Category: Talks SOPhiA

Robin Waldenburg Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt Since its introduction by Miranda Fricker, the concept of epistemic injustice, which describes a wrong done to someone in their capacity as a knower, has seen a remarkable rise, becoming a widely cited framework in contemporary feminist theory. Given the extensive literature on its foundations, nature, and application, it is striking…

Dominik Robel University of Warsaw Under the heading of ‘naturalising intentionality’, philosophers of mind have tried, for many decades, to find natural conditions accounting for the ‘aboutness’ of mental states. This has, in the case of teleosemantics, developed into a fully fledged theory about how natural functions of animal behaviour account for meaning of their…

Petr Jošt University of Hradec Králové, Philosophical Faculty, Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences The project of biomedical moral enhancement seeks to use procedures such as brain implants or human genome editing in order to overcome the evolutionary mismatch between our outdated morality and the challenges of the modern world. These challenges range from eliminating…

Mikołaj Kotuła Doctoral School of University of Szczecin What explains the emergence of intuitions that there are particularly difficult problems with consciousness? One possible approach suggests explaining such intuitions in terms of behavioral dispositions. There is some universal, cognitive mechanism that generates dispositions to make judgments that express puzzlement about consciousness. However, problem intuitions depend…

Jakob Lohmar University of Oxford According to non-consequentialist moral theories, there are optimific wrongs: morally wrong actions that have at least as good consequences as every available alternative. Intuitively, if there are indeed optimific wrongs, we ought to prevent them if this is feasible by morally innocuous means. Consider, for example, the well-known transplant case…

Anahí Frank University of Zurich To earn money, many female sex workers cater to men’s fantasies. Satz and Shrage argue that in doing so, sex workers perpetuate sexist stereotypes, such as the belief that women are sexually passive and subservient to men. This raises the questions: If sex workers contribute to sexist stereotypes, are they…

Elżbieta Eysymont University of Warsaw Contemporary epistemology of modality struggles with fundamental issues concerning the foundations of modal knowledge. Traditional theories of modality often postulate the existence of a “modal facts” or “possible worlds.” As a result, they carry significant ontological burdens and generate difficulties regarding epistemic access to modal truths. Amie Thomasson argues that…

Yijing Yang University of Oslo At the beginning of De Anima, Aristotle claims that his study of the soul aims to explain life scientifically, which comprises essential knowledge in Natural Philosophy. However, unlike mathematics, the knowledge of which can be built upon axioms and logical inductions (c.f. Post Analytics), the knowledge of life seems to…

Andres Rodriguez Rojas KU Leuven In recent debates in deontic epistemology, much attention has been given to the role of justification in shaping our understanding of epistemic norms governing belief formation. Some recent detractors of ‘justification talk’ in epistemology have rejected a general norm of justification under the grounds that it is an ideological harmful. One…

Carla Peri University of Padua According to the CORR principle of grounding, a fact is ungrounded only if it is fundamental, and a fact is fundamental just if it involves only fundamental entities (e.g., individuals). I argue that individuation facts—expressing that, for any individual x, x is the very individual it is, or [Ind(x)]—challenge the…