De 19 de Junho a 11 de Julho de 2017

Segunda-feira e terça-feira das 16:00 às 19:30

• Sessões de Junho: Sala 9
• Sessões de Julho Sala 5.1

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Ben Bradley

Syracuse University

Resonance and Modality

16 June 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Subjectivist theories of welfare are largely motivated by a resonance constraint. Roughly, the resonance constraint holds that nothing can be good for someone unless it resonates with them. This general statement of the resonance constraint leaves important questions unanswered. One question involves modality. What does the resonance constraint entail about cases where something resonates with me at one possible world but not another? This is closely related to a second, more widely discussed question: what happens when something resonates with a person at one time but not another? I discuss some different ways we might formulate a resonance constraint. They are importantly different and lead to different results in interesting cases.

June 14th

15.30h – 18.00h

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa

Room: tba

Lecture on Harm

by Ben Bradley

Injunctions against harming others can be found everywhere.  An obvious example is Mill’s “Harm Principle,” which “requires liberty… of doing as we like, subject to such consequences as may follow: without impediment from our fellow-creatures, so long as what we do does not harm them.” (Mill 1859: 265).    Principles like Mill’s suggest that there is something especially important about harm, such that we have strong, perhaps overriding reasons both to avoid harming people and to prevent harm from coming to people. […] [However,] there are significant disagreements about what counts as a harm.  So it is incumbent on philosophers to say what harm is (adapted from Ben Bradley “Doing Away with Harm”).

In this lecture, Ben Bradley takes us through the leading analyses of ‘harm’ – such as, among others, the views defended by Thomson, Norcross and Northcott – and discusses the main problems they face.

Free attendance

All welcome

David Yates

LANCOG Universidade de Lisboa

Thinking about Spacetime

9 June 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Quantum gravity research suggests that spacetime is not fundamental, but is in some sense emergent. There is little clarity about what ‘emergent’ means, but it is often taken to mean something like merely phenomenological. Emergent spacetime thus threatens the existence of the “local beables”—meters, pointers, dials—that we observe to gain evidence for fundamental physical theories, which gives rise to a problem of empirical incoherence. In this talk, I will first recast this problem in terms of spatiotemporal truth: in order to defend the empirical coherence of quantum gravity, we need to explain how there can be true propositions about things like meters, pointers and dials despite the fact that spacetime is not fundamental. Spacetime functionalism and certain causal theories of reference offer the promise of such an explanation, by positing non-transparent spatiotemporal concepts. Non-transparency would allow spatiotemporal truths to have non-spatiotemporal truthmakers, but I will argue that some spatiotemporal concepts are at least partially transparent. Combining partial transparency with the claim that at least some spatiotemporal property attributions are true, it follows that such propositions are made true by a structure closely resembling the spacetime of the manifest image. If the fundamental ontology of quantum gravity is indeed non-spatiotemporal, then it must ground a robustly emergent spacetime, in which local beables live and bear the spatiotemporal properties that serve as truthmakers of ordinary empirical claims.

Já está disponível a Philosophica 49

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David Papineau

King’s College London

Causation

2 June 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Causation is a temporally asymmetric relation, and so not grounded in fundamental dynamics alone. But this does not mean it does not exist or is unimportant. In this talk I shall show how causal relations are grounded in probabilistic connections between macroscopic facts, and how this analysis helps with a number of philosophical problems, including mental causation, pre-emption, counterfactual conditionals, and decision theory.

Tommaso Piazza

Università di Pavia

On What a Defeater Is

26 May 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Along with the venerable tradition initiated by John L. Pollock (1986), (Def) D is a defeater for E’s support for believing P if and only if E is a reason to believe P and E&D is not a reason to believe that P. Def aims to characterise in general terms the role that a reason of a subject S plays when it interacts with other reasons of S in such a way as to destroy or diminish S’s justification based on the latter reasons.  In spite of its undisputed popularity, Jake Chandler (2013) has convincingly argued that Def is flawed. In this talk I shall briefly rehearse Chandler’s ingenious objection against Pollock’s principle. Since Chandler has also proposed a new principle to replace Def, I shall address this principle, and criticize it by arguing that it seems unsuited to detect the role exerted by rebutting defeaters. On Chandler’s behalf I’ll then consider a possible reply to this objection based on J. Pryor (2013)’s suggestion that all rebutting defeaters are also undercutting defeaters. Although it is initially successful, I will argue that the reply under consideration is ultimately bound to fail because there are rebutting defeaters that, pace Pryor, are not also undercutting defeaters. Finally, I shall defend a new principle that is more faithful to the spirit of Pollock’s original characterization. I will conclude by arguing that this new principle does not fall afoul of the problems afflicting Pollock’s characterization and the one with which Chandler has proposed to replace it.

O novo livro de Paulo Borges, “Do Vazio ao Cais Absoluto ou Fernando Pessoa entre Oriente e Ocidente” (Lisboa, Âncora, 2017) será apresentado pelo escritor e pensador Miguel Real na Sala de Actos da Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa no dia 24 de Maio às 18:30.

Este livro mostra um Fernando Pessoa que transita em duplo sentido entre o Vazio e o Cais Absoluto, dois temas e imagens marcantes na sua obra e icónicos do Oriente e do Ocidente. Na verdade, um Fernando Pessoa que, bem pessoanamente, se move entre um e outro, sem jamais se fixar num ou noutro. “Entre” é o espaço por excelência do fluxo pessoano. Entremos nele.

Entrada Livre

Ricardo Miguel

LANCOG Universidade de Lisboa

Making mistakes and getting away with it?

19 May 2017, 16:00

Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa

Sala Mattos Romão (Departamento de Filosofia)

Abstract: Harman (2015, 2016) argues that there are permissible moral mistakes (PMM) – behaviours one should not engage in, all things considered, for moral reasons, but that are not wrong. She finds this category useful to solve a puzzle about accommodation: moral vegetarians believe that buying and eating meat is wrong; if they believe this, it seems that they should also believe that accommodating such actions is wrong; however, many of them seem to lack this latter belief since they accommodate the buying and eating of meat in various ways. Her suggestion, then, is that buying and eating meat are PMM and so moral vegetarians may have the implicit belief that those actions are not wrong. My main goal here is to show that Harman’s reasons for the existence of PMM are unconvincing. To this effect I criticize her two strategies: an argument against the thesis that all moral mistakes are wrong; and alleged counterexamples to the same thesis. I offer both a plausible way of denying one premiss of the argument and a reasonable interpretation of her examples as begging the question against her opponents. Consequently, without further reasons to accept PMM, we cannot get away with making mistakes like buying and eating meat and thereby solve the puzzle about vegetarians’ accommodation.

New article by António Lopes in Arte e Filosofia.