Philosophy

Judging from the amount of recent publications, in particular that of readers, textbooks, handbooks, and companions, it seems save to say that the philosophy of literature is about to become a self-standing philosophical discipline. Yet, the way the debate is structured unveils that this discipline – at least in its contemporary, analytic form – is still deeply rooted in other philosophical disciplines, as problems that are relevant to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, metaphysics, or epistemology are often at the centre of attention.

Forgiveness takes place in time. Obviously. But I shall explore the temporally extended nature of forgiveness with two particular aims in mind. First, the aim of explaining how forgiveness that must be earned through the culprit’s remorse is of the same moral genus as forgiveness whose distinct value resides precisely in the fact that the culprit has done nothing whatever to earn it. And second, the aim of explaining how acts of forgiveness can be acts of social construction, both in relation to the wrongdoer and in relation to the forgiver.

I argue that judgements of what is 'true in a fiction' presuppose the Reality Assumption: the assumption that everything that is (really) true is also fictionally the case, unless excluded by features of the work. By contrast with the more familiar Reality Principle, the Reality Assumption is not a rule or 'principle of generation' for inferring implied content from what is explicit in a text. Instead it provides an array of real-world truths that can be used in making such inferences.

Barry Loewer at Philosophy, CEU
|BL> has long been known to be an eigenvector of the philosophy operator Φceu. We have accordingly decided to measure its eigenvalue, in talk-units, on July 13th, 2015, in Budapest. Speakers will contribute 1 talk-unit each, on a variety of subjects on which Barry has been working.

In 'The Refutation of Idealism' GE Moore famously argues that a certain claim is both the basis for believing that 'esse is percipi' and self-contradictory. The claim in question is the identification of the sensation of e.g. blueness with the object of the sensation, namely blueness - or perhaps an instance of blueness - itself. Call this 'Objectualism' about the sensation. The connection between Objectualism and the esse is percipi thesis was noted by Berkeley (Notebooks 609), though obviously he did not think it self-contradictory.

Why do liberal states face a moral dilemma when confronted, as many are at present, with pressures for mass inward migration?  On the one hand, liberal principles of freedom, equality and human rights push them towards leaving the door as wide open as possible.  On the other hand, as democratic welfare states that wish to remain stable over time, they are unavoidably concerned about the size and composition of their own citizen bodies.  This impels them to impose limits on immigration and to give priority to those who are already connected in one way or another to the political community. 

Ancient philosophers, through their incessant debates and discussions, produced a vast array of highly complex competing conceptions about the nature of reality, and its fundamental constituents. These debates, and the metaphysical theories which were formulated in the course of these exchanges, are highly interesting in their own right, but also in the way they set the frame for later discussions, and provide the starting points of competing conceptual frameworks for later developments.

Some beliefs are not just false but profoundly misguided. They are based on a fundamentally flawed view of the world and have no basis in reality. Given the complex factors that underpin the formation and maintenance of such wayward beliefs, what are the prospects of persuading wayward believers to think differently? In this talk I will examine the nature and limits of persuasion in such cases. I will suggest that the challenge is to change what people think by changing how they think. Wayward believers need to unlearn established patterns of thought and epistemic conduct.

The goal of this talk is to defend a monist framework for causal and non-causal explanations - a counterfactual theory of explanation (CTE). According to the CTE, both causal and non-causal explanations are explanatory by virtue of revealing counterfactual dependencies between the explanandum and the explanans. I argue that (1) the CTE is applicable to paradigmatic examples of non-causal explanations, and that (2) the CTE has a surprising consequence regarding the asymmetry of explanations.