Category: Talks SOPhiA

Federico Pollachini University of Hamburg Collective action is an important concept in social ontology and in philosophy of action. It is linked to both metaphysical and moral questions. For example, what does it mean for an agent to be involved in a collective action? What does it mean to be morally responsible for an action…

Jakub Wunderlich University of Hradec Králové With the book Reasons and Persons (1984), Derek Parfit effectively established population ethics as a distinct area of ethical inquiry. Population ethics is concerned with moral problems arising from the fact that our actions can affect the number of people born in the future, their identity, or the quality…

Kamil Furman Jagiellonian University Determinism is quite often regarded as somehow related to the causation – such a view traces back to the early, pre-Laplacian concepts. Starting with Earman’s slogan that this way of defining ‘seeks to explain a vague concept – determinism – in terms of a truly obscure one – causation’ (Earman 1986:…

Sanjar Akayev Central European University Many relational egalitarians argue that friendship embodies the ideal of equality and can illuminate what it means to relate as equals on a broader social scale (Viehoff 2014, 2019; Scheffler 2015; Kolodny 2014; Wilson 2019). However, Joseph Chan (2021) has provided a forceful critique of this view, arguing that friendship…

Clelia Repetto University of Turin The issue of musical meaning is one of the main topics discussed in philosophy of music and it concerns the question of whether or not music possesses contents which can be comprehended and interpreted (e.g., Robinson 1997; Kivy 2009; Bertinetto 2017).With regard to this debate, the structural analogy between music…

Paulina Oppermann Leibniz Universität Hannover Often cited as one of the successes of predictive modelling in the social sciences, election models have recently taken center stage in a critical discussion about predictive limitations, false interpretations of certainty, as well as self-reinforcement between models and their explananda. The aim of this talk is to apply established…

Giacomo Ferrari Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) The so-called “question of fundamental mereology” – “the question of what is the ground of the mereological hierarchy of whole and part” (Schaffer 2010, p. 38) – is among the most vexed issues of contemporary metaphysics. Two rival theses have dominated the debate: Mereological Bottomism (MB) and Mereological…

Emanuele Tullio Central European University I put forward a new solution to the problem of Evil on behalf on classical Theism. I shall focus on natural evil – the kind of evil which does not result from an agent’s free will and free choices, e.g. illnesses. Natural evil, in rough outline, poses a serious challenge…

Eleanna Tzeraki KU Leuven A powerful argument against pragmatism about reasons for belief comes in the form of an impossibility claim: practical motivations are simply irrelevant to a process of belief formation through deliberative reasoning; the only way to be  convinced of the truth of a proposition, e.g. that God exists, is by acknowledging enough…

Marius Mumbeck Universität Duisburg-Essen Consider differences in register (or style), such as “dead/deceased” or “dog/bow-wow”. The items in each pair have the same truth-conditional meaning; yet, they differ in their social appropriateness. However, this aspect is still underexplored in pragmatics. To improve our understanding of register items, I will examine their role in (putative) manner…