Category: Talks SOPhiA

Severin Rohrer University of Vienna How we form beliefs about our friends sometimes differs from how we form beliefs about strangers. More specifically, we often seem to be partial in favour of our friends, e.g. by imposing higher evidential thresholds to form negative beliefs about them or by preferring charitable interpretations of their prima facie…

Agnes Katona Central European University The Aristotelian conception of universals is often presented as a naturalistic alternative to Platonism, on the grounds that it places universals in space-time. However, a standard objection to the Aristotelian view is that it requires universals to be multi-located, which either leads to contradiction or leaves it unclear what multi-location…

Kotryna Elijosiute Università della Svizzera italiana This paper argues that ordinary wholes, such as cats and tables, are not fusions, but hylomorphic entities. In the first part of the paper, I will present the criteria for a theory of wholes by looking into some of the problems pure mereologists face. After setting the criteria, I…

Pavel Matail Masaryk University Libertarians about free will believe that free will exists, although it is incompatible with determinism. According to them, somewhere in the deliberation process, an event E is not determined. The critics often point out that if both E’s occurrence and non-occurrence at time t are compatible with the laws of nature…

Martin Nosek Masaryk University Consider the proposition that God would be necessarily godly. Some have drawn from the proposition that God is impossible, whereas others have drawn from it (in modal ontological arguments) that God is necessary. In the talk, I first investigate some intuitions regarding worth and the attitude of worship that may support…

Ivan Catanzaro University of Cologne / University of Salento Following Christensen (2021), I call BRV the Belief-Relative Value account: it is rational for an agent to believe p iff believing p, rather than suspending or disbelieving p, would have the best expected consequences, given the agent’s beliefs. Susanna Rinard (2022) defends BRV as especially attractive…

Ana Maria Popescu Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna This presentation examines the claim of epistemic neutrality in contemporary evidence-based medicine and argues that such neutrality is a constructed ideal rather than an actual feature of scientific practice. Medicine presents itself as value-free, yet this appearance is achieved through value-laden assumptions about both disease…

Finn Matthiessen University of Amsterdam, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation Several natural language (e.g. free-choice inferences, negative contexts) phenomena motivate non-classical accounts of disjunction. Mandelkern (2024) proposes that embedded disjunction ˹p v q˺ means (p v q) & ◊p & ◊q, where the interpretation of ◊ is context-dependent. On this account ‘Sofia takes the…

Alicia M. Wach University Vienna In this talk, I argue that holding conflicting sets of norms does not necessarily mean a pathological breakdown of agency for group agents, rather, they can retain agency despite persistent and structural incoherence. I thereby challenge the popular coherence condition for agency in groups.In ordinary discourse, practice and theory, states,…

Carolina Berrutti Bartesaghi University of Vienna It is generally accepted that agency requires materiality, since action must originate somewhere. In group agents, this implies that they are agential material objects rather than hovering, mind-like entities (Hess 2025). In this paper, I argue that the material existence of group agents can be best explained through a…