Category: Talks SOPhiA

Veronika Lassl University of Vienna In his 2022 book The A Priori Without Magic, Jared Warren develops a theory of epistemic a priori warrant. As part of it, he claims that there are synthetic a priori truths, for example: (CRIM-RED) “Everything crimson is red”. However, according to Warren, (CRIM-RED) is not only a synthetic a…

Christian Ennsgraber Universität Salzburg In the Blue Bus hypothetical, a plaintiff is injured by an unidentified bus; the only evidence is that the defendant runs 80% of the buses on the route. This is widely taken to threaten formal-probabilistic models of legal fact-finding: a Bayesian who reads the civil standard of proof as P(liability|evidence) >…

Julian Vincent Laggner University of Vienna Regarding the question of what a propensity’s degree is and how it fixes a probability, there are broadly speaking three ways of answering it. (1) The degree is a probability: the view of nearly every historical propensity theorist, including Popper, Fetzer, Miller, and Gillies, which commits them to what…

Fabricio Carvalho University College London In biology, functional statements are usually linked to teleological terms such as purpose, goal or design. To explain this connection, Ratti & Germain defend that function-talk retained the treatment of organisms “as if they were designed objects” as a relic from early physiological practices. However, after Darwin, they argue this…

Maxi Viola Mirabel Seidl LMU Munich University Within the last years, a variety of strategies broadly aimed at vindicating the value-free ideal (VFI) have been put forth. One strand of contemporary vindication attempts to argue for exactly that, namely the realizability of the VFI. Such an attempt has recently been made by Sikorski (2024). With…

Naomi Mușan & Ciprian Alexandru University of Bucharest It seems that a debate is possible only if both interlocutors admit that at least one of them is wrong. But this goes against the intuition that, concerning taste or aesthetic values, both of them are subjectively justified to hold on to their respective truth. Thus, a…

Giorgio Geuna LMU Munich The multiple realizability argument consists in inferring that mental properties are not physical properties from the premise that they admit a highly heterogeneous range of possible physical realizations. Depending on the degree of heterogeneity that is considered sufficient for genuine multiple realizability, this inference may extend to paradigmatically physical properties. In…

Sebastian Jantsch University Mannheim/ Goethe-University Frankfurt Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (2024) defends a radical detachment between the prescriptive (rightness of acts or beliefs) and the hypological (praise and blame), arguing that both are grounded in the success-conduciveness of dispositions assessed within a situation-relative space of feasible alternative dispositions. This yields a symmetrical framework in which agents can…

Aleksander Kałuski University of Warsaw There is a growing concern that analytic philosophers rely too heavily on intuitions when formulating their arguments (Cappelen 2012; Schuringa 2025). In this talk, I argue that the reliance on intuition corrupts the soundness of analytical arguments through the example of the “”zombie”” argument (Chalmers 1996). The “”intuitions problem”” is…

Giorgia Carli Trinity College Dublin My paper advances a necessarily non-acousmatic thesis of musical listening, which relates musical listening necessarily to non-acoustic properties and sound sources (i.e. human agency). To do so, I distinguish music perception from musical listening. The former is a perceptual experience relying on the perceptual objects, like sounds and sound sources,…