Current Termcard
Recent Termcards
The Serious Metaphysics Group (SMG) is currently run by Alexander Bird (ajb368@cam.ac.uk) and Wouter Cohen (wac36@cam.ac.uk).
All meetings in Lent 2021 will be held on Zoom on Wednesdays, 4.30-6pm. The Zoom details for each talk will be emailed on the CamPhilEvents mailing-list:
https://lists.cam.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/phil-events
Lent 2021 Termcard
27 January (week 1) |
Jessica Leech (KCL) |
Relative necessity redefended |
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3 February (week 2) |
Wouter Cohen (Cambridge) |
Frege on existence |
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10 February (week 3) |
Thomas Schindler (Bristol) |
Deflationary theories of properties and their ontology |
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17 February (week 4) |
Cancelled |
Cancelled |
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24 February (week 5) |
Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez (Cambridge) |
Reference, instantiation, and the ontology of fictional entities |
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3 March (week 6) | Jessica Wilson (Toronto) |
Identity and relative fundamentality |
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10 March (week 7) |
Sophie Allen (Keele) |
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17 March (week 8) |
Dolf Rami (Ruhr-Universität Bochum) |
Recent SMG Termcards
Michaelmas 2020 Termcard
14 October (week 1) |
No Meeting |
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21 October (week 2) |
Owen Griffiths (Cambridge) |
The collapse of logical pluralism |
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28 October (week 3) |
Mat Simpson (Cambridge) |
Universal generalisations and belief causation |
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4 November (week 4) |
Benjamin Marschall (Cambridge) |
Quine on ontology and the primacy of truth |
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11 November (week 5) |
Tim Button (UCL) |
Metaphysicians hate this one simple trick for avoiding universals, but they can't stop you using it! |
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18 November (week 6) | Barbara Vetter (Freie Universität Berlin) |
Essence, potentiality, and modality
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25 November (week 7) |
Alex Fisher (Cambridge) |
Truth in interactive fiction
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Lent 2020 Termcard
January 22nd (week 1) |
Lukas Skiba (Hamburg) |
'From Higher-Order Modal Logic to Necessitism?’ |
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January 29th (week 2) |
Emanuel Viebahn (HU Berlin) |
'Insincerity in Linguistic and Pictorial Communication’ |
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February 5th (week 3) |
Matt Farr (Cambridge) |
'Do we need to explain initial conditions?’ |
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February 12th (week 4) |
Alexander Roberts (Cambridge) |
‘Theories of Necessity' |
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February 19th (week 5) |
James Cargile (Virginia) |
‘Russell’s Paradox’ |
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February 26th (week 6) |
CANCELLED Ben Brast-Mckie (Oxford) |
‘Identity and Aboutness’ |
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March 4th (week 7) |
CANCELLED Annina Loets (Oxford) |
'Aspect Theories of Qualification’ |
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March 11th (week 8) |
CANCELLED Owen Griffiths (Cambridge) |
'The Collapse of Logical Pluralism’ |
Michaelmas 2019 Termcard
October 16th (week 1) |
Hugh Mellor (Cambridge) |
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October 23rd (week 2) |
Bryan Roberts (LSE) |
Causation when time unfolds in the wrong direction |
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October 30th (week 3) |
Hasok Chang (Cambridge) |
The Pragmatic Meaning of Reality [Time and room change: 3-4:30pm, Postgraduate Common Room] |
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November 6th (week 4)
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Roland Krause (HU Berlin) |
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November 13th (week 5) |
Kenny Walden (Dartmouth) |
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November 20th (week 6) |
Tom McClelland (Cambridge) |
Attention & Attendabilia: An Affordance Theory of Salience |
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November 27th (week 7) |
CANCELLED |
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December 4th (week 8) |
CANCELLED |
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Easter 2019 Termcard
1st May |
Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Professor University of Oxford) |
On a certain conception of metaphysical necessity |
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8th May |
Andrew Sepielli |
On the Superficiality of Normative Ethics |
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15th May |
Peter van Inwagen |
Two Problems for a Truth-centered Ontology |
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22nd May
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Matthew Kramer |
On the Mind-Independence of Legal Norms |
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29th May |
Aaron Hanlon (Associate Professor at Colby College) |
Literary Studies Needs an Epistemology, and Philosophy Can Help |
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5th June |
Sahanika Ratnayake (Cambridge PhD student) |
How Should We Understand 'The Shoulds'?: Contemporary Psychotherapy and Normative |
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12th June |
Wesley Wrigley |
Is the concept natural number vague? |
Lent 2019 Termcard
23rd January |
Hugh Mellor (Cambridge) and |
Conditionals: Truth and Safety |
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30th January |
David Oderberg |
Evil, Negative Being, and Truthmakers |
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6th February |
Li Li Tan |
On visual categorisation and recognition |
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13th February
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Raamy Majeed |
The Indeterminacy of Unconscious Belief |
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20th February |
Benjamin Marschall |
Carnap’s Internal Platonism |
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27th February |
Jeroen Smid (rescheduled) |
Aggregates and their role in the problem of coincident objects |
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6th March |
Nick Treanor |
The (Serious) Metaphysics of Epistemic Normativity |
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13th March |
Yael Loewenstein |
Heim Sequences and Why Most Unqualified 'Would'-Counterfactuals are Not True |
Michaelmas 2018 Termcard
10th October |
Penelope Mackie (Associate Professor at The University of Nottingham) |
Essentialism and context-dependence: a New Argument against Lewisian Counterpart Theory |
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17th October |
Jonathan Schaffer (Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University) |
Heavy Ontology, Light Ideology |
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24th October |
Owen Griffiths and Arif Ahmed (Cambridge University) |
Inner and outer harmony |
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31st October (note: talk cancelled) |
Jeroen Smid (Post-doc at Manchester University) |
Aggregates and their role in the problem of coincident objects |
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7th November |
Rachel Robertson (PhD student at Cambridge University) |
Embodied Agency in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science |
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14th November |
Nakul Krishna (Cambridge University) |
Scepticism, Pessimism, Mitigation: The Amoralist in the 1950s |
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21st November |
Richard Gaskin (Professor at University of Liverpool) |
Reference and Propositions |
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28th November |
Alex Jackson (Associate Professor from Boise State University) |
Vagueness, Relativism, and Realism |
Easter 2018 Termcard
25th April |
Andreas Stokke | Modal Metarepresentation | ||||||||
2nd May |
Ali Boyle |
Animalism, Dicephalus Twinning, and Biological Individuation |
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9th May |
Nora Heizelmann |
Weakness of Will as a Cognitive Bias |
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16th May |
Kyle Mitchell |
From Pragmatism to Easy Ontology—and Back Again |
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23rd May |
Nathan Hawkins | Paired Quantified Modal Logic | ||||||||
30th May |
Kasia Jaszczolt |
Time: From Semantics to Metaphysics |
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6th June |
Alastair Wilson |
Emergent Contingency |
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13th June |
Rachel Fraser |
An Ontology of Narrative Belief |
Lent 2018 Termcard
24th January |
Tim Button |
A Dogma of Metaphysics |
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31st January |
Jack Lyons |
Toward a solution to the generality problem for reliabilism |
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7th February |
Dorothy Edgington |
Indeterminacy and Conditionals |
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14th February |
Bart Streumer |
Reduction without Supervenience |
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21st February |
Jonathan Shaheen |
Cavendish's Mereology |
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28th February |
Nakul Krishna |
*Cancelled* |
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7th March |
Ali Boyle |
*Cancelled* |
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14th March |
Brian Pitts |
*Cancelled* |
Michaelmas 2017 Termcard
11th October |
Alexander Bird |
“Fundamental Powers, Evolved Powers, and Mental Powers” |
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18th October |
Emanuel Viebahn |
“Deceptive presuppositions” |
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25th October |
John Marenbon |
“Avicenna and Duns Scotus on Universals” |
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1st November |
Alex Moran |
"Material Things, Russell's Principle and 'Grounding-Qua'" |
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8th November |
Hugh Mellor |
“Chances and Conditionals” |
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15th November |
Christian List |
“Levels: descriptive, explanatory, and ontological” |
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22nd November |
Anthony Fisher |
“Thingification in Trope Theory” |
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29th November |
Matt Farr |
“Explaining Temporal Qualia” |
Easter 2017 Termcard
27 April 2017 |
Joe Dewhurst (Edinburgh) |
Folk Psychology and the Bayesian Brain |
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4 May 2017 |
Sarah Sawyer (Sussex) |
Concepts, Conceptions, and Self-Knowledge |
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11 May 2017 |
Juliet Griffin (Cambridge Psychiatry) |
Does the Free Energy Principle Have a Motivation Problem? |
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18 May 2017 |
Rachel Robertson (Cambridge) |
Kant's Theory of Embodiment |
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25 May 2017 |
Annika Boeddeling (Cambridge) |
Towards a Non-Metaphysical Explanatory Strategy for Quietists |
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1 June 2017 |
Katie Robertson (Cambridge) |
TBC |
Lent 2017 Termcard
19 January 2017 |
Adaum Caulton (Oxford) |
In what sense is quantum field theory a theory of fields? |
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26 January 2017 |
Sean Fleming (Cambridge) |
How to Interpret Action-Sentences about States |
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2 February 2017 |
Ralph Weir (Cambridge) |
The Compresence Relation: A Challenge for Property Dualism |
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9 February 2017 |
Wes Wrigley (Cambridge) |
Sider's Ontologese Introduction Instructions |
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16 February 2017 |
Paul Fletcher (Cambridge) | Rethinking schizophrenia within a predictive coding framework" | ||||||||
23 February 2017 |
Verena Wagner (Konstanz) |
Glitterfree Fredom |
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2 March 2017 |
Hugh Mellor (Cambridge) |
Properties of Chance | ||||||||
9 March 2017 | Robin Le Poidevin |
Stereoscopy: some aesthetic - and ontological - issues |
Michaelmas 2016 Termcard
6 October 2016 |
John Broome (Oxford) |
Reason fundamentalism and what is wrong with it |
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13 October 2016 |
Natalja Deng |
Does temporal ontology exist? |
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20 October 2016 |
James Hutton |
Emotion as sensitivity to value: the implementation problem |
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27 October 2016 |
Raamy Majeed |
The Cognitive Impenetrability of Recalcitrant Emotions |
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3 November 2016 |
Tim Button | I Disappear | ||||||||
10 November 2016 |
Ori Beck |
Rethinking Naive Realism |
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17 November 2016 |
Jessica Leech (King's) |
Against logical essence | ||||||||
24 November 2016 | Luke Cash |
TBC |
Easter 2016 Termcard
21 April 2016 |
Henry Taylor |
Powerful Qualities and Pure Powers: What's the difference? |
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28 April 2016 |
Alexander Greenberg |
TBC |
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5 May 2016 |
Barry Maguire (UNC) |
There are No Reasons for Attitudes |
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12 May 2016 |
Sahanika Ratnayake |
Multiple Persons |
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19 May 2016 |
Carlo Rossi | TBC | ||||||||
26 May 2016 |
Wes Wrigley |
Sider's Ontologese Introduction Instructions |
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2 June 2016 |
Stephen Duxbury |
The Reduction of Modality to Essence | ||||||||
9 June 2016 | Dan Brigham |
No Nonsense |
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17 June 2016 |
Murali Ramachandran |
Knowledge-to-Fact Reasoning: Towards a Unified Solution to the Prediction Paradox* *Organised by Arif Ahmed, if you have any questions please email ama24. |
Lent 2016 Termcard
14 January 2016 |
Louise Hanson |
The Real Problem with Evolutionary Debunking Arguments |
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21 January 2016 |
Margot Strohminger (Antwerp) |
Perceptual Knowledge of Nonactual Possibilities* |
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28 January 2016 |
Christopher Mole (UBC) |
Beauty is Objective |
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4 February 2016 |
Max Hayward |
Practical Reason, Sympathy, and Reactive Attitudes |
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11 February 2016 |
Michael Blome-Tillman | TBC | ||||||||
18 February 2016 |
Hugh Mellor |
Growing Block Theories of Time |
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25 February 2016 |
Kyle Mitchell |
TBC | ||||||||
3 March 2016 | Simona Aimar (UCL) |
Disposition Ascriptions as Possibility Ascriptions |
*In conjunction with the New Directions in the Study of the Mind Project.
Michaelmas 2015 Termcard
8 October 2015 |
Bence Nanay |
