Colloquia are on selected Fridays from 3:30pm to 5:30pm, and will take place in the second floor seminar room (room 202), 5 Washington Place, unless otherwise noted. Refreshments will be served. For more information, please call the department at (212) 998-8320.
September 12
2014 Mala Kamm Lecture: Lydia Goehr (Columbia) Reading Danto’s Red Squares as a Political Thought Experiment, Or, “Catching the Conscience of our Kings.”
September 26
Taneli Kukkonen (Otago, NYU Abu Dhabi) Averroes on Infinite Time
October 3
2014 Diversity Lecture: Timothy McKay (University of Michigan)
October 17
Jennifer Lackey (Northwestern)
November 14
Alex Byrne (MIT)
Spring 2015
March 6
Kieran Setiya (MIT)
April 10
Angelica Kratzer (Amherst)
Two characteristics distinguish quantities from non-quantitative properties and relations. First, every quantity is associated with a class of determinate “magnitudes” or “values” of that quantity, each member of which is a property or relation itself. So when a particle possesses mass or charge, it always instantiates one particular magnitude of mass or charge — like 2.5 kilograms or 7 Coulombs. Second, the magnitudes of a given quantity (alternatively, the particulars which instantiate those magnitudes) exhibit “quantitative structure”, which comprises things like: ordering structure, summation/concatenation structure, ratio structure, directional structure, etc. We often represent quantities using similarly-structured mathematical entities, like numbers, vectors, etc.
The Metaphysics of Quantity conference is a three day conference to be held at the New York University Philosophy Department, with support from the New York Institute of Philosophy, on the weekend of May 1st through May 3rd, 2015. The purpose of this conference is to showcase new work being done in this exciting subfield, which investigates the nature of, and the philosophical issues stemming from, quantities. For more about the range of topics covered, and for information on how to submit a talk for this conference, please see our Call For Papers. To register, click here.
9:00-9:15 Welcome
9:15-10:15 Andy Egan & Bob Beddor: ‘Might do better: Flexible Relativism and the QUD’,
Comments by Melissa Fusco
10:20-11:20 Janice Dowell: ‘Contextualist Explanations of Recent Experimental Data on Modals’
Comments by Julia Zakkou
11:20-11:50 Coffee Break
11:50-12:50 Markus Kneer: ‘Restricting the Modal Base’
Comments by Manuel Garcia-Carpintero
Lunch break
2:40-3:40 Seth Yalcin: ‘Iffy Knowledge’
Comments by Kai von Fintel
3:45-4.45 Justin Khoo & Jonathan Phillips: ‘Experimenting with Modals’
Comments by Max Kölbel
4.45-5.15 Coffee Break
5.15-6.15 Teresa Marques: ‘Falsity and Retraction’
Comments by Chris Barker
7.00 Dinner
Speakers:
Una Stojnić (NYU/Columbia)
Karen Lewis (Barnard)
Ray Buchanan (University of Texas at Austin)
Hartry Field (NYU)
Crispin Wright (NYU)
Ian Rumfitt (Oxford University)
Sponsored by the New York Institute of Philosophy
For information, contact: nyip.events@nyu.edu
Speakers: Una Stojnic, Karen Lewis, Ray Buchanan, Hartry Field, Crispin Wright, Ian Rumfitt
Location: New York University
Indeterminacy of content: the really hard problem about animal intentionality
Brown Bag Talk
Hans-Johann Glock, University of Zurich
Wednesday, May 10, 12:30 p.m.
5 Washington Place, Seminar Room 202
Call for Papers: NYIP Workshop on “Higher Order Metaphysics”
Submissions are invited for presentation at a forthcoming New York Institute of Philosophy workshop on “higher order metaphysics”, concerned with questions of metaphysics which can be posed in higher order languages.
Higher order languages allow for variables having different syntactic categories — for example, variables that are predicates, and variables that are formulae (open sentence) — and for quantifiers that can bind such variables. Sentences of such languages are sometimes treated as shorthand for sentences about abstract objects, such as propositions and properties. The workshop will explore views which reject such equivalences, or at least, take sentences of higher order languages as precise, intelligible, and metaphysically interesting as they stand. This approach has deep historical roots: it is arguably the view of Frege’s Begriffsschrift, and was influentially promoted by A.N. Prior. It has also recently enjoyed a resurgence; for example, Timothy Williamson makes extensive use of higher order logic in his book “Modal Logic as Metaphysics”.
Each presentation at the workshop will be followed by comments given by an invited commentator.
For consideration, please submit an (extended) abstract or a complete paper, anonymized, as a pdf attachment, and including name, institution, and contact details in the email, to Iliana Gioulatou. Please also indicate in your email if you would be interested in commenting on one of the presentations. The submissions will be evaluated by external referees; to ensure triple-blind review, please do not include any identifying information in the abstract/paper, and do not send the submission to the workshop organizer.
Submission Deadline: March 1, 2017
Travel and accommodation for speakers and commentators will be covered by the workshop.
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.
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.
The universe plausibly has an infinite future and an infinite past. Given unlimited time, every qualitative state that has ever occurred will occur again, infinitely many times. There will thus exist in the future persons arbitrarily similar to you, in any desired respects. A person sufficiently similar to you in the right respects will qualify as literally another incarnation of you. Some theories about the nature of persons rule this out; however, these theories also imply, given an infinite past, that your present existence is a probability-zero event. Hence, your present existence is evidence against such theories of persons.
Vegan reception to follow.
“The issue of anarchy is at once metaphysical and political. Nevertheless, (French) philosophy and politics have always turned their backs on each other when defining it. One of the fundamental motivations of my lectures is to understand the reason of such a non-dialogue.
Different, sometimes contradictory, signs are making manifest the necessity of a new interrogation on anarchy in the current global political situation, far beyond the idea of a violent strategy against the State. How are we to understand and interpret those signs?”
– Catherine Malabou
Catherine Malabou is a Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida.
Her last books include Morphing Intelligence, From IQ To IA, CUP (2018), Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016, trans. Carolyn Shread), Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (with Adrian Johnston; New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); with Judith Butler, You Be My Body For Me, For, Corporeity, Plasticity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Blackwell, 2012).
In English
Sponsored by Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture