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.
New York University’s Liberal Studies, in Collaboration with Nietzsche Circle, Presents:
Nietzsche and the Disadvantage of History: The rise of Western Oikophobia
More Info & RSVP:
If you like to attend, Please RSVP by sending email to Luke Trusso at luke.trusso@gmail.com
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
Free Will
Implications from Physics and Metaphysics
The workshop will be hybrid, and anyone interested can participate through Zoom, although there will be limited spots for in-person participants. If you are interested in attending in-person, please reply to this email or write to loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu.
Barry Loewer (loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu) Assistant: Diego Arana (diego.arana@rutgers.edu)
Program (All times are EST)
Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/freewillzoom
iCal: https://tinyurl.com/freewillical
May 11
10:00am Peter van Inwagen (Notre Dame, Duke)
Ginet’s Principle: Our freedom is the freedom to add to the
given past.
11:30am John Perry (Stanford)
Causation, Entailment and Freedom
3:00pm Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus
4:30pm Carlo Rovelli (Aix-Marseille, UWO)
Free will: Back to Reichenbach
May 12
10:00am Kadri Vihvelin (USC)
Why We can’t Change the Past
11:30am Valia Allori (NIU)
Freedom from the Quantum?
3:00pm Tim O’Connor (Indiana, Baylor)
Top-Down and Indeterministic Agency: Why?
4:30pm Jessica Wilson (Toronto)
Two Routes to the Emergence of Free Will
We are excited to announce a public talk featuring Elie During as part of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard’s 60th death anniversary. On the face of it, The Dialectic of Duration, Gaston Bachelard’s 1936 essay, is a pungent—if often unfair—criticism of the Bergsonian doctrine of time and creative evolution. The constructive side of this Anti-Bergson has received less attention: it implies a genuine poetics of time based on the intuition of the sporadic and oscillatory nature of becoming. Bachelard’s rhythmic theme is consistent with the idea of “surrationalism” introduced that same year as a formal counterpart to the surrealist experiments carried out on the fringes of conscious experience. Inspired by the explosive potential of scientific revolutions already celebrated in Le Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, the surrationalist project can be interpreted as that of a poetics of reason. André Breton believed it would “act simultaneously as a stimulant and restraining influence” (“Crisis of the Object”). Insights from the scientific investigation of time as well as poetic and musical experience will help us see how this double action is in keeping with the eruptive dynamics of imagination and reason, as much as with Bachelard’s ideal of “self-surveillance”.
Elie During is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris Ouest. His research focuses on the philosophical implications of relativity theory. His publications include an introduction to Poincaré’s philosophy of science (La Science et l’Hypothèse, 2001), an essay on the nature of time (The Future does not Exist, 2014), two critical editions of Bergson, a coedited volume on contemporary metaphysics of realism (Choses en soi, 2018, English translation forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press), and most recently a critical edition of Bachelard’s Dialectique de la durée (2021).
Organized by
Julie Beauté, Aix-Marseille Université, ADES (France)
Alexander Campolo, Durham University (UK)
Jeanne Etelain, New York University (USA)
Sam Kellogg, New York University (USA)
Alexander Miller, Ghent University (Belgium)
Pierre Schwarzer, New York University (USA)
Meg Wiessner, New York University (USA)
Susan Neiman develops in Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002, Princeton: Princeton University Press) a watershed perspective on the longstanding problem of evil, the perniciously difficult to satisfy “need to find order within those appearances so unbearable that they threaten reason’s ability to go on.” The book thereby also presents a radically new perspective on traditional debates within metaphysics. On the occasion of its twentieth anniversary, we gather to celebrate her accomplishment and to advance the research program it reflects. Participants will include, in addition to Neiman herself: Annalise Acorn, Frederick Beiser, Jeremy Bendik-Keymer, Omri Boehm, Dan Brudney, Caroline Bynum, Lorraine Daston, Michael Della Rocca, Wendy Doniger, Wolfram Ellenberger, John Faithful Hamer, Carey Harrison, Patricia Kitcher, Philip Kitcher, Christia Mercer, Cornel West, Allen Wood, and James Wood.
Social Metaphysics Workshop – location tbd