Dec
2
Mon
On the Notion of Diachronic Emergence. Jessica Wilson @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Dec 2 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Though most accounts of emergence take this to be a broadly synchronic phenomenon, it has been recently maintained that there are distinctively diachronic forms of emergence (see, e.g., O’Connor and Wong’s 2005 account of strong emergence, Mitchell’s 2012 dynamic self-organization account of emergence, and Humphreys’ and Sartenaer and Guay’s 2016 accounts of ‘transformational emergence’). Here I argue that there is no need for a distinctively diachronic notion of emergence, as purported cases of such emergence can either be subsumed under broadly synchronic accounts, or else are better seen as simply cases of causation.


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

Dec
6
Fri
Symposium on Brian Cantwell Smith’s The Promise of Artificial Intelligence: Reckoning and Judgment (MIT Press, 2019) @ Kellen Auditorium, Room N101
Dec 6 all-day

Selected speakers:

Zed Adams

The New School

Brian Cantwell Smith

University of Toronto, St. George

Mazviita Chirimuuta

University of Pittsburgh
Dec
9
Mon
Logic in Fiction. Mark Colyvan @ CUNY Grad Center, 7314
Dec 9 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

This paper will address the question of whether the logic of a fiction can be specified as part of the fiction. For example, can one tell a fictional story in which it is part of the story that the logic in question is, say, K3? It seems unproblematic that we can do this. After all, we can tell a story about a world with a different geometry from ours, different physical laws, and even different numbers of dimensions (e.g. the two-dimensional world of Flatland). While allowing fictions to specify their own logics seems a natural extension of such science fiction, there are problems looming. Fictions are, by their very nature, incomplete. Specifying that the logic in question is classical is to embrace, amongst other things, classical principles such as excluded middle. But if the fictional world is incomplete, in what sense can it be part of the story that excluded middle holds? We would, in effect, be specifying that the incomplete situation described in the fiction is complete. Imposing excluded middle where it doesn’t belong leads to contradiction. These are especially pressing issues for (particular kinds of) fictionalism about mathematics.


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

Feb
3
Mon
The Power of Naive Truth. Hartry Field @ CUNY Grad Center, 7395
Feb 3 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

While non-classical theories of truth that take truth to be transparent have some obvious advantages over any classical theory that evidently must take it as non-transparent, several authors have recently argued that there’s also a big disadvantage of non-classical theories as compared to their “external” classical counterparts: proof-theoretic strength. Some of them have concluded that this gives a decisive advantage to classical logic theories. Williamson has argued this too. While conceding the relevance of proof-theoretic strength to the choice of logic, I will argue that there is a natural way to beef up extant internal theories so as to remove their proof-theoretic disadvantage. Given this, the resulting internal theories should seem preferable to their external counterparts.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Spring 2020

Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU

Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia

Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING

Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC

Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications

Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence

Mar 16 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest

Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC

Mar 30 David Papineau, GC

Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC

Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING

Apr 20  Michał Godziszewski, Munich

Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers

May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol

May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC

May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING

Feb
7
Fri
Ethics in the Shadow of Love. Quinn White (MIT) @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 202
Feb 7 @ 3:30 pm – 5:30 pm

One of the central questions facing human beings is how we should respond to the humanity of others. Since the enlightenment, secular Western ethics has gravitated towards two kinds of answer: we should care for others’ well-being, or we should respect them as autonomous agents. Largely neglected is an answer we can find the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. Analytic philosophers have started to pay more attention to love. But unlike those working within religious traditions, for whom an ideal of love for all serves as the central, organizing ideal in ethics, most of these philosophers see love as confined to the domain of intimate relationships between friends, family, romantic partners and the like. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all, of agape, can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and illuminating account of the the nature and grounds of morality. Against challenges to the idea that love for all is possible, I offer a novel account of what it would be to love all. I go on to argue that while it is possible to love all, most of us should not, as doing so would rule out the possibility of loving particular friends and families. Instead, we should approximate love for all. I argue that the minimal approximation of love for all is, surprisingly, respect, deriving the basic, structural features of deontological ethics (including anti-welfarism and anti-aggregation) from my account of love for all.

Reception to follow.

Feb
10
Mon
Is Free Choice Cancellable? Melissa Fusco @ CUNY Grad Center, 7395
Feb 10 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

I explore the implications of the Tense Phrase deletion operation known as sluicing (Ross 1969) for the semantic and pragmatic literature on the Free Choice effect (Kamp 1973, von Wright 1969). I argue that the time-honored ‘I don’t know which’-riders on Free Choice sentences, traditionally taken to show that the effect is pragmatic, are sensitive to scope. Careful attention to such riders suggests that these sluices do not show cancellation on Free Choice antecedents in which disjunction scopes narrower than the modal.

 


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop Spring 2020

Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU

Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia

Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING

Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC

Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications

Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence

Mar 16 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest

Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC

Mar 30 David Papineau, GC

Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC

Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING

Apr 20  Michał Godziszewski, Munich

Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers

May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol

May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC

May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING

Philosophy and Anarchy: Anatomy of a Disavowal. Catherine Malabou @ La Maison Française
Feb 10 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

“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

Feb
20
Thu
Could a Middle Level be the Most Fundamental? Sara Bernstein (Notre Dame) @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 5307
Feb 20 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

Debates over what is fundamental assume that what is fundamental must be either a “top” level (roughly, the biggest or highest-level thing), or a “bottom” level (roughly, the smallest or lowest-level things). Here I sketch a middle view between top-ism and bottom-ism, that a middle level could be the most fundamental, and argue for its possibility. I then suggest that this view satisfies the desiderata of asymmetry, irreflexivity, intransitivity, and well-foundedness of fundamentality, and that it is on par with the explanatory power of top-ism and bottom-ism.

Feb
24
Mon
A Truthmaker Semantics for Modal Logics. Dongwoo Kim @ CUNY Grad Center, 7395
Feb 24 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

This paper attempts to provide an exact truthmaker semantics for a family of normal modal propositional logic. The new semantics can be regarded as an “exactification” of the Kripke semantics in the sense of Fine (2014). For it offers an account of the accessibility relation on worlds in terms of the banning and allowing relations on states. The main idea is that an exact truthmaker for “Necessarily P” is a state that bans the exact falsifiers of P from obtaining, and an exact truthmaker for “Possibly P” is a state that allows the exact verifiers of P to obtain.


Logic and Metaphysics Workshop

Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU

Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia

Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING

Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC

Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications

Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence

Mar 16 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest

Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC

Mar 30 David Papineau, GC

Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC

Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING

Apr 20  Michał Godziszewski, Munich

Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers

May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol

May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC

May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING

Cancelled- Logic and Metaphysics Workshop @ CUNY Grad Center, 7395
Feb 24 @ 4:15 pm – 6:15 pm

Feb 3 Hartry Field, NYU

Feb 10 Melissa Fusco, Columbia

Feb 17 GC CLOSED NO MEETING

Feb 24 Dongwoo Kim, GC

Mar 2 Alex Citikin, Metropolitan Telecommunications

Mar 9 Antonella Mallozzi, Providence

Mar 16 David Papineau, GC

Mar 23 Jenn McDonald, GC

Mar 30 Mircea Dimitru, Bucharest

Apr 6 ? Eoin Moore, GC

Apr 13 SPRING RECESS NO MEETING

Apr 20  Michał Godziszewski, Munich

Apr 27 Michael Glanzberg, Rutgers

May 4 Matteo Zichetti, Bristol

May 11 Lisa Warenski,GC

May 18 PROBABLY NO MEETING