Category: Talks SOPhiA

Jacopo Giraldo University of Padova  This paper highlights the geometrically dimensional nature of spatial extension, as analyzed and applied in the literature, and argues that the concept of geometric dimension warrants metaphysical scrutiny, given its potential relevance to our understanding of the structure of reality. Attempts to define criteria for spatial extension trace back to…

Ella van Dalen Radboud University Do we have free will? This question has plagued philosophers for centuries. In the moderndebate on free will, it is a central problem whether and how free will could exist in a deterministic world. In their 2006[1] and 2009[2] papers, John Conway and Simon Kochen present the Free Will Theorem…

Saam Nasseri University of California, Riverside The aim of Catarina Dutilh Novaes’ project in the philosophy of logic is to resituate deductive reasoning according to its genealogy. In her book The Dialogical Roots of Deduction, Novaes aims also to provide the historical evidence necessary to motivate an understanding of deduction as fundamentally social and discursive,…

Leonard Paar Humboldt Universität zu Berlin Alex Gregory has proposed an “unashamedly normative” account of direction of fit according to which “for a mental state that P to be a desire that P is for it to be the case that if not-P, the mental state gives you a subjective reason to make P the…

Yan Xu Durham University “The success of speech acts depends on whether the listener can accurately identify what the speaker is doing in saying something—namely, their illocutionary acts, as defined in Austin’s speech act theory. To better ensure that listeners can accurately comprehend, scholars have framed the necessary preconditions either from the perspective of semantics—focusing…

Laura Maria Nowak Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Croatia Physician aid-in-dying (PAD), consisting of euthanasia or assisted suicide, is a medical procedure of terminating one’s life due to their health conditions, which make life arduous. The first laws legalizing PAD appeared almost two decades ago, and recent changes enabled seeking it…

Ema Luna Lalic Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka, Croatia Analytic philosophy is commonly considered determined by its clarity of expression or style, by virtue of which it is able to provide arguments and remove the possibility of ambiguity. However, there is a dispute about what constitutes clarity and to which texts…

Zhengguan Chen University of Bern This paper explores a novel approach to the debate on kindhood and its ontological status by drawing on a philosophically less familiar concept vital in deep learning: latent space. In machine learning, latent space is defined as a representation of data in the compressed form where similar points cluster together…

Ida Miczke University of Warsaw The aim of this paper is to propose an account of the procreation asymmetry: a pair of seemingly incompatible judgments stating a moral obligation to refrain from conceiving a miserable child but at the same time denying the existence of any obligation to conceive a happy child (see e.g. Frick, 2020,…

Aleksandra Bacevic University of Cologne This paper revisits the concept of the specious present to reframe the ongoing debate on temporal consciousness from a multidimensional perspective. Building on Henri Bergson’s notion of durée and Sonja Deppe’s interpretation of qualitative multiplicity, which addresses the tension between tense and extension, the study argues that the paradoxes in…