Bit of a short notice, but I just saw an announcement for this conference on the law (or principle, whichever you prefer) of non-contradiction. This is always a topic that interests me, and of course I’ve got a paper on LNC as well, ‘The Law of Non-Contradiction as a Metaphysical Principle’. Well, I don’t think I’ll be able to attend, but it looks quite interesting. Would be useful to know Italian though, as some of the papers are in Italian. Bologna is a nice city as well.

Here’s the announcement:

An international meeting on the Principle of Non-Contradiction (history and theory) will be held in Bologna on next September 30th-October 1st. Everyone interested is welcome. For any information, please contact Walter Cavini (walter.cavini@unibo.it).

The Principle of Non-Contradiction
History and Theory

Bologna, September 30th-October 1st, 2010
Rodolfo Mondolfo Hall
Via Zamboni, 38 – Third Floor

September 30th

Chair Walter Cavini

9:30 Graham Priest, Plato’s Parmenides

11 Break

11:15 Jonathan Barnes, Against Aristotle?

Chair Gerhard Seel

15:30 Mauro Nasti De Vincentis, Forme della Contraddizione e Sillogistica Aristotelica

17 Break

17:15 Walter Cavini, Truth and (Non-) Contradiction: Some Ancient Reflections

20 Dinner (Anna Maria, Via delle Belle Arti, 17/A)

October 1st

Chair Jonathan Barnes

9:15 Mirella Capozzi, Kant e il Principio di Non Contraddizione

10:45 Break

11 Enrico Berti, Hegel e il Principio di Non Contraddizione

Chair Graham Priest

14:00 Franca D’Agostini, What Kind of Law Is the Law of Non-Contradiction?

15:30 Break

15:45 Gerhard Seel, What is Pragmatic Self-Contradiction? Some Semantical Considerations

17:15 Break

17:30 Annalisa Coliva/Sebastiano Moruzzi, Relativism and Contradiction

This looks nice, but too far away for me! Fraser Macbride as the invited speaker. Here is the CFP, not much time left though:

The Society for the Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy (SSHAP) will be meeting in Minneapolis during the Central APA (March 30-April 2, 2011). SSHAP wishes to invite members and non-members to submit contributions on the following topic:

Truth in Analytic Philosophy

Invited speaker: Fraser MacBride (University of Cambridge)

The nature of truth is a perennial topic for philosophy, but the advent of analytic philosophy seems to have put debates about truth on a new course. Initially writers such as Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein tried to distinguish themselves by arguing that their views of truth were considerably clearer than their predecessors. Later Tarski’s seminal writings on truth forced a reevaluation of some earlier approaches and also led to some new theories as in the work of Carnap, Quine and Davidson. These debates continue into the present where philosophers combine issues from logic, semantics, metaphysics and epistemology in order to articulate and defend their preferred proposals. The questions this raises include the following: Is there anything distinctive about the way analytic philosophers have approached truth historically? What lessons can we learn about current debates on truth by considering earlier analytic philosophers? What have been the neglected trends in the history of analytical philosophical thought about truth?

CALL FOR PAPERS

A limited number of papers will be selected for presentation at the meeting. Time allowed for presentations is 60 minutes including discussion. Submitted papers should have a maximum of 4000 words and should be accompanied by a 200 words abstract.

All submitted papers should be PREPARED FOR BLIND REVIEW, and should be sent electronically to:

bolzano@ksu.edu

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 1 September 2010. Authors will be notified shortly thereafter.

In addition to individual papers, the scientific committee will be considering PROPOSALS FOR SYMPOSIA. Time allowed for symposia is 3 hours (including discussion). Symposia should include a minimum of three and a maximum of four contributions. Submissions should be clearly identified as “Symposium proposal” and include:

1) The title of the symposium
2) A brief description of the topic and its relevance to the conference (200 words)
3) The name, affiliation and academic status (student, lecturer, assistant professor, etc.) of each participant
4) The title of each contribution as well as an extended 500-1000 word abstract.
5) The name, affiliation and academic status of the person who will be chairing the symposium

Symposium proposals should be sent electronically to:

bolzano@ksu.edu

EXTENDED DEADLINE: 1 September 2010. Authors will be notified shortly thereafter.

