Category: Talks SOPhiA

Andrea Villalba Cuesta UT Austin  Joseph Raz opens “”Value, Respect, and Attachment”” with an anecdote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s “”The Little Prince.”” The Little Prince, having arrived on Earth from the tiny asteroid B-612—his only companion being a rose—discovers a garden filled with five thousand roses. Overwhelmed, he proclaims through tears: “”I thought that I…

Aleksander Teodor Kałuski University of Warsaw Direct perception is an ambiguous term, prone to misinterpretation. In contemporary philosophy of mind, a range of mutually exclusive interpretations of the concept can be found, alongside competing theses about what it means for perception to be “direct”—even the systems for classifying these theses are diverse and highly sophisticated…

Matija Rajter University of Rijeka, Faculty of Philosophy Revisionary metaphysics faces a threat from the epistemological challenge. The epistemological challenge to revisionary metaphysics, as formulated by Uriah Kriegel, originates from the fact that competing metaphysical theories are typically (1) internally consistent and (2) empirically adequate. In light of this, how can we justify our theory…

Lea Spiegl University of Vienna Trust is traditionally distinguished from mere reliance: while reliance can be directed at both agents and objects, trust is understood as appropriate only toward agents. Departing notably from this standard view, Nguyen (2022) contends that to trust is to adopt an unquestioning attitude which, crucially, also applies to non-agents such…

Marcin Nowicki Jagiellonian University There is an ongoing debate in ethics about the normative force of the difference between identified and statistical victims and whether we it is justified to prefer helping identified ones. A classic example of an identified victim (IV) would be a particular child with a disability who needs a prosthesis, while…

Andrea Rodríguez University of Granada This paper aims to analyze a mechanism of manipulation that consists of the covert promotion of harmful evaluative content through seemingly factual statements. This phenomenon, called “naturalization of ideologies,” plays a fundamental role in radicalization processes. The naturalization of ideologies involves erasing the political or moral content of discourses, typically…

Kerstin Raab Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Various attempts to explain and resolve the paradoxes of the Liar family have been suggested but whether one of them may be correct and if so which of them, remains an issue of debate. In my presentation, I am going to address an issue that may lend support to many (if…

Julian Lee-Sursin Sorbonne Université; Ecole Normale Supérieure (Ulm)  There are two special questions in mereology: “When is it that some things compose an F?” and “When is it that some things are arranged F-wise?” These questions have given rise to a dispute in mereology that I call the Special Questions Dispute (SQD): “Do some things compose…

Masoumeh Abbasian Pardubice University This article explores the contributions of Aristotelian ethics to contemporary bioethics and medical ethics, framed by a tribute to Iranian physicians who have sacrificed their lives upholding medical ethics under oppressive regimes—including Dr. Ramin Pour-andarjani, Dr. Abdolreza Soud-bakhsh, and Dr. Ida Rostami. Against this backdrop, the study interrogates how Aristotle’s conception…

Cong Chen Zhejiang University A spectre of anti-physicalism haunts philosophy of mind: we cannot explain how phenomenal experiences emerge from physical or functional bases, and a residual mystery—a explanatory gap—remains. Rather than repeat clichés about the profundity of this explanatory gap, in this paper, I defend a set of Trivialisms, which suggest the gap for…