Category: Talks SOPhiA

Raffaele Giovanni Caravella Università della Svizzera Italiana The goal of this paper is to defend the use of the category of belief in cognitive science against eliminativist arguments, focusing on Jenson’s [Jenson, 2016] claim that belief should be rejected due to its fragility. A theoretical entity is considered fragile if the results of multiple, independent,…

Andreas Frenzel LMU Munich (MCMP) Timothy Williamson is a prominent defender of classical logic, which he regards as sufficient for the analysis of all philosophical concepts, including vague predicates. His epistemic theory of vagueness holds that such predicates have sharp but unknowable boundaries. The Sorites paradox, on this view, arises not because of any logical…

Leon Isenmann University of Potsdam Recent years have seen the rise of a discussion in metaphysics regarding the status of individuals in our ontology: the basic question in this regard is whether we should admit individual entities into our fundamental ontology or think of reality as being comprised of structure without individuals. Ontic structural realism…

Paweł Zacharewicz University of Warsaw There is an ongoing debate in philosophy of language on how to understand and interpret silence. The dominant view is that silence might be meaningful in certain contexts while simultaneously being meaningless in others. Following Pettit (1994), one can argue that the necessary condition for silence to have meaning is…

Edoardo Fazzini University of Bern “Baumgartner(3) is critical on Woodward interventionist account(7,8) in mental causation, stating that upper-level properties are impossible to be proved causally efficacious. Given the nature of the supervenience relation between high-level mental properties and their low-level physical bases, any intervention on the mental level also alters the physical one. Hence, interventions…

Peihong Xie University of Vienna This paper aims to reframe the enterprise of metaphysical grounding through the lens of Carnapian explication, enriched by a role-function dynamics inspired by Basic Formal Ontology. According to my proposed story, the explication of a concept of grounding can be divided into three stages. In the Requirements Assessment stage, conceptual…

Zofia Sierant Jagiellonian University  Rape is commonly considered to be morally worse than comparable cases of violation of bodily autonomy. Sexual autonomy is somehow special to human self-identity and therefore should be particularly protected. Explaining this intuition is a central point of the debate on wrongness of rape.The starting point of this paper is a…

Mattia Rossi Università della Svizzera Italiana Dogmatism is widely considered a paradigmatic epistemic vice, particularly within Quassim Cassam’s obstructivist framework, which defines epistemic vices as traits that systematically obstruct knowledge and render their possessors epistemically criticizable. This paper interrogates that assumption, examining whether dogmatism is always vicious. After clarifying Cassam’s view, I explore whether dogmatism…

Lucas Timmerman Radboud In this talk, I revisit the application of Earman’s principles within the debate on the arrow of time. Earman’s principles state that (SP1) any dynamical symmetry is a spacetime symmetry, and that (SP2) any spacetime symmetry is a dynamical symmetry. Roberts and Salimkhani argue that we can employ these principles to deduce…

Celine Lechaux Freie Universität Berlin The world is a messy place. Models of different kind, developed in different practices, attempt to approximate it through different lenses. Normally, our understanding of causation is informed by physics and its underlying conception of the world as being something made up by things. But in the Philosophy of Biology,…