Category: Talks SOPhiA

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,…

Arianna Laura Savelli University of Trento QBism interprets quantum states as expressions of an agent’s personal degrees of belief and construes quantum theory as a normative framework governing probabilistic coherence. At the same time, it maintains that agents interact with an agent-independent reality that “kicks back” and underwrites the regularities captured by the Born rule.…

Kristina Malzahn Leibniz University Hannover, Institute of Philosophy A widely accepted premise in the philosophy of science is that scientific images possess epistemic value, derived from their capacity to represent reality. On this image-centric view, the evidential value of a visualization derives exclusively from its visual content. An unambiguous depiction of a phenomenon is considered…

Andrea Sanders ILLC (Master of Logic), University of Amsterdam This paper develops a new epistemic theory of grooming that shifts the focus from norm transgression to the manipulation of trust, arguing that Lauren Leydon-Hardy’s (2019; 2021; 2025) existing account mislocates both what is distinctive about grooming and wherein the primary harm lies. The contribution of…

Victoria Weronika Grygorczuk Universitat de les Illes Balears Recent debates in the ontology of fiction divide broadly between deflationary approaches,  which treat fictional entities as artefacts grounded in social practices, and inflationary frameworks that anchor fictional truth in robust modal or metaphysical structures. This paper introduces a third option that has received insufficient attention: Roman…