Sep
20
Fri
Anti-Exceptionalism about Logic Workshop @ CUNY Grad Center
Sep 20 – Sep 21 all-day

Logic has frequently played an exceptional role in philosophical projects. The laws of logic have been considered self-evident, obvious or a priori, and therefore epistemologically foundational. As a result, logic has been set apart from the other sciences.

According to anti-exceptionalism, however, the privileged epistemological status of logical laws has been exaggerated. Instead, both logical theories and theory-choice in logic are continuous with the theories and methods of other sciences. But what does that tell us about theory-choice in logic, and does it help us adjudicate in the many disputes between rival logical theories?

Speakers:

Jc Beall (UConn)

Christopher Blake-Turner (UNC Chapel Hill)

Ole Hjortland (University of Bergen)

Saul Kripke (CUNY)

Ben Martin (University of Bergen)

Romina Padro (CUNY)

Graham Priest (CUNY)

Marcus Rossberg (UConn)

Lionel Shapiro (UConn)

Stewart Shapiro (OSU)

Gillian Russell (UNC Chapel Hill)

Registration

Registration deadline: September 1, 2019, 9:00am EST

How to register: ole.hjortland @@@@ uib.no

https://philevents.org/event/show/74778

Autonomy, Deference, and “Getting it Oneself” (ZIDE 自) Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State University) @ Columbia University Religion Dept. 101
Sep 20 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm

This paper is on the topic of deliberative autonomy in (primarily) post-classical Chinese moral epistemology. By “deliberative autonomy,” I mean the epistemic state or achievement in which one’s ethical views or beliefs are those that seem right to oneself and are based on reasons or considerations that one understands for oneself. This is to be contrasted with holding a view or belief based primarily on the authority or expertise of others, without seeing for oneself that the view is correct or why it is correct.
The Chinese philosophical tradition is rich in discussion of the nature, value, and function of deliberative autonomy, having much to say both in its defense and against it. I will focus my discussion by looking more closely at what Neo-Confucians have said about a particular term of art, zide 自得 (“getting it oneself”). I translate and discuss some passages on “getting it oneself” in the works and recorded lessons of influential Song, Ming, and Qing Confucians, note different types of deliberative autonomy implied by these passages, and discuss Wm. Theodore de Bary’s famous explication of “getting it oneself.” I consider whether the premium these Confucians placed on zide has the implications for liberal education that de Bary proposes and describe how proponents of zide could respond to formidable and important Xunzian arguments for deference to traditions and expertise.

With responses from: KATJA VOGT (Columbia University)

The Fall dates for the Comparative Philosophy seminar:

September 20 – Justin Tiwald (San Francisco State University)
October 11 – Richard Kim (Loyola University, Chicago
November 8 – Sungmoon Kim (City University of Hong Kong)
December 6 – Paul R. Goldin (University of Pennsylvania)

More details (such as titles, abstracts, and respondents) to follow. Looking forward to seeing you soon.

Hagop Sarkissian
Associate Professor & Chair, Department of Philosophy, The City University of New York, Baruch College
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, CUNY Graduate Center 
Co-Director, Columbia Society for Comparative Philosophy

Sep
23
Mon
Existence, Verbal Disputes and Equivocation (Alessandro Rossi) @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Sep 23 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Noneism is the theory according to which some things do not exist. Following an established convention, I will call allism the negation of noneism (every thing exists). Lewis [1990] and, more recently, Woodward [2013] argued that the allism/noneism dispute turns on an equivocation about the meaning of ‘exists’ and would thereby be merely verbal. These arguments have been attacked by Priest [2005, 2011, 2013], who took the dispute to be genuine. In this paper, I will present two new arguments for the genuineness of the allism/noneism dispute. The first appeals to a recent version of logical pluralism defended by Kouri Kissel [Forth]: the two parties could be seen as engaging in a metalinguistic negotiation, that is, a normative disagreement about which meaning of ‘exists’ is best suited for a certain domain of discourse. Secondly, Williamson [1987] indicated a proof-theoretic criterion the two sides should meet in order for their dispute to count as genuine: they must share enough rules of inference governing ‘exist’ to characterise it up to logical equivalence. This challenge, I argue, can be met.

Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Fall 2019 Schedule:

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, St. Andrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18

November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Oct
7
Mon
Explanation and Modality: On Why The Swampman Is Still Worrisome to Teleosemanticists (Dongwoo Kim) @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Oct 7 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Many have thought that Davidson’s Swampman scenario offers a serious problem to teleosemantics. For it appears to be possible from the scenario that there are completely ahistorical creatures with beliefs, and this apparent possibility contradicts the theory. In a series of papers (2001, 2006, 2016), Papineau argues that the Swampman scenario is not even the start of an objection to teleosemantics as a scientific reduction of belief. It is against this claim that I want to argue here. I shall argue that the explanatory power of teleosemantics rests on two conceptual pillars, namely success semantics and the etiological conception of biological function, and that the Swampman scenario questions the adequacy of the foundational conceptual commitments. Along the way, some general connection between explanation and modality will be developed that sheds a new light on Kripke’s analysis of necessary a posteriori propositions. The conclusion will be that teleosemanticists should tackle the Swampman objection head on.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Fall 2019