This looks like a great conference for those who are interested in the interface between metaphysics and science. The topic has been hot for a good few years already, but it shows no signs of cooling down! I’d love to go, but not sure if I could justify spending the money to get to Toronto…

Here is the official call for papers, still plenty of time to write that paper:

METAPHYSICS & THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE CONFERENCE

Presented by the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science
and Technology, University of Toronto and the Fishbein Center for the
History of Science and Medicine, University of Chicago

13-15 May 2011, University of Toronto

The philosophy of science has an illustrious history of attraction and
antipathy towards metaphysics. The latter was famously exemplified in
the Logical Positivist contention that metaphysical questions are
meaningless, but in the wake of the demise of Positivism, metaphysics
has found its way back into the philosophy of science. Increasingly,
questions about the nature of natural laws, kinds, dispositions, and
so on have taken a metaphysical cast. The metaphysics of science
commands significant attention in contemporary philosophy.

While many philosophers embrace the increased contact between
metaphysics and the philosophy of science, others are wary. Should
science (and its philosophical study) lead us into doing metaphysics?
If so, which metaphysical issues are genuine and which are illusory,
and how might we tell? Such questions dovetail with similar soul-
searching in metaphysics proper (sometimes under the banner of “meta-
metaphysics”, sometimes simply as methodology).

This conference will examine ground-level debates about metaphysics
within the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of biology, and
broader methodological questions about the role of metaphysics in the
philosophy of science. Participation is open and welcome from all
parties to these questions: from those who hold that metaphysics must
have a place within the philosophy of science, to those who hold it
should not.

PLENARY SPEAKERS
Craig Callender (University of California, San Diego)
Anjan Chakravartty (University of Toronto)
Katherine Hawley (University of St. Andrews)
Jenann Ismael (University of Arizona)
James Ladyman (University of Bristol)
Kyle Stanford (University of California, Irvine)
Michael Strevens (New York University)
Robert Wilson (University of Alberta)
C. Kenneth Waters (Minnesota)

CALL FOR PAPERS:
Essays of 4,000-5,000 words (30 minutes allotted for presentations)
concerning any aspect of metaphysics and the natural or social
sciences will be accepted for review until January 10, 2011. Please
include a short abstract (200 words or so), a few keywords, prepare
your essayfor blind review (do not include your name or other
identifying references in the document), and submit it in PDF format
here: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=mpsc2011

Notification by early February 2011.

If you are planning to attend the conference and would like to
identify yourself as a potential chair, please email the conference
address .

ORGANIZERS
Chris Haufe (University of Chicago)
Matthew H. Slater (Bucknell University)
Zanja Yudell (California State University, Chico)

Please direct general conference inquiries to mpsc2011@gmail.com

This combination of a mini-course and a workshop, which is effectively on pluralism in logic, looks rather interesting. It is part of the Foundations of Logical Consequence project and takes place in St. Andrews. I don’t think I’m going as I’m busy enough as it is, although it would be a great chance to meet some top people in philosophical logic, especially Graham Priest. Anyway, this is not my primary area, even though I do have a paper, entitled ‘On the Notion of Logical Truth’, which deals, among other things, with the question of whether there is a One True Logic, and how logical pluralism could be understood. If anyone reading this is considering of going, do let me know!

Here is the official announcement:

Arché ‘Logic or Logics?’ Mini-course and Workshop

27 September – 1 October, 2010, University of St Andrews

The Arché ‘Logic or Logics?’ Mini-course and Workshop are organised by the members of the AHRC funded Foundations of Logical Consequence project. The Mini-Course is intended for graduate students and younger researchers (postdocs and junior faculty) working on related topics. The aim is to provide intensive graduate-level instruction on the latest thinking about pluralism and revision in logic. Topics will include the revision of logic debate, logical pluralism vs. absolutism (or monism), and combining logics. The week will conclude with a Workshop dedicated to contemporary research on the same theme.

