Category: Talks SOPhiA

Hyun Park Yale University I argue that the intuition we have that lying is worse than merely misleading is due to a self-preservation instinct, similar to why we think suicide is worse than self-harm.First, I refute standard views. It is not worse to lie because it leads to worse outcomes—there’s no difference between saying “I…

Brylea Hollinshead Central European University In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle controversially contends that the virtuous person must take pleasure, and cannot take pain, in virtuous activity. In this paper, I argue against this claim, which I term the “pleasure thesis”. An intuitive reading of the pleasure thesis has been widely dismissed as untenable on the…

Nataliia Lysovets University of Warsaw, Faculty of Philosophy The objective of this article is to provide a theoretical foundation for the term «social lie» and to establish its semantic framework. The article aims to conduct a comparative analysis of this phenomenon in the Polish and Ukrainian languages. the concept of (pro)social lies and their social…

Jan Seibert Justus-Liebig-Universität (JLU) Gießen Many people are clearly and without a doubt religious in their acting and cognizing. However, it is unclear what exactly this feature of religiousness philosophically speaking amounts to. For example, it might be tempting to define religiousness in terms of essential beliefs that are suitable to guide actions in various…

Catherine Hochman UCLA Philosophical inquiry into self-knowledge, self-consciousness, and agency seems to require an investigation of our mental states, specifically, those in which we represent ourselves. Perception provides fertile ground for this investigation. The tight connection between perception and one’s self, between what is perceived and who is perceiving, prompts the question of whether and…

Aditya Jha University of Canterbury and MIT A debate has been raging in the philosophy literature over whether some physical facts have a purely mathematical, as opposed to a causal, explanation. Among the various accounts of mathematical explanations — given by Baker, Baron and Lange — Lange’s (2013; 2016) account of DMEs is distinguished by…

Maren Bräutigam University of Cologne There are largely three views on whether Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles (PII) is violated by similar particles. According to the earliest view, PII is always violated (call this the no discernibility view). According to the more recent weak discernibility view, PII is valid in a weak sense.…

Gretchen DobbinSchmaltz University of Houston A particularly mystifying feature of Obsessive-compulsive Disorder (OCD) is that obsessions, characteristic of the disorder, can trigger anxiety despite the ability of OC individuals to recognize such intrusive mental content as irrational. The framing of OCD as a disorder of attention provides some insight as to how impaired cognitive processes…

Agata Machcewicz-Grad University of Warsaw In the discussion over the nature of folk psychological mental states one can distinguish two families of accounts: superficialism (represented i.a. by D. Dennett, E. Schwitzgebel) and realism (represented i.a. by J. Fodor, E. Mandelbaum). The former states that when we attribute e.g. beliefs, we do not posit any concrete,…

Louis Doulas University of California, Irvine Since its publication in 1939, many philosophers have felt that there is something wrong with G.E. Moore’s infamous two-handed proof of an external world. What’s wrong is that it’s circular. Failing to be epistemically cogent in this way, Moore’s proof is therefore generally thought to be a bad one:       …