The Society for the Metaphysics of Science will be holding its first annual conference on September 17-18, 2015 at Rutgers University – Newark. As well as various presentations, the conference will also feature the first organizational meeting of the Society which will elect officers, begin to make various policies, plan future conferences, etc. Both those interested in presenting papers and/or participating in the Society are invited to the conference. (For more information on the society, see the Society for the Metaphysics of Science web page.)
At the conference, presentations will be 40 minutes. Submissions should be on a topic in the metaphysics of science broadly construed, of no more than 6,000 words and should include an abstract of ~150 words and a word count. All papers must employ gender-neutral language and be prepared for blind review.
Submissions must be made using the Easychair online submission system at:https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sms2015. The submission deadline is March 1, 2015. Notifications of acceptance will be delivered by May 15, 2015. The conference will have a $50 registration fee. (The fee will be waived for graduate students.)
Our keynote speaker will be Barry Loewer, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, and all other sessions will comprise submitted papers.
Program Committee:
Ken Aizawa, Rutgers University, Newark, Chair
Carl Gillett, Northern Illinois University
Alyssa Ney, Rochester University
Thomas Polger, University of Cincinnati
Jessica Wilson, University of Toronto
Conceptions of unstructured content take contents to be sets of possibilities, or circumstances, or conditions (or functions from such things to truth values). In recent years, a great variety of new conceptions of unstructured content have been developed and applied, often with great formal ingenuity. Debates on relativism and context-sensitivity more generally, on expressivism, de se attitudes, counterfactual attitudes, vagueness, truthmaker semantics, and many more bear witness to these developments. At the same time, not as much attention has been paid to the philosophical foundations of unstructured conceptions.
In sharp contrast, proponents of structured propositions have recently spent a great amount of their time developing and clarifying the foundations of their conceptions in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind. This conference encourages new reflexion on the foundations of unstructured conceptions of content, the availability of existing foundational stories to new technical conceptions, the competitiveness of unstructured conceptions vis-a-vis structured conceptions as well as the relationship between the two conceptions. It also aims to establish renewed dialogue between, on the one hand, proponents of structured conceptions and of unstructured conceptions and, on the other hand, between proponents of the various conceptions and applications of unstructured content.
Speakers:
In addition to invited talks, there will be a CFA for 2-4 further talks.
(Non-exhaustive) list of topics:
- Foundations in philosophy of mind of conceptions of unstructured content
- Kinds of unstructured content \& the nature of representation
- Philosophical and / vs formal motivations for unstructured content
- What are the relationships between structured and unstructured conceptions of content? Competition? Complementation?
- Promiscuity on permissible sets of n-tuples: anything goes? (worlds-hyperplans, worlds-languages, worlds-standards of taste, …)
- What is it that gets characterised, or modelled, by a set of possibilities, or circumstances, or conditions?
- What are outstanding problems of fineness of grain?
- What progress has been made on the the problems of deduction / logical omniscience as they arise for unstructured content?
- The role of (unstructured) content in semantic theory
- Truthmaker semantics
- Notions of hyperintensionality with unstructured content
- Mental fragmentation/compartmentalisation
- Metaphysical foundations of unstructured content
- Possible worlds/points in the possibility-space: primitive or construed (e.g. out of structured things/sentences)?
Organisers: Andy Egan (Rutgers), Dirk Kindermann (University of Graz)
Please direct all queries to dirk.kindermann@uni-graz.at. If you’d like to attend the event, please informally register at dirk.kindermann@uni-graz.at.
Monism Conference
Organized by Jonathan Schaffer
for November 11-12, 2016
at Rutgers University
Friday November 11th
9:30 – 10:00 Breakfast
10:00 – 11:15 Terry Horgan, “The One is Real but the Many are Transcendentally Ideal”
11:30 – 12:45 Dean Zimmerman, “Arguments for Monism from Internal Relations”
12:45 – 3:00 Lunch
3:00 – 4:15 Ricki Bliss, “Monisms East and West”
4:30 – 5:45 Mark Johnston, “How the One Contingently Gave Rise to the Many”
Saturday November 12th
9:30 – 10:00 Breakfast
10:00 – 11:15 Kelly Trogdon, “Sparse Ontology beyond the Concrete”
11:30 – 12:45 Elizabeth Miller, “Collectivism”
12:45 – 3:00 Lunch
3:00 – 4:15 Ted Sider, “Monism, Ground, and Structuralism”
4:30 – 5:45 Michael Della Rocca, “Monism of Knowledge”
This conference is free and open. No advanced registration or anything else is needed to attend.
We are grateful to the Marc Sanders Foundation for their generous support.
The Department’s colloquium series typically meets on Thursdays in the Seminar Room at Gateway Bldg, 106 Somerset Street, 5th Floor.
- 2/27/18 Goldman Lecture, 4pm
- 3/1/18 Mesthene Lecture, Prof. Miranda Fricker (GC-CUNY), 3:00-6:30 pm
- 3/22/18 RU Climate Lecture, Prof. Sally Haslanger (MIT) 3:00-5:00 pm
- 4/8/18 Karen Bennett (Cornell University)
- 4/12/18 Sanders Lecture, Prof. Linda Zagzebski (University of Oklahoma)
- 4/13/18 Rutgers Chinese Philosophy Conference, 9:30 am-6:30 pm
- 4/13-4/14/18 Marilyn McCord Adams Memorial Conference
- 4/14-4/15/18 Rutgers-Columbia Undergraduate Philosophy Conference (held at Columbia University)
- 4/17/18 Class of 1970’s Lecture, Prof. Jeremy Waldron (NYU), Alexander Teleconference Lecture Hall, 4:30-7:30 pm
- 5/21-5/25/18 Metaphysical Mayhem
- 6/8-6/9/18 Pantheism Workshop
- 7/8-7/15/18 Summer Institute for Diversity in Philosophy (held at the Rutgers University Inn and Conference Center)