Category: Talks SOPhiA

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…

Felix Danowski University of Vienna Metaethical Non-Cognitivism is the view that moral judgments are non-cognitive, i.e. conative mental states. They are functionally more like desires rather than ordinary non-moral beliefs, e.g. in being inherently motivating.This view is often regarded as troubled by objections centered around the “surface structure” of moral thought and language. We think…

Alonso Molina University of California, Los Angeles Many philosophers (Armstrong, 1963, 1968, 1999; Lycan, 1995; Hill, 1988; Sosa, 1998; Prinz, 2004) have distinguished between two kinds of introspection.  The first kind is described as automatic and fast, while the second kind is described as deliberate and effortful. Think about the difference between an agent stubbing…

Xian He Zhejiang University What makes it fitting or appropriate to love someone? According to the Quality Account of love, only loveable qualities of the beloved person can make love for that person fitting (Abramson & Leite, 2011; Clausen, 2019; Howard, 2019; Naar, 2017, 2021b; Protasi, 2016). For instance, it may be fitting to love someone because she…

David Stoellger University Bielefeld In this paper I argue that communicable diseases, especially when resulting in asymptomatic carriers, pose an under-appreciated difficulty for the prevalent conceptions of the term ‘disease’. Prevalent accounts  be it naturalist, normativist or eliminativist cannot be straight-forwardly applied. I argue that the trouble can be made clear by examining the normativist…

M. Hadi Fazeli Gothenburg University Lars cheated on Ella, leading to their separation. Years later, Ella still blames Lars for his past infidelity. However, as a matter of fact, Lars has undergone significant character changes and no longer sees himself capable of cheating. This raises the question of whether Ella can still appropriately blame him.…

Michael Vollmer University of Innsbruck The recent literature has seen a renewed interest in the concept of fittingness. Next to the long-standing analyses of, say, ‘desert’ in terms of fittingness of certain treatments, or ‘value’ in terms of fitting pro-attitudes, scholars have revisited the idea that even deontic notions qua an analysis of normative reasons…

Bailey Fernandez University of Vienna/ Central European University In this presentation, I argue that the “behavioral spaces” proposed by Wayne Wu as models for his version of the “attention-as-selection-for-action” thesis meet the conditions for “diagrams” as understood within the literature of and inspired by the pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. In so doing, I derive…

Emanuele Tullio & Tommaso Soriani CEU Vienna, University of Reading Perdurantism –i.e. short-lived entities (temporal parts) ground the persistence of lifelong entities (worms) – is faced by the Epistemic Objection (EO) which challenges our belief of being lifelong entities as opposed to short-lived ones [8] [9] [14]. Despite there being some strategies for the perdurantist…