Category: Talks SOPhiA

Tugba Yoldas University of Alberta In this paper, I discuss friendship from the perspective of virtue ethics and claim that friendship with AI companions might be harmful to us because firstly, they do not actually meet our moral needs where friendship is concerned, and secondly, they threaten to undermine the virtue of friendship by introducing…

Niklas Parwez Heinrich-Heine-University The concept of ‘fitness’ has been the subject of a long-standing debate in the philosophy of the life sciences. Authors, including Popper (1974), have objected that its traditional definition as a measure of actual reproductive success might render evolution’s central “law” – the principle of natural selection – and, thereby, evolutionary explanations…

Sanggu Lee Syracuse University Philosophical orthodoxy has been that second-order quantification is unintelligible without reference to first-order quantification over properties, sets, or linguistic expressions. However, the idea of sui generis second-order quantification has received increasing support. Following the pioneering work of Prior (1971) and Boolos (1975), Rayo and Yablo (2011), Williamson (2003; 2013), Wright (2007),…

Kumru Akdogan Università della Svizzera italiana I will examine the question of whether there is a gap between the mental and physical states, and if so, what kind of gap it is and whether it can be closed through grounding. Specifically, I will explore two different accounts regarding the gap between mental and physical states.…

Sharon Casu University of Fribourg In this talk, I will present a challenge to collective intentional action, starting from action theories developed during and after the second half of the 20th century. I will presuppose that cases of collective intentional action and of individual intentional action are both instances of intentional agency, i.e. the two…

Josef Kohlmaier University of Wollongong, Australia In the discussion about neural representation the two main positions have traditionally been either ‘industrial-strength’ realism (e.g. Fodor 1988, 1994; Marr 2010; Thomson and Piccinini 2018) or eliminativism (e.g. Chomsky 2005; Churchland 1988; Brooks 1991). Many take this dichotomy of perspectives to be problematic. The former is fact assertive…

Sebastian Scholz Heinrich-Heine-University Goodman’s New Riddle of Induction is that we cannot easily distinguish “good” (viz. projectible) predicates that are allowed for inferences from peculiar ones that are prohibited – such as the infamous Goodman-predicate ‘grue’. This is at least one common way of framing the problem. But the larger epistemological concern at stake is…

Euan Allison University College London How are stigmatized subjects wronged in virtue of failures to treat them as individuals? The Dignity View claims that stigma, because of its connection to stereotypes, violates an instance of the general requirement to respect our dignity as autonomous beings. The Self-Presentation View claims that stigma inhibits the functioning of…

Sami Tayub Bristol University In my view, naturalised metaphysics (NM) bears no better epistemic prospects than a priori metaphysics (AM). NM seeks to identify those metaphysics which are appropriately related to science, and privilege them as our only contenders which tell us how reality actually is. In contrast, AM does not bear this relation so…

João Miranda University of Lisbon Contrastivism about epistemic reasons is the claim that reasons to believe are relative to  sets of alternatives. Sets of alternatives are the content of questions (Hamblin, 1958). So,  reasons to believe are relative to questions. Contrastivism about epistemic reasons is  motivated by puzzles that generate inconsistencies when a non-contrastive account…