Category: Talks SOPhiA

Xingyu Lyu University of Mannheim Color Physicalism is the thesis that colors are identical with physical properties, such as surface spectral reflectances. Color physicalism is normally developed as a form of posterior physicalism, which requires some constraints to single out the right epistemic possibility out of many epistemic possibilities that seem to be metaphysically possible…

Joost Ziff University of California, Irvine Do I think my thoughts or do my thoughts think themselves, arising when they want to, without my say-so? This latter possibility Friedrich Nietzsche forcefully posited in Beyond Good and Evil (1989). Intuitively, it might seem obvious that I think my thoughts and know them well enough. But his…

Aaron Wirt Università della Svizzera italiana One of the central themes in contemporary analytic philosophy is the concept of normativity. It has been widely noted that there is great heterogeneity in ordinary concepts that count as normative (G.H. von Wright 1963; J.J. Thomson 1992, 2008). Moreover, it is generally accepted that normative concepts split into…

Hanna Metzen Bielefeld University There are two different ways in which philosophers of science think about the nature of appropriate trust in science: as based on objectivity or as based on shared values. According to the first view, we can trust in what scientists say if their claims are the output of objective research processes.…

Angelica Mezzadri University of Turin Paradoxes and thought experiments have more in common than we would have thought. This paper argues that they do not form mutually exclusive categories. Rather, there is a natural and relevant subcategory of thought experiments that is also a natural subcategory of paradoxes. This subset is formed by alethic refuters,…

Maciej Piwowarski Jagiellonian University in Kraków Most countries hold very similar regulations as it comes to medicine in almost every respect, but differ vastly when it comes to procedures that can be performed to purposefully bring about or hasten the death of the patient. These differences seem to be more than only minor labeling inconsistencies.…

Sebastian Sanchez-Martinez TU Dresden According to recent work in epistemology, the main function of beliefs is the simplification of reasoning (SR for short). Beliefs are here understood as attitudes that, beyond an agent’s voluntary control, take the proposition that is their content as true. This is SR with respect to working with credences, understood as…

Dorothee Bleisch Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg It is often claimed that moral theories must not only specify if and why actions are (morally) right or wrong but should also be action-guiding in a robust sense. A moral theory is taken to be action-guiding in this sense if it can be used by all human agents to…

Charlie Blunden Universiteit Utrecht Key past instances of moral progress, and perhaps some future progressive changes, rely on people coming to have more accurate beliefs about the extent to which their current institutions and social practices are “natural, necessary, and inevitable feature[s] of the social world” (Pleasants, 2010, p. 166). I call this account of…

Marcin Woźny University of Warsaw The aim of my presentation will be to answer the question what role idealizations play in the process of legal interpretation. The philosophy of science literature highlights the crucial role that idealisations play in our cognitive practices, particularly in the sciences – both natural and social (Nowak 1980, Cartwright 1983,…