The speakers for the Mini-course are:

• JC Beall (University of Connecticut)
• Carlos Caleiro (Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal)
• João Marcos (DIMAp / UFRN, Brazil)
• Graham Priest (University of Melbourne/CUNY)
• Greg Restall (University of Melbourne)
• Gillian Russell (Washington University, St Louis)
• Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam)

The speakers for the Workshop are:

• JC Beall (University of Connecticut)
• Colin Caret (Arché, University of St Andrews)
• Roy Cook (University of Minnesota)
• Ole Hjortland (Arché, University of St Andrews)
• Greg Restall (University of Melbourne)
• Penelope Rush (University of Tasmania)
• Gillian Russell (Washington University, St Louis)
• Johan van Benthem (University of Amsterdam)

We invite interested parties to register here: http://tinyurl.com/2wtxkp6

For information about accommodation please visit this site: http://www.stayinstandrews.com/

Further inquiries should be directed to arche@st-andrews.ac.uk or you can visit the websites for the ‘Logic or Logics?’ Mini-course and Workshop at the addresses below.

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/events/event?id=398

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~arche/events/event?id=399

James Ladyman, Oystein Linnebo & Richard Pettigrew: Identity and indiscernibility in logic and philosophy

Just before I came to Finland, and after my trip to the Dolomites in Italy, I attended the Structure and Identity conference in Bristol, which was part of the AHRC-funded Structuralism project, led by James Ladyman. The keynote speakers were John Burgess, Katherine Hawley, Fraser Macbride, Simons Saunders and Stewart Shapiro. My photos from the conference are here. I certainly don’t work in structuralism and although I have some interests towards things like the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, which was a major theme at the conference, I haven’t written anything about identity since my MA thesis either. However, one of the suggested themes concerned the notion of a fundamental level (especially in regard to structuralism), and I happen to have a paper about that, my talk was entitled ‘In Search of a Fundamental Level’. The paper is in need of revision and I did get some useful comments at the conference which I need to take into account, but the main argument should be clear enough already from the draft I’ve linked to.

Donnchadh O'Conaill & Olley Pearson: Ontic structral realism and infinite descent

Two of my colleagues from Durham, Donnchadh O’Conaill and Olley Pearson, also attended the conference and we all drove down together from Durham. They presented a joint paper entitled ‘Ontic structral realism and infinite descent’, which concerns the (im)possibility of infinite chains of dependence — something which also supports my thesis of the existence of a fundamental level. The connection with structuralism comes from the widely shared view that structuralism is not committed to the existence of a fundamental level and might in fact be opposed to the idea. However, Kerry McKenzie actually questioned this view and argued that in some sense structuralism might be committed to fundamentalism, albeit perhaps only to fundamental principles. Kerry’s paper was probably the most interesting for me, as it was directly connected to my own.

My talk: In search of a fundamental level (thanks to Olley for the photo)

Donnchadh and Olley presented their paper just before me and got a great audience. Some good discussion as well. Ladyman attended both of our papers, which was nice to see, and commented as well. In some sense we were the official opposition, as the type of metaphysics that we do at Durham is not particularly popular amongst this folk. Having said that, of the keynote speakers, Hawley and Macbride are certainly metaphysicians, and metaphysical issues crept up frequently during the discussions. In my own paper I sketched an a priori argument for a fundamental level, which did not go down so well, but I never had so much confidence in it anyway and in fact the paper is more about the metaphysical possibility of a fundamental level and the methodological issues concerning our research into the existence and nature of such a level rather than about the a priori argument. No one questioned the physics though, so I guess that bit must’ve been roughly correct.

Drinks at a nearby pub after a long conference day

The conference as a whole was enjoyable and fairly well organised, although the timetables did not quite hold (there should’ve been at least a 5min transition time between talks) and due to a lack of chairs the timings were sometimes a bit off. There were some other small things that could’ve been better (Wi-Fi usernames for the delegates for instance), but nothing serious. Bristol is also a lovely city with great pubs and restaurants, so nothing to complain about in that regard! In terms of the social side, I met a few nice people and some old conference aquintances, but I was still rather tired from my trip to Italy and from all the travelling, so I didn’t get so much out of the social activities. I wish I had had more energy though, because it was a great bunch of good philosophers.

