6th In-house Graduate Philosophy Conference

Abstracts

Keynote Address   Katalin Farkas Do We Know What Knowledge Is?

Graduate Presenters

In a series of psychological experiments on the role of race categories in perception, subjects consistently judged White faces as lighter in luminance than Black faces, even for racially ambiguous faces that were disambiguated by lexical labels (Levin and Banaji, 2006). Philosopher Macpherson (2012) has made much of the latter finding, arguing that insofar as the lexical labeling effect implies the activation or priming of cognitive categories, it provides a most convincing empirical case for the cognitive penetration of perceptual experience. By ‘cognitive penetration,’ Macpherson has in mind a specific kind of cognitive influence that sustains, inter alia, some logical relation between the contents of cognition and the contents of perception. I examine and reject Macpherson’s argument on both theoretical and empirical grounds, and I argue that, possible first appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the empirical findings on which her argument stands are best explained by cognitively impenetrable perceptual processes. The upshot is that modular perceptual systems are psychologically sophisticated and philosophically significant. Ironically, though, the psychological sophistication that I propose should not provide much philosophical comfort for traditional defenders of modularity like Fodor.

Florin George Calian TBA

Damir Cicic Selective (In)compatibilism: A Compromise Solution to the Problem of Free Will 

The problem of free will is arguably one of the most difficult philosophical problems. It is so, to a great extent, because philosophers cannot reach agreement on what is the right answer to the following question: is free will compatible with determinism? It is beyond dispute that what we want to know when we ask this question is whether determinism is compatible with a certain kind of control over our actions. However, while some philosophers, the so called incompatibilists, think that determinism is not compatible with the relevant sort of control because it eliminates alternative possibilities and implies that we are not ultimate sources of our actions, others, the so called compatibilists, hold that determinism has no bearing on the freedom of our wills because it is not incompatible with any ability worth wanting. But, beside these philosophers who have radically different views on this issue, there are those who are, like me, undecided and who find the arguments on both sides of the debate equally compelling. What should the people in this predicament do? There are several options. First, they can make more effort to convince themselves that either compatibilists or incompatibilists are right. Second, they can try to show that being undecided in this respect is the most rational state to be in. But there is also the option that I would like to pursue which is to develop a view that will accommodate both the incompatibilist and compatibilist intuitions or, at least, bring closer the views of these philosophers. In this talk I will argue that we can do that by granting the incompatibilists that they are right when it comes to bad actions or actions performed for the wrong reasons and granting the compatibilists that they are right when it comes to good actions performed for the right reasons.

Andrea Csillag TBA

Rasa Davidaviciute The concept of mathematical intuition in Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic

Michael Dummett once noted that Frege and Husserl “may be compared with the Rhine and the Danube, which rise quite close to one another and for a time pursue roughly parallel courses, only to diverge in utterly different directions and flow into different seas.” This quote seems to perfectly summarize the way Husserl is perceived in analytic philosophy even today, as even his mathematical (as opposed to phenomenological) investigations still seem to be underestimated. One of the few analytic philosophers to mention Husserl’s work extensively is Charles Parsons. In his seminal article “Mathematical Intuition,” Parsons notes that there were two important philosophers of the past who seem more directly committed to intuition of mathematical objects: namely, Kant and Husserl. He goes on to elaborate on both philosophers’ views and often stresses that he is following their track in his theory of perceptual intuition in mathematics. Bringing up the similarities between Husserl’s and Parsons’ application of intuition is thus not a novel task – it has been done before, most notably by Richard Tieszen, who in his paper “Mathematical Intuition and Husserl’s Phenomenology” has argued that Husserl’s notion of intuition can help Parsons account for the difficulties that his theory encounters once it is faced with objects such as potential infinities. However almost no work has been done to investigate Husserl’s earliest and only solely mathematical work, Philosophy of Arithmetic, and to see whether Husserl’s earliest work already supports Parson’s version of mathematical intuition. In this talk, I will argue that in fact it does.

Attila Hangai Peripatetic theory of phantasia at the turn of the 3rd century A.D. – Alexander of Aphrodisias 

Alexander’s main theoretical aim was to defend a coherent Aristotelian philosophy, well suited to engage contemporary philosophical discussions, in most cases with the Stoics. The Stoic view of phantasia (the whole issues in the Hellenistic age in general) was based on epistemological considerations (thus apprehensive phantasia is the criterion of truth for them); whereas Aristotle’s account is more psychological, so to say. Alexander returns to his master’s analysis of the soul in terms of faculties or powers which he applies to phantasia as well, and in turn argues against its prominent epistemological role. However, he seems not to be entirely faithful to Aristotle’s theory. In my paper I shall indicate Alexander’s chief divergences from the Aristotelian view and try to give an account of his motivations for making them, for the most part by showing their dependence on debates with other schools (Stoics).

Viktor Illievski Lot-casting, divine interference and chance in the Myth of Er 

In the last book of his Republic Plato presents a puzzling myth, which some modern commentators regard as an anti-climactic, while other as a well-suited and illuminating end of the great dialogue. Be that as it may, the Myth of Er remains a fascinating reading, due to both its artistic excellence, and the array of philosophical problems that it raises. In the focus of this paper is Plato’s theodicy-in-making, or his early attempt to absolve god from the blame for the badness that sentient beings experience in this world. He does that by transferring all responsibility to the very agents acting in the material environment, i.e. to the embodied souls. The Myth illustrates this with the help of a scene of pre-natal choice making, when the souls are consciously and willingly picking up their own future destinies. However, the image of the soul’s freedom of choice, and consequently, moral responsibility for the future distress, seems tainted with several factors that apparently interfere with the lying of all blame solely on the chooser. Some of the more prominent such factors are the introduction of the initial lottery, which is meant to establish the order of choosing, and the introduction of the element of tychē, or chance, operational during the event of casting the lots. This paper purports to answer some undue criticism of the lottery episode, to establish its real meaning and purpose within the Myth, and to offer some glimpses on the status of tychē.       

Laszlo Kajtar “Memory Wars”: Unconscious, Repression and the Philosophy of Personal Identity 

Among other things, Locke is famous for giving a new direction to philosophizing about personal identity through time. After him, the emphasis on substance-sameness has been replaced the continuity of consciousness with extra attention to memory. Locke made the question about the persistence of persons a psychological one. Oversimplified but in essence his view is that if one has the memory of an experience then one is the same person as the one who had the experience.

If memory is essential to personal identity, and many non-philosophers would agree, then the understanding of personal identity would be enriched by a better understanding of the workings of memory. In this talk, I propose such a project. I focus on what has been called “memory wars”, the debate about whether there are repressed memories, going back to Freud. Freud theorized that some disturbing experiences can be banned unconsciously by one’s mind in order to protect one’s consciousness. However these memories can lead to neuroses in later life. This is the process of repression. In the 1990s, the notions of repression and the possibility of recovering repressed memories in therapy or hypnosis came under fire by psychologists and clinicians. I attempt to think through the consequences of this debate for the philosophy of personal identity. For instance, if repressed memories exist, then persons have memories they cannot recall. This means they fall out of the “backward reaching” of consciousness, à la Locke. Should we understand this along the lines that the person undergoing the experience is not the same person in whom the experience is later repressed?

Yuliya Kanygina A Critique of Kantian Constructivism 

Kantian Constructivism about reasons is the view that there are no mind-independent normative reasons but that reasons are constructed by our rationality. Kantians argue that rationality functions through the application of two of its principles, Hypothetical and Categorical imperatives (HI and CI, for short). I argue that the Kantian argument for constructivism about reasons is circular. First, instrumental reasons cannot be constructed through the HI without begging the question because the HI rests on the claim that the will, if autonomous, is legislative and autonomy, by definition, consists in applying laws, HI and CI, to oneself. Second, the argument for construction of moral reasons is circular in a the similar manner because the formulation of the CI expressing its matter, the Formula of Humanity, depends on the claim that rationality is an end in itself, which can be justified only if we assume constructivism about reasons.

