Calendar

Meeting Cancellation: The CUNY Graduate Center will be closed on Monday, March 4^th. Therefore, the Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will not be meeting. There is no meeting

I argue that racial injustice can make a subject’s news sources unreliable because of the effect of (1) racial prejudice and (2) society’s unjust structure on the news-gathering-and-disseminating processes a subject relies on.  I assume that societies with entrenched racial injustice have widespread racial prejudices and that these societies are unjustly structured.  I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief. In section one, I describe features of coverage-reliance ignorance, its relation to coverage-supported belief and white ignorance, its bad epistemic consequences and a case of coverage-reliance ignorance where a subject holds a true, but unjustified, belief.  In section two, I argue that racial prejudice can make a news source less reliable because racial prejudice can make it less likely that news sources report on racial injustice related topics.  In section three, I argue that a society’s unjust structure can make a news source less reliable because it can make it less likely that reports on racial-injustice-related topics reach subjects who lack information on these topics.  In section four, I argue that racial injustice can undermine a subject’s capacity to be properly sensitive to her social conditions such that she is doxastically justified in her coverage-supported belief.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room 7314 of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:

Feb 4. Melvin Fitting, CUNY

Feb 11. Benjamin Neeser, Geneva

Feb 18. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Feb 25. Achille Varzi, Columbia

Mar 4. Eric Bayruns Garcia, CUNY

Mar 11. Romina Padro, CUNY

Mar 18. Jeremy Goodman, USC

Mar 25. Kit Fine, NYU

Apr 1. Elena Ficara, Paderborn

Apr 8. Chris Scambler, NYU

Apr 15.  Jenn McDonald, CUNY

Apr 22. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Apr 29. Tommy Kivatinos, CUNY

May 6. Daniel Durante, Natal

May 13. Martina Botti, Columbia

May 20. Vincent Peluce, CUNY

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room 7314 of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:

Feb 4. Melvin Fitting, CUNY

Feb 11. Benjamin Neeser, Geneva

Feb 18. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Feb 25. Achille Varzi, Columbia

Mar 4. Eric Bayruns Garcia, CUNY

Mar 11. Jeremy Goodman, USC

Mar 18. Romina Padro, CUNY

Mar 25. Kit Fine, NYU

Apr 1. Elena Ficara, Paderborn

Apr 8. Chris Scambler, NYU

Apr 15.  Jenn McDonald, CUNY

Apr 22. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Apr 29. Tommy Kivatinos, CUNY

May 6. Daniel Durante, Natal

May 13. Martina Botti, Columbia

May 20. Vincent Peluce, CUNY

What are laws of nature? The predominant view in contemporary philosophy of science is the Humean `best system account’ which holds that the laws of nature are merely descriptive, an efficient summary of contingent regularities that we find in the world. Using the concept of typicality, I will spell out a common anti-Humean intuition into a precise argument: A typical Humean world wouldn’t have any law-like regularities to begin with. Thus (I will argue), Humean metaphysics do not fit the objective order that we find in our universe.

There will be dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please send an email with `Dinner’ in the heading to nyphilsci@gmail.com (please note that all are welcome, but only the speaker’s dinner will be covered). If you have any other questions, please email isaac.wilhelm@rutgers.edu.

Russell proved over a century ago that a naive conception of structured propositions is inconsistent. Hodes (2015), Dorr (2016), and Goodman (2017) have recently reformulated Russell’s argument in the language of higher-order logic, and concluded from it that distinctions in reality cannot always reflect all the syntactic structure of the language in which we draw those distinctions. But they also float the idea that such distinctions might nevertheless have sentence-like structure, so long as this structure fails to neatly correspond to the syntactic structure of the sentences we use to draw those distinction. Perhaps, that is, the popular metaphor of facts being like sentences written in God’s “book of the world” is tenable after all. In this talk I’ll give a way of making this metaphor precise, and prove a new limitative result showing that, given natural assumptions, it too is inconsistent.

The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will be meeting on Mondays from 4:15 to 6:15 in room 7314 of the Graduate Center, CUNY (365 5th Avenue). The (provisional) schedule is as follows:

Feb 4. Melvin Fitting, CUNY

Feb 11. Benjamin Neeser, Geneva

Feb 18. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Feb 25. Achille Varzi, Columbia

Mar 4. Eric Bayruns Garcia, CUNY

Mar 11. Jeremy Goodman, USC

Mar 18. Romina Padro, CUNY

Mar 25. Kit Fine, NYU

Apr 1. Elena Ficara, Paderborn

Apr 8. Chris Scambler, NYU

Apr 15.  Jenn McDonald, CUNY

Apr 22. GC CLOSED. NO MEETING

Apr 29. Tommy Kivatinos, CUNY

May 6. Daniel Durante, Natal

May 13. Martina Botti, Columbia

May 20. Vincent Peluce, CUNY

Vera List Professor of Philosophy, Richard J. Bernstein, will present his new book on Hannah Arendt, Why Read Hannah Arendt Now (2018, Polity Press), followed by a screening of the documentary film Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt.

Free and open to the public.

Working Papers in Ethics and Moral Psychology is a speaker series conducted under the auspices of the Icahn School of Medicine Bioethics Program. It is a working group where speakers are invited to present well-developed, as yet unpublished work. The focus of the group is interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on topics in ethics, bioethics, neuroethics, and moral psychology. The meetings begin with a brief presentation by the invited speaker and the remaining time is devoted to a discussion of the paper. The speakers will make their papers available in advance of their presentation to those who sign up for the Working Papers mailing list.

Upcoming Speakers:

11 Oct: Jordan Mackenzie, NYU

8 Nov: Susana Nuccetelli, St. Cloud State

13 Dec: Michael Brownstein, John Jay

14 Mar: Kyle Ferguson, CUNY

18 Apr: Jeff Sebo, NYU

23 May: Johann Frick, Princeton

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students, postdocs, people who got their PhD within the last few years, advanced undergrads etc. – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2-3 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students, postdocs, people who got their PhD within the last few years, advanced undergrads etc. – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2-3 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

There’s the question of what there is, and then there’s the question of what ultimately exists. Many contend that, once we have this distinction clearly in mind, we can see that there is no sensible debate to be had about whether there are such things as properties or tables or numbers, and that the only ontological question worth debating is whether such things are ultimate (in one or another sense). I argue that this is a mistake. Taking debates about ordinary objects as a case study, I show that the arguments that animate these debates bear directly on the question of which objects there are and cannot plausibly be recast as arguments about what’s ultimate. I also address the objection that, because they are trivially answerable, questions about what there is cannot be a proper subject of ontological debate.

Reception to follow.