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18

November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Logic and Metaphysics Workshop @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Oct 7 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18 Matias Bulnes, CUNY

November 25 Vincent Peluce, CUNY

December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Oct
21
Mon
The Buddha versus Popper: When to Live? Rohit Parikh @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Oct 21 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

We discuss two approaches to life: presentism and futurism. The first one, which we are identifying with the Buddha, is to live in the present and not to allow the future to hinder us from living in the ever present now. The second one, which we will identify with Karl Popper, is to think before we act, and act now for a better future. We will discuss various aspects of presentism and futurism, such as Ruth Millikan’s Popperian animal, the psychologist Howard Rachlin’s social and temporal discounting, and even the popular but controversial idea, YOLO (you live only once). The purpose of this talk is to contrast one with the other. The central question of ethics is: How should one live? Our variation on that question is: When should one live? We conjecture that the notion of flow, developed by Csikszentmihalyi, may be a better optimal choice between these two positions.

This work, which is joint with Jongjin Kim, is to appear in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop:

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18

November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Oct
28
Mon
Benacerraf’s Non-Problem. Barbara Gail Montero @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Oct 28 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Research in philosophy of mathematics over roughly the past half century can be understood, to a large degree, as a series of responses to what is commonly known as the Benacerraf problem: Given the abstract nature of mathematical entities, how can we come to have mathematical knowledge? How are we, in Benacerraf’s words, “to bridge the chasm. . . between the entities that form the subject matter of mathematics and the human knower?” In this talk, I aim to share with you some of the reasons why I think that Benacerraf’s problem—as he presents it and as Field restates it—just may be nothing to worry about.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop:

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18

November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Nov
4
Mon
The Provability of Consistency. Sergei Artemov @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Nov 4 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

We revisit the foundational question “Can consistency of a theory T be established by means of T?” The usual answer “No, by Gödel’s Second Incompleteness Theorem” is based on two assumptions:

1. Gödel’s internalized consistency formula is the only way to represent consistency.
2. Any contentual reasoning within T internalizes as a formal derivation in T.

We show that already for Peano arithmetic PA both of these assumptions are false: (1) does not cover such legitimate mode of presentation as schemes (think of the Induction scheme), (2) fails for schemes. Based on these observations, we offer a proof of PA-consistency by means of PA and discuss its potential impact.


Logic & Metaphysics Workshop

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18

November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Nov
11
Mon
Talking about Reification (Martin Pleitz) @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Nov 11 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Reification is the systematic association of a non-object with an object that encodes it. Therefore the reificationist must be a trans-objectist – i.e., anyone who thinks that there are instances of reification must also think that some items are not objects. As exemplified by Frege’s puzzle of the concept horse, non-objects and reification are notoriously difficult to talk about. Therefore I will begin my presentation by outlining a formal language that enables the trans-objectist and the reificationist to speak in a way that is not self-undermining. I will go on and employ the framework to give a uniform diagnosis of the set theoretic and semantic paradoxes in terms of static reification that is an alternative to Graham Priest’s Inclosure Schema, and sketch how dynamic reification can provide a uniform solution to the paradoxes as well as a general account of the constitution of abstract objects. In order to achieve this it will be crucial to import some tools of Procedural Postulationism, a dynamic account of the ontology of mathematics developed by Kit Fine.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18

November 25
December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT

Nov
18
Mon
An Unorthodox Solution to the Hintikka-Kripke Problem. Matías Bulnes @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Nov 18 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

The Hintikka-Kripke problem consists in reconciling Hintikka’s semantics for doxastic operators and Kripke’s semantics for alethic operators. The problem arises from their treatment of identity. While the necessity of identities was one of the main innovations of Kripke’s semantics, Hintikka needs identities to be contingent to explain the opacity of doxastic operators. Yet alethic and doxastic operators are combined effortlessly in everyday discourse. In the talk, I will first discuss various attempts at reconciliation within the orthodoxy about opacity, and raise objections to them. Then, I will propose an unorthodox idea: rather than thinking of doxastic operators as introducing new possible worlds with different identities, think of them as introducing new logical spaces with different domains of objects. This achieves reconciliation by circumscribing the necessity of identities to the logical space of each agent. To assess this idea viz-a-viz its competitors, we will have to reexamine some fundamental concepts of the problem of opacity, such as the concepts of language and semantics.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop

September 2 GC Closed NO MEETING

September 9 Yael Sharvit, UCLA

September 16  Ole Hjortland and Ben Martin, Bergen

September 23 Alessandro Rossi, StAndrews

September 30 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 7 Dongwoo Kim, GC

October 14 GC Closed NO MEETING

October 21 Rohit Parikh, GC

October 28 Barbara Montero, GC

November 4 Sergei Aretmov, GC

November 11 Martin Pleitz, Muenster

November 18 Matias Bulnes, CUNY

November 25 Vincent Peluce, CUNY

December 2 Jessica Wilson, Toronto

December 9 Mark Colyvan, Sydney

December 16  MAYBE A MEETING; MAYBE NOT