Category: Talks SOPhiA

Andrea Huete Rodríguez University of Barcelona Carlson et al. (2025) offer a new argument for the existence of moral luck drawing on a distinction between first-order and second-order control. They propose a case where two individuals lack second-order control while nonetheless differing in blameworthiness because only one of them has first-order control over the relevant…

David Peter Burits University of Vienna Formal sentences such as ∃x(P(x)) have commonly been interpreted and translated into natural language by one of the following expressions: 1) „There is something that is P“, 2) „Some things are P“, or 3) „Something that is P exists“, and vice versa (here, I have replaced “x” with “something”…

Eric Wallace University of Vienna Davidson’s method of truth, which is widely used in Natural Language Ontology (NLO), resolves metaphysical questions by appealing to the truth conditions of sentences. I raise a worry for the method of truth. Truth conditions are partially specified using sets. For example, the truth conditions of ‘Tibbles is a cat’…

Kida Lin University of Oxford Suppose that 1,000 innocent people will be killed by a runaway trolley unless Y diverts it onto a side track where it will kill X. Y announces that he does not plan to intervene. Z then coerces Y to do so – she credibly threatens that, unless he does, she…

Federica Melis University of Bologna The question of how logic explains has received comparatively little attention in the philosophy of logic. Notable exceptions include Wyatt and Payette (2018) and Martin (2021). These accounts take the validity of arguments to constitute the explanans of a logical explanation. A central line of concern for both the approaches…

Guanzhang Li University of Antwerp When G. E. M. Anscombe’s Modern Moral Philosophy (1958) appeared, virtue ethics emerged as a third alternative to deontology and consequentialism in explaining what is good. Many virtue ethicists, such as Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre, joined this project, engaging in both a critique of modern moral philosophy and a…

Piet Fritz Pankratz University of Vienna This paper examines the practical role of the sciences in guiding action through a critical reconstruction of what I call the “signpost thesis” in Rudolf Carnap’s scientific humanism (Carnap 1929; 1963). Carnap’s signpost thesis claims that science does not determine ultimate ends but can contribute to decision-making by supplying…

Joachim Stein Heidelberger Akademie der Wissenschaften / University of Tübingen Machine learning systems, in particular neural networks (NNs), are widely regarded asopaque. The reasoning behind their predictions and the processes that shape their learned models remain poorly understood. This lack of transparency, combined with the rapid adoption of NNs in high-stakes domains, has fueled growing…

Nirvana Ribić University of Rijeka This research paper examines verbal reasoning through the lens of the suppression effect, a robust phenomenon in which the introduction of a disabler leads reasoners to withhold otherwise valid inferences and instead endorse uncertain conclusions. Situated at the intersection of logic and the psychology of reasoning, the study contributes to…

Mara Zschommler University of Bern Metaphysical grounding is a popular tool of contemporary metaphysics (see e.g., Jonathan Schaffer (2009), Gideon Rosen (2010), Karen Bennett (2011), Kit Fine (2012)). Grounding claims express a presumed hierarchical structure in our world and are intimately tied to the idea of metaphysical explanation. For example, the fact that Chad likes…