Being Without Foundations: Events
Varieties of Non-Wellfoundedness Workshop
Friday 16th - Sunday 18th December, 2022
Ligerz, Switzerland
On the standard view, reality is well-founded, roughly in the sense that everything is finitely many steps of immediate grounding away from the fundamental. Various authors have distinguished and taxonomised ways in which the standard view might fail. Still, much of the territory is unexplored. In this workshop, which forms part of the project “Being without Foundations” (funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation), we aim to bring together researchers working on phenomena of non-wellfoundedness in metaphysics (involving relations such as grounding, explanation, causation, constitution, relative fundamentality, and parthood). We are interested both in new arguments for or against the well-foundedness of a certain relation, and in new distinctions among non-wellfounded structures.
Speakers:
- Alexandre Billon (Lille), "When is non-well-founded grounding explanatorily defective?”
- Masuk Simsek (Bilkent), "Determination relations and metaphysical explanations"
- Léon Probst (Lugano), "Cyclical proofs in mathematics”
- Stephan Leuenberger (Glasgow), "Zeno grounding"
- Yannic Kappes (Vienna), "The inescapable ill-foundedness of the inclusive 'explains'"
- Fréderique Janssen-Lauret (Manchester), "Susan Stebbing’s arguments against well-foundedness"
- Philipp Blum (Lucerne), "Production and foundation"
A special volume of Dialectica with papers on the topic of the workshop will be released in 2023.
Philosophical Applications of Modal Logic Workshop
Thursday 14th May, 2020
University of Glasgow (via Zoom)
The formalism of modal logic has established itself as an enormously fruitful extension of standard propositional logic. The operators it introduces, originally interpreted to stand for necessity and possibility, can be given a range of different interpretations. Today, a great deal of specialised work is being done in modal logic, and the formalism is widely used in a number of fields, notably linguistics, computer science, and game theory. The aim of this workshop is to develop and discuss distinctly philosophical application of modal logic. The speakers are invited to report on new technical work in their talks, but place the emphasis on its motivation and application to philosophical applications rather than its mathematical interest. The workshop will of interest to formally-minded philosophers, giving them the chance to learn about the state of the art in the use of a key device in their theoretical tool-kit.
Speakers:
- Juhani Yli-Vakkuri (Tartu): "Belief, Truth, and Disquotation"
- Johannes Stern (Bristol): "Being in a Position to Know"
- Melissa Fusco & Arc Kocurek (Columbia): "A Two-Dimensional Logic for Two Paradoxes of Deontic Modality"
If you have any questions about project events, don't hesitate to contact Steph on stephanie.rennick@glasgow.ac.uk. Details of other philosophy events at the University of Glasgow are available via the the philosophy calendar.
