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Spontaneous Arising and an Ethics of Creativity in Early Daoism, Erica Brindley (Penn State)
5:30 pm
Spontaneous Arising and an Ethics of Creativity in Early Daoism, Erica Brindley (Penn State)
@ Columbia University Religion Dept. 101
Nov 2 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm
In the early part of the 20th century, Joseph Needham formulated a substantial claim concerning the Chinese predilection for self-generated creation rather than creator gods and myths. Half a century later, scholars working in the West like Frederick Mote, Derk Bodde, and Chang Kwang-chih picked up on Needham’s insight to discuss the so-called lack of a “creation myth” in early Chinese culture, basing their arguments on what they called the “inner necessity” or “spontaneously self-generating”[...]
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Agential Free Choice, Melissa Fusco (Columbia)
4:15 pm
Agential Free Choice, Melissa Fusco (Columbia)
@ CUNY Grad Center, 6494
Nov 5 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm
The Free Choice effect—whereby ♢(p or q) seems to entail both ♢p and ♢q—has long been described as a phenomenon affecting the deontic modal “may”. This paper presents an extension of the semantic account of deontic free choice defended in Fusco (2015) to the agentive modal “can”, the “can” which, intuitively, describes an agent’s powers. I begin by sketching a model of inexact ability, which grounds a modal approach to agency (Belnap & Perloff, 1998;[...]
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Causal Composition, Jessica Wilson (Toronto)
4:00 pm
Causal Composition, Jessica Wilson (Toronto)
@ CUNY Grad Center
Nov 8 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm
On the face of it, we live in a world rife with materially composed objects. But what is it exactly for some (smaller, spatiotemporally located) objects to materially compose, or ‘make up’, another? Intuitively, this has something to do with causal interactions among the parts, but causal accounts of composition have been surprisingly rare, due to their seeming to face pressing difficulties associated with extensional inadequacy, vague existence, and causal overdetermination. Here I motivate, present,[...]
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Openness and Indeterminacy, Amy Seymour, Fordham
4:15 pm
Openness and Indeterminacy, Amy Seymour, Fordham
@ CUNY Grad Center, 6494
Nov 12 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm
There are competing accounts of the openness of the future, which are structurally similar to competing analyses of ‘can’ and ‘able to do otherwise’. I argue metaphysical openness regarding the future requires the rejection of the commonly assumed tense logic axiom of Kt, (HF): p → HFp. (That is: If p, then it has always been the case that it will be that p). This account of openness both captures the core intuitions in the open[...]
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A Multimodal Interpretation of Descartes’ Creation Doctrine, Andrew Tedder, UConn
4:15 pm
A Multimodal Interpretation of Descartes’ Creation Doctrine, Andrew Tedder, UConn
@ CUNY Grad Center, 6494
Nov 19 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm
Descartes’ doctrine of the creation of eternal truths seems to claim that there is a class of necessary truths which are, nevertheless, possibly false. In short, these are truths concerning the essences of created things, and so are necessary: yet God, having full voluntary control over the creation of said essences as part of his voluntary control over creation in general, could have failed to create some essences or created them otherwise than he did.[...]
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Fatalism and the Logic of Unconditionals, Justin Bledin (Johns Hopkins)
4:15 pm
Fatalism and the Logic of Unconditionals, Justin Bledin (Johns Hopkins)
@ CUNY Grad Center, 6494
Nov 26 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm
In this talk, I consider a variant of the ancient Idle Argument involving so-called “unconditionals” with interrogative antecedents. This new Idle Argument provides an ideal setting for probing the logic of these close relatives of “if”-conditionals, which has been comparatively underexplored. In the course of refuting the argument, I argue that contrary to received wisdom, many unconditionals do not entail their main clauses, yet modus ponens is still unrestrictedly valid for this class of expressions. I[...]
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Can the Vaiśeṣika Individuate Universals? David Nowakowski (Union)
5:30 pm
Can the Vaiśeṣika Individuate Universals? David Nowakowski (Union)
@ Columbia University Religion Dept. 101
Nov 30 @ 5:30 pm – 7:30 pm
The Vaiśeṣika school of Indian philosophy is known for its distinctive doctrine of “individuators” (viśeṣāḥ), by means of which the various entities of the mundane world—substances, qualities, and motions—can be distinguished as unique individuals on purely formal grounds. As straightforward as the account is for these entities, the problem of individuation becomes much more complicated for universals. This paper uses the question “Can the Vaiśeṣika individuate universals?” to explore the next three categories in the[...]
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