Category: Talks SOPhiA

Jiusi Guo University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign The reliabilist theory of justification has it that there exists a justification-truth link: Roughly, a person S is justified in believing that p iff S’s belief that p is produced by a process that tends to output true beliefs over false ones. Stewart Cohen disagrees. In his “Justification and…

Jakub Węgrecki Jagiellonian University Proposition are assumed to be objects of our attitudes. Mark Richard (1981), in his famous paper, argued that temporal propositions, i.e. propositions that change their truth-values through time, are not apt to play this role. His argument was criticized (e.g. Brogaard 2012, Sullivan 2014), but the eternalist-temporalist debate is not yet…

Daian Bica Heinrich-Heine-Universiy Scientific perspectivism came into being as an attempt of reconciling anti-realist (i.e., scientific knowledge is contingent/situated) with realist theses (i.e., there are mind-independent entities, properties, laws) (cf. Giere 2006, Massimi 2022). As a purported middle path between both, Giere extended this claim to scientific instrumentation – an instrument, i.e., the knowledge gained…

Ataollah Hashemi Saint Louis University The metaphysical discourse on the science of properties features a well-known dichotomy between categorical and dispositional properties. Dispositional properties are considered to be relational, extrinsic, and dynamic, representing potentialities that exist in the natural world. In contrast, categorical properties are intrinsic and qualitative. Traditionally, the distinction between these two types…

Szymon Sapalski Jagiellonian University In my talk I examine recent proposals for naturalizing inferentialism. My central claim is that despite the fact that some strategies seem more promising than others, none of them are entirely satisfactory.One of the challenges facing inferentialism is its claim that language is strongly rule-governed, which may be problematic from a…

Saskia Janina Neumann Eötvös Lorand University The importance of the justification of our beliefs is a long-debated question. The question of how our memory beliefs are justified, however, is a question Philosophers often deem as not worth considering. After all, there are bigger fish to fry. We can get to the details later! In my opinion,…

João Pinheiro da Silva Central European University Howard Robinson has appealed to the “causal closure of the physical” principle (CCP, from now on) in order to present what he takes to be the two main problems with Aristotelian hylomorphism:1. Aristotelian approaches to metaphysics and nature in general do “not fit nature as we now understand…

Jinglin Zhou LMU Munich In this paper, I explore how to make moral progress through conceptual improvements. Concepts play a vital role in how we make moral judgments and decisions. When we categorize creatures or things in the world using different concepts, it can have a significant impact on our moral progress. For example, during…

Jinglin Zhou LMU Munich Evolutionary debunking argument has risen a big problem for moral realism. On of the most influential arguments is offered by Sharon Street as Darwinian Dilemma. With scientific evidence, it seems that evolutionary forces have had a tremendous influence on our moral beliefs. With this scientific premise, this dilemma says, realists can…

Carl Scandelius Harvard University The “phenomenon of conceptual relativity,”^(1) as Putnam names it, calls into question the feasibility of external realism. But full relativism does not seem an attractive theory to embrace either, given its seemingly self-refuting nature—the conceptual relativist seems to require scheme independent truth even to articulate their own ideas. Is there a…