Katherine Hawley: Structuralism as monism

As to the content, it was surprisingly varied, with some very technical papers, but even one on continental philosophy (which was a bit strange). All the keynotes were good, although we missed Simons Saunders as we arrived late on the first day. None of the talks were on issues that would be exactly on what I’m working on, but some very interesting issues about the foundations of mathematics were discussed, and there was quite a debate about whether that amounted to metaphysics or not — to me it’s clear that it did! I wish I had some notes or a draft of some of the papers available; John Burgess’ talk on ‘Codifiability vs codification’ for instance was very interesting, and quite easy to follow, but I can’t remember enough of the details to comment on it. Shapiro continued on similar foundational issues, although he mixed some linguistics into his talk and I failed to see the motivation for that really. Well, I think I should read some papers from the huge philosophy of logic and mathematics volume edited by Shapiro to be able to follow these discussions properly. I have that volume, but there are so many other things to read…

Well, that’s about it. What I took from the conference is that I should read more on the foundations of mathematics and even more physics! I recently read Lee Smolin’s excellent book The Trouble with Physics, which I also reviewed. I think I’ll have a look at his other popular physics books before jumping into any hardcore stuff.

But now for some laid back time in the Finnish sun (no kidding, the all-time heat record in Finland was broken this summer: 37,2 degrees centigrade!).

I’ve never been to one of the Taller d’Investigació en Filosofia conferences, which are for graduate students and recent PhDs (within 3 years), but I suspect that they might be quite nice. Especially so this time since the 13th conference takes place in Barcelona! That on its own is reason enough to submit something. I haven’t yet decided whether I’ll send a paper or not (I’m still within 3 years of getting my Ph.D.), but I wouldn’t mind going to Barcelona again. The two conferences that I’ve been to there before have been very enjoyable. Here is the CFP:

XIII TALLER D’INVESTIGACIÓ EN FILOSOFIA

UNIVERSITY OF BARCELONA, 12-13-14 JANUARY 2011

CALL FOR PAPERS

This call for papers is addressed to graduate students and doctors in philosophy who finished their PhDs during the last 3 years. All submitted papers must be in English, Catalan or Spanish; and must be on philosophical issues. However there will be no further restrictions as regards topics or areas in philosophy. Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop (45 minutes) followed by a commentary (15 minutes) and an open discussion (30 minutes). There are two ways of participating in the workshop, as a speaker or as a commentator.

CONTRIBUTED PAPERS

Authors should send their papers or, alternatively, a summary in between 1000 and 1500 words (where the thesis defended and the arguments backing them up should be clearly stated) to . Papers and summaries should be arranged for blind refereeing. On a separate sheet of paper the authors will include their full name, e-mail address, title of their contribution and university or institution to which they belong. The selection will be carried out by the members of our scientific committee.

COMMENTATORS

Those interested in participating as commentators should send their data (name, e-mail address, institution and a short CV) to xiiitif@gmail.com. A description of the main areas of philosophy they are interested in will also be required.

DEADLINES

Submitted papers will be accepted until the 26th September 2010. The result of the selection process will be communicated to the authors by the end of October 2010. Speakers must send the final version of their papers before the 21th of November 2010.

ORGANIZERS

The TIF XIII is organized by Marta Jorba, Sergi Oms and Miguel Ángel Sebastián and supported by LOGOS, with the collaboration of Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Barcelona and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.

Strahov Monastery, the conference venue

I’m back from Prague where I talked at the conference entitled Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. My primary motive to attend this conference was to publicize my forthcoming volume Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. Two of the contributors, E. J. Lowe and David Oderberg, were among the keynote speakers of the conference. Other keynotes included Michael Loux, Peter van Inwagen, Robert Pasnau and Edward Feser. There was indeed interest towards my volume, and merely the fact that a conference of this type was organised means that the volume is very timely.

My photos from the conference are here, and I have also posted a couple of new photos to my Prague album, although most of the shots there are from my trip to Prague three years ago, when I was still learning to use my D-SLR. Incidentally, it was great to visit Prague again and hang out with my colleague from Durham, Alex, who knows the city quite well. I didn’t have much time or energy for sightseeing though.

Strahov Monastery, the conference venue -- ceiling

I found the conference itself to be a bit hit and miss, with a couple of very interesting talks, several mediocre ones, and a bunch of rather badly presented, misguided or uninteresting (at least for me) talks. There were some organisational issues as well: on the first day the acoustics of the room that we used were horrible and it was nearly impossible to follow the talks. The schedule was also a bit all over the place with too short breaks (except for the lunch breaks, which were almost too generous) and talks going overtime. It would also have helped to have the abstracts for the talks available in the conference pack or on the website (apart from the keynotes). Having said that, the venue, Strahov monastery, was absolutely lovely, if a bit far from the centre. There are splendid views over Prague from the monastery. The rooms were quite nice as well, but the main part would be to have good acoustics and technical resources, which were completely lacking from the monastery. Also, I was pleased to discover that there were no parallel sessions, I much prefer that format. That did mean that each session was only 30 minutes though, including discussion, which generally meant that there wasn’t very much discussion… Even the keynotes got only a total of 50 minutes.

My talk: What Is Aristotelian Metaphysics?

My own talk was entitled ‘What Is Aristotelian Metaphysics?’, and it is also the basis of my own contribution to the volume I’m editing. Due to time contraints, it was more of an outline of a paper though, and I don’t actually have it written down yet, as I’m combining elements of several drafts that I have. The slides are available here. Unfortunately it was on the last day, and some people had to leave before that, but I still got a decent audience and even managed to leave some time for discussion. The talk seemed to go down quite well, although it might’ve been more due to my presentation style than the material, which is still a bit sketchy. In any case, it was nice to talk about the methodology of what I call ‘Aristotelian metaphysics’ to an audience who is very sympathetic. Basically I addressed some criticisms of this conception of metaphysics by Thomas Hofweber and James Ladyman & Don Ross.

E. J. Lowe: Essence and Ontology

The talks that were the most interesting to me were Peter van Inwagen’s ‘What is an ontological category?’, E. J. Lowe’s ‘Essence and Ontology’, which is the topic of his contribution to my volume as well, and David Oderberg’s ‘Essence and properties’. I won’t go very deep into the details here though. Loux might’ve said something interesting as well, but since his talk was on the first day in the room with horrible acoustics, I’ve got next to no idea what he was even talking about.

Van Inwagen’s account of ontological categories resembles a typical story that one might give about natural kinds — he mentioned fermions and bosons as a good example of well-defined categories. However, he also talked about mammals and animals, which are more controversial examples. I was concerned that his account may be vulnerable to the sort of crticisms that Achille Varzi has raised against bona fide boundaries, but I didn’t get a chance to ask about this from van Inwagen.

Peter van Inwagen: What is an ontological category?

Both Lowe and Oderberg briefly discussed our epistemic access to essences, which is one of my long-term research interests. However, they did not go into as much detail as I would’ve liked. Oderberg seemed to be quite optimistic about classic cases such as it being part of the essence of gold that it has the atomic number 79 (and that we can know this), but as I have recently argued, the story about chemical kinds in particular is rather more complicated than is often assumed. Lowe suggested that our epistemic access to metaphysical modality is via essences, emphasizing the Finean understanding of modality as being grounded in essences, and also argued that all modality is grounded in either the essence of one entity or a conjunction of such essences. I sympathise with the latter claim, but I have reasons to think that the epistemic story goes the other way around: given that we clearly have some knowledge of modal truths, but knowledge of essential truths may seem rather mysterious or elusive, is it not more likely that we acquire knowledge of essences via metaphysical modality?

David Oderberg: Essence and properties

I just saw an advert for this conference in Pisa, Italy, in the beginning of June. It looks fantastic, very impressive list of speakers, including E. J. Lowe, Peter van Inwagen, and John Heil for instance. I worked on universals when I was doing my Masters degree, but I haven’t really followed the discussion since. This conference would no doubt give a good idea about the current state of the debate, but the timing doesn’t really work for me — I’m travelling a lot this summer.

Anyway, the schedule is below, I wish I could attend!

Pisa, Scuola Normale Superiore – 5th-7th July 2010

Provisional Schedule

Monday (5th of July)

h. 14.30: Introduction

h. 14.50: Michael Loux (University of Notre Dame) : An Exercise in
Constituent Ontology

h. 16: Coffee Break

h. 16.15: Peter van Inwagen (University of Notre Dame): Relational
versus Constituent Ontologies

h. 17.30: Dean Zimmerman (Rutgers): Rehabilitating David Lewis’s
Arguments from Temporary Intrinsics

Tuesday (6th of July)

h. 9.15: Alex Oliver (Cambridge): Plurals and Properties

h. 10.30: Coffee Break

h. 10.45: Fraser Macbride (Cambridge): Russell on Relations

h. 12.00: Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Oxford): Leibniz On Properties

h. 13.15-14.45: Lunch Break

h. 14.45: John Heil (Washington, St. Louis): Universals?

h. 16.00: Coffee Break

h. 16.30: Sophie Gibb (Durham): Tropes and the Generality of Laws

Wednesday (7th of July)

h. 10: Jonathan Lowe (Durham): In Defence of Substantial Universals

h. 11.15: Coffee Break

h. 11.45: Gabriele Galluzzo (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa): For an
Aristotelian Understanding of Kinds and Properties

h. 13-14.30: Lunch Break

h. 14.30: Anna-Sofia Maurin (Lunds Universitet): States of Affairs and
the Exemplification Regress

h. 15.45: Coffee Break

h. 16.15: Robert Garcia (Texas A&M University): Categorial Gaps in Bundle Theory

The main bilding of the university, venue for the Graduate conference

Time for the second part of my Germany report. This concerns the combination of a graduate conference and research workshop with Scott Soames, entitled ‘Meaning, Modality and Apriority’. The events took place in Cologne 17-20 May 2010. Photos from both events are up in my Gallery. I gave a paper in the research workshop, with the title ‘The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements’ (a slightly revised draft). Soames agreed with much of my criticism, although I was perhaps a bit provocatively pushing him closer to deflationism about modality than I was entitled to — in any case he conceded that the kind of essentialist picture that I sketched in the paper is on the right lines.

Scott Soames: Truth, Propositions and Possible World States

The organisation was top notch, although it was a pity that we couldn’t stay in the same venue for both events. I enjoyed all three events, but the conference marathon started to take its toll on me already during the graduate conference. The graduate conference included seven talks with dedicated comments and they were quite good in general, although I didn’t find any of the papers extraordinary. I think that on this post I will focus on Scott Soames’ keynote lecture and the discussion at the workshop rather than individual talks.

Soames has got two new books forthcoming very soon. One of them is entitled What Is Meaning?, the other Philosophy of Language. We got excerpts of both books before the workshop, and Soames talked about related matters in his keynote lecture as well. The topic is rather less interesting for me than Soames’ work on modality and apriority, but it was interesting to get this sneak preview and I think that there is something here that I could latch on to.

I won’t go into this in much detail, but basically Soames is defending a realist account on the nature of propositions: he thinks that propositions are ‘event types instances of which are events in which agents perform cognitive acts that are inherently representational’. Soames defends the view in some detail against the traditional Frege-Russell account on one hand and a modern deflationary view of propositions on the other hand. However, he does not really elaborate what the ontological status of propositions is according to his view. I tried to get into the bottom of this by asking whether he thinks that propositions have an existence independently of the agents’ cognitive acts. There are some problems with either answer to this question. If propositions do have an independent existence, how and where exactly do they exist? Are they abstract objects? Is there a Platonic realm of propositions? If they do not have an independent existence, then it seems that propositions just come in and out of existence according to the cognitive acts of the agents, which might have undesirable consequences as well.

Soames replying to comments

Be that as it may, more needs to be said regardless of how one might answer this question. Soames, though, wishes to remain non-committal: he said that he’s happy to commit to non-existing propositions and it seemed as if he might be willing to conceive of them as abstract objects of some kind. When pushed towards Platonism, Soames becomes a little bit uneasy, as it, understandably, strikes him as mysterious. So, I think that we can ask more from Soames in this regard, and it might also be an interesting project to examine the ontological options available to him.

Another theme that came up in the workshop was Soames’ view that we can quantify over non-existents. Basically this is based on a substitutional rather than an objectual reading of the existential quantifier. The difference can be illustrated by considering the sentence ‘There is at least one thing which is F’. On an objectual reading, the sentence is true just in case some object in the domain of discourse is F, whereas on the substitutional reading the sentence is true just in case there is some true sentence of the form ‘a is F’, where ‘a’ is a singular term (this is how Lowe puts it).

My talk at the research workshop: The Metaphysical Status of Modal Statements

Now, I was rather surprised and pleased at the same time that Soames is a proponent of the substitutional reading, as I am also more sympathetic to it, as are E. J. Lowe and Kit Fine. Now, since Soames thinks that we can can quantify over non-existents, the question arises: what can we know about non-existent objects? Can we know something about their essential properties? I put this question to Soames, and he said: yes, we must be able to know something about the essential properties of non-existents. This indeed seems to be an obvious requirement, as otherwise we wouldn’t be able to individuate them. Here I am reminded of Lowe’s saying ‘essence precedes existence’. My interest in this is that Soames seems to be very close the the Lowe-Fine view of essence here, or it would at least be fairly easy to push him towards that direction, which is good news of course!

So much for that. Numerous other issues came up during the events and I really enjoyed most of the discussion. But I’d like to keep these blog posts at least reasonably brief, so this will have to do for now. I think that I will return to these two mentioned themes at some point though.

Next up: a more general, non-philosophical report of my trip to Germany, and some more photos.

The conference venue

So, I’m back from a conference marathon and a bit of a holiday in Germany, and I’ve got a few reports to write! I’ll do a separate report for the first event and the combination of the other two which I attended, plus a non-philosophy post about the trip in general, to keep things in order. The conferences were all in Cologne and organised by the Emmy Noether Research Group ‘Understanding and the A Priori’. In addition I spent two nights in Dresden and two nights in Berlin. Without further ado, some remarks about the first event, a Workshop on the A Priori, follows. More photos from this event in my Gallery.

This was a two-day workshop with young philosophers working on the a priori. The format was similar to the one that was used in the Metametaphysics conference in Barcelona a couple of years ago, where I gave a talk, namely, the papers were distributed before the conference and there was just a brief summary rather than a presentation, followed by a comment and open discussion. I quite like the format, and it worked well in this occasion as well, as there were some good, in-depth discussions. The papers were by Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (Cologne), Yuri Cath (Arché, St. Andrews), Daniel Cohnitz (Tartu), Jonathan Ichikawa (Arché, St. Andrews), Carrie Jenkins (Nottingham) and Thomas Krödel (Konstanz). The commentators were mostly from Cologne or Bonn, although I was in fact the commentator for Magdalena’s paper.

Magdalena Balcerak Jackson: Intuitions as Inferential Judgements

I don’t think I will go into much detail about the individual papers here, as they were ‘work in progress’ and you will probably see revised versions of them in the future. Some general remarks are in order though. I was expecting papers mostly on things like a priori justification related to the work of e.g., Laurence BonJour and Albert Casullo, but in fact a major theme of the workshop was intuitions, with four papers addressing the role of intuitions in philosophy directly (Ichikawa, Balcerak Jackson, Jenkins and Cath). I didn’t mind this, but I’m more familiar with the literature concerning other aspects of apriority. In addition, Krödel gave a paper on implicit definition and Cohnitz on the substantiality of philosophical disputes. The papers were all interesting.

There were some intriguing attempts (especially Jenkins and Balcerak Jackson) to clarify what intuitions in fact are, whether they are inferential, basic, fall in one category or several, and so on. The upshot was roughly that the word ‘intuition’ is used to describe a great number of things in philosophy, and it’s rather difficult to get a clear idea of what intuitions amount to. The best way to proceed seems to be to restrict one’s discussion to a certain domain, such as thought experiments. I have no strong opinions about intuitions in philosophy as such, but the topic seems rather messy and should certainly be sorted out. I suspect that the most natural use for the notion is to relate it to the sort of ‘hunch’ that those who know their subject-matter well sometimes get, rather than to layman’s intuitions about philosophical thought experiments, for instance. That is, I think that intuitions are nothing but learned guesses, which are based on one’s previous experience concerning the topic at hand. If this is the case, they might very well be inferential (which is what Balcerak Jackson suggested).

Carrie Jenkins: 'Intuition', Intuition, Concepts, and the A Priori

There is another option: in some cases it might make sense to use the notion of ‘intuition’ for something that I would identify as a piece of a priori knowledge. For instance, one might have a very strong intuition that the law of non-contradiction is necessarily true. Indeed, I consider it to be a good candidate for a metaphysically necessary a priori truth, although I have expressed some reservations about this. Anyway, in this case there could be a mapping from intuitions to a priori knowledge. Be that as it may, the issue is ultimately terminological, and I believe that it would be rather more helpful to abstain from using the notion of ‘intuition’ ambiguously. In fact, in my work I try not to resort to the notion at all.

On that note, look out for the next report on the graduate conference and research workshop, ‘Meaning, Modality and Apriority’, hopefully within the next couple of days.

Workshop dinner