Linda Lazar TBA

Anton Markoc When Intentions Matter for Permissibility

We can distinguish two questions: (1) When, if ever, are intentions relevant for permissibility? (2) If intentions are ever relevant for permissibility, why are they relevant? I will talk about (1). The most prominent answer to (1) is the so-called Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE). I will show that two of the DDE’s central assumptions are false: that the intention/foresight distinction has universal moral relevance and that bad intention is so weighty that it outweighs the fact that good effects of an action override its bad effects, thereby rendering it impermissible. I will then defend my preferred account according to which bad intentions are of such weight that they become necessary for permissibility only when they tip the balance of equally weighty sufficient moral reasons that favor an action. In other words, I will argue that if one justifiably believes that there is as much reason to do something as not to do it one gets less reason to act if one’s intention is bad – more specifically, if one justifiably believes that acting and not acting are both permissible because good and bad effects of acting and not acting are morally on a par and there are no other morally relevant considerations and if one acts (or does not act) intending bad effects, then one’s action (or inaction) is impermissible.

Robert Matyasi

Against Causal Eliminativism of Ordinary Objects

In Objects and Persons, Trenton Merricks argues that there are no ordinary objects such as statues, baseballs, chairs, rocks or any artifacts and composite natural objects of any kind. Although our pre-metaphysical conceptions of reality are admittedly committed to the existence of ordinary objects, Merricks explains away these folk-beliefs by arguing that any subject of our claims about the ordinary objects could be superseded by their constituent atoms taken collectively. In my presentation I will argue that Merricks’s argument for supporting his claims falls short on two counts; either it could not distinguish ordinary objects from their constituent atoms in order to eliminate them; or if it attempts to distinguish them, the argument’s presuppositions will undermine the reasons to eliminate ordinary objects. To motivate my argument, I will assume a minimal counterfactualist account of causation, namely, the difference making principle.

  Colin McCullough-Benner

Wittgenstein on Gödel and Mathematical Truth

Since the publication of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (RFM), Wittgenstein's remarks on Gödel's first incompleteness theorem have been particularly controversial. According to the traditional interpretation -- proposed by early reviewers of RFM and, notably, endorsed by Gödel himself -- these passages of RFM are marred by Wittgenstein's misunderstanding of Gödel's result, so much so that he misguidedly undertakes to refute a mathematical theorem. On the other hand, many of those who have recently come to Wittgenstein's defense attribute to him implausibly technical, implicit claims. In contrast, I will argue that the most philosophically fruitful approach to these remarks takes Wittgenstein not to be engaging with the mathematics of the theorem in any particularly sophisticated way, but rather with its supposed importance to our conception of mathematical truth. Not only does this yield a more philosophically significant interpretation, but it also avoids the claim that Wittgenstein attempted to refute a mathematical theorem -- something which he explicitly disavowed.

  Attila Mraz TBA

Magdolna Nyulaszi Immaterial Bodies?  - The Concept of Corporeality in Stoic Philosophy 

In my presentation I discuss the relationship between materiality and corporeality in Stoic philosophy.  Based on the surviving descriptions of the Stoic conception of body, I argue that although material entities were the paradigmatic examples of bodies for the Stoics, their notion of corporeality left room for the existence of such things as immaterial bodies.

Edi Pavlovic TBA   Nenad Petkovic Two types of skeptical arguments

In my opinion there are two types of arguments for the skepticism about external world. First type (Type A) relies on the assumption that experiences in Good Case (GC) are indistinguishable from the experiences in skeptical scenario - Bad Case (BC). Second type (Type B) relies on closure principle. I try to explore how these types of arguments work in the case of dream skepticism.

  Elena Popa Influence and Intervention Unified

There are some ambiguities about the scope of Woodward’s (2003) manipulability account of causation. Most notably, although there are clues for interpreting it as a metaphysical project, Woodward is denying any metaphysical aims. Starting from a distinction drawn by Strevens (forthcoming), between causal influence, causal difference-making, and frameworked difference-making, I will look for a metaphysics that could be used to fill in the space that Woodward deliberately leaves open. Maintaining a distinction between claims about the metaphysics of causation and claims about difference-making could make the account presented by Lewis (2000) part of a unified account, along with Woodward’s take on difference-making, rather than take them as rivals. I will go on to argue that there are good reasons to think of Lewis’s influence account as a suitable candidate due to the similarity between the claims about patterns of influence and Woodward’s concept of invariance. Furthermore, for both accounts there seems to be a very important link between causation and counterfactual dependence. Finally, I will briefly describe two worries that neither Woodward’s, nor Lewis’s account answer satisfactorily and that may threaten the unified account as well.

Orsolya Reich Do We Owe Anything to Our Parents?    Isik Sarihan Direct Visual Acquaintance with Possible Objects

There is something subjectively common between a veridical experience (e.g. seeing a red tomato that is front of your eyes) and a matching non-veridical experience (e.g. hallucinating, dreaming of, visually imagining a red tomato.) Disjunctivist direct realist theories claim that what is common is only epistemic: A veridical experience of a red tomato cannot be subjectively distinguished from the hallucination of a red tomato, and that's it. Sense-data theories claim that what is common is that in both cases we are directly acquainted with a red-sense data (a non-physical object). Qualia theories claim that in both cases there is the same mentally instatianted quality (a "red-quale"). Representationalist (or intentionalist) theories claim that in both cases there is the same representational or intentional content: Both experiences represent a red tomato, and that in cases of hallucination there is no red-quality to be aware of, be it mental or physical. The red-quality is "merely represented", not really there. I hold that the representationalist theories are on the right track but cannot solve some epistemic puzzles about perception: Having a hallucination of a red tomato, the subject gets to know of a quality, redness, even though there is no concrete red object to be aware of. How is this possible? I will suggest that hallucinating redness might be a matter of being directly acquainted with a red object, but with a non-actual, possible one. That is, we can be directly aware of things that are not actual, and this acquaintance relation is what is common between a veridical and a hallucinatory experience. I will argue that this possibility is not as implausible as it first sounds, and it is compatible with many ordinary views about perceptual experience. It should be considered as a serious option. I will also discuss what is the best terminology to make this view coherent.

Sergiu Spatan A new fallibilist response to the skeptic

The two most prevailing answers to the skeptic in the last decades are contextualism and safety-based neo-Mooreanism. I want to argue that although these two approaches do not succeed in presenting a conclusive solution to the skeptical puzzle, they do offer important tools for such a solution. Namely, I want to argue that an answer to the skeptic has to accommodate the insights of contextualism and anti-luck epistemology, but in a new, holistic and fallibilist framework.

Holger Thiel All Is Related And Relations Are All - A Case For Structural Neutral Monism

In monism the world is conceptualized in terms of one single entity. In the philosophy of mind, this amounts to the view according to which the physical and the mental are one single entity. Neutral Monism holds that the single entity is neutral with respect to the physical and the mental and that both are conceptualizable in terms of it. I claim that the single entity is structure and argue for Structural Neutral Monism. I pursue the conceptualization of the physical in terms of structure by way of alluding to Ontic Structural Realism (OSR). According to OSR, physical elements own their identity exclusively in virtue of the relations they entertain to other physical elements. Physical objects instantiate relational and extrinsic properties only, no intrinsic ones. For the conceptualization of the mental in terms of structure I take phenomenal qualities of perceptual experience as an exemplification of the mental and argue for a position I label phenomenal structuralism. According to phenomenal structuralism, perceptual experiences own their identity exclusively in virtue of the relations they entertain to other perceptual experiences. Perceptual experiences instantiate relational and extrinsic properties only, no intrinsic ones. Based on this picture, phenomenal qualities are purely relational and extrinsic properties of perceptual experience.

Nemanja Todorovic Understanding ‘Reasonableness’

Rawls’ political liberalism builds on an intuitive idea that any justification of political power, within liberal democracies, requires certain sensitivity to the fact of deep doctrinal disagreement, which normally characterizes such democracies.  In order to put more substance to this idea, Rawls draws on a familiar concept of reasonableness, using it to mark the scope and content of public justification.  And yet, even though central to his account, the concept of reasonableness is never clearly articulated by Rawls.  Even more so, the concept is used ambiguously – sometimes designating a purely moral view, and sometimes, a view responsive to epistemic standards.  My aim will be to provide an interpretation of the concept that seems most plausible and in line with Rawls’ underlying aims.

Mate Veres The Aim and Scope of Carneadean Argumentation in Cicero’s De Natura Deorum