Category: Talks SOPhiA

Gabriel Levc University of Vienna Recently, some philosophers have used the notion of a perspective, understood as an “open-ended disposition to characterize: to encounter, interpret, and respond to some parts of the world in certain ways” (2019), in their theories. For example, Camp (2006, 2018) uses perspectives to account for the meaning of metaphors and…

Wanja Amandus Thielmann University of Hamburg In his 1977 paper, “Should the Numbers Count?”, John Taurek suggests that, when one is faced with the decision to either save one person from dying or save five persons from dying, the moral thing to do is not to default to the larger number of beneficiaries (5) but…

Simon Graf University of Leeds Sometimes we face choices in which the different values we subscribe to give us conflicting recommendations. One famous example of such a case is found in Sartre (1966), who describes an encounter with one of his students who is torn between joining the Free French Forces and staying home to…

Tobias Derschan University of Vienna In 2001, Alvin Goldman reinvigorated a debate in applied social epistemology: How can lay  people identify and assess the trustworthiness of experts when they lack said expertise?  Unfortunately, we are lay people in almost every context of our live and depend intimately on  the knowledge of others. While trusting others…

Lena Golker University of Vienna New pragmatic theorists like Cheryl Misak want to link their conception of truth to non-metaphysically laden theories such as deflationism, pluralism and minimal theories. Though Misak agrees with Paul Horwich’s minimal theory that “true” functions as a de-nominalizer, Misak holds that there are more functions that a theory of truth…

Lior Nissim Grinman The Hebrew University of Jerusalem  One prevailing economic policy proposal to counteract irrational decision-making is to reconstruct the preferences individuals would hold had they been rational and then design policies that will encourage them to act in accordance with these rationalized preferences. However, there has been a recent pushback against this approach,…

Christina Fritz Department of Philosophy, University of Graz Most of the actions we perform in our daily lives we perform automatically (Lumer, 2017). That is, we perform these actions without paying attention to them. In automatic actions, we are unaware of any decision-making process or deliberation preceding the action. This raises the question of whether…

Fabio Tollon Bielefeld University  In this paper I argue for a re-framing of the debate surrounding artificial agency. I do so by running through some standard problems in action theory and applying this to the case of artificial systems. What we learn from this story is that agency ought to be understood in a more…

Morgan Steele University of Southampton I argue that truth-valueless propositions cannot be asserted to exist without serious, detrimental, consequence. Regardless of which propositions are deemed to be truth-valueless, and for what reason, I claim that a dilemma arises. This dilemma originally stems from Dummett and is concerning propositions of the form “P” and “it is…

Marlon Rivas Tinoco University of Oklahoma The question of whether the rationality of our beliefs can depend on practical considerations has two traditional responses. Evidentialists such as Feldman and Conee (1984), and Kelly (2002) argue that a belief is rational if and only if it aligns with the evidence, meaning that we should not believe…