精东传媒

TITLE: Fundamentality Without Favouritism ABSTRACT: According to a widely endorsed conception of fundamentality, the fundamental is characterized in terms of a certain privileged relation or set of relations. On this conception, something is fundamental just in case it is unexplained relative to a unique privileged relation or a privileged set of relations. Let us say…

TITLE: Against Conservative Ontology ABSTRACT:聽In his recent book聽Objects: Nothing Out of the Ordinary聽(2015), Dan Z. Korman argues in favour of conservatism in metaphysics, that is, very roughly, that what we聽ordinarily聽take there to be is true. Especially, we are right about how many objects there are and what these objects are supposed to be. Korman takes…

TITLE: Artifacts and the Limits of Human Creative Intentions ABSTRACT: According to Amie Thomasson鈥檚 author-intention-based account of artifacts, an artifact of kind K is essentially a product of a largely successful intention to create something of kind K (see, e.g., Thomasson (2003), 鈥淩ealism and Human Kinds鈥�, Philosophy and聽Phenomenological Research, Vol. 67, No. 3, pp. 592-602).…

Title: Truthmaker semantics for containment and nonsense Abstract: Conceptivism is the doctrine according to which a proposition cannot entail another proposition if the latter contains a concept which is not already contained in the former: entailment does not introduce any additional conceptual content. This doctrine motivates so-called containment logics, namely logics where a formula B…

Title: On American and Australian plans for negation Abstract: Francesco Berto, later joined by Greg Restall, defends a modal account of negation, or the Australian plan for negation. The aim of this talk is to carefully examine and compare Australian and American plans for negation. To this end, I will consider four cases, and draw…

Title: Something Must Go Abstract:聽In this talk, we identify a tension between the intensional criterion of property identity and Leibniz鈥檚 Law. In particular, we argue that these two widely accepted criteria, when taken together and examined in light of certain assumptions, offer a circular analysis of the identity of properties and objects.

Title: Fundamentality and Humean Laws of Ground Abstract:聽What grounds facts of ground? Some metaphysicians invoke fundamental grounding laws to answer this question. These are general principles that link grounded facts to their grounds. The main business of this talk聽is to advance the debate about the metaphysics of grounding laws by exploring the prospects of a…

Title: Partial identity and mereotopology Abstract: How should we think about the ways in which identity and parthood interact? One important line of thought comes from the joint influence of the two Davids: Armstrong and Lewis. The underlying idea is that mereological overlap is a kind of identity 鈥� namely, partial identity. The aim of…

Title: Relevance in the Logic of Imagination Abstract: Reality-oriented mental simulation is a kind of imagination. The working assumption is that, when trying to determine whether a match would light if struck, one initially imagines striking the match and, together with relevant beliefs imported into the imaginative scenario, mentally simulates what would happen. But what…

Title: Composition as Identity defeats an Ethical Objection to Four-Dimensionalism Abstract: Johnston, Olson, and Taylor have argued against four-dimensionalism on the grounds that it commits us to the existence of personites, which are proper temporal parts of four-dimensional persons. They argue that the existence of personites makes many of our moral beliefs and practices untenable,…

Title:聽Worlds: Possible and Impossible Abstract: In this talk, I鈥檒l reflect on the role of worlds鈥攂oth possible worlds and impossible worlds鈥攂oth in the聽semantics of various kinds of languages and logics, and in broader issues in metaphysics. I will argue that, given very modest assumptions concerning the role of worlds in semantics, that any defender of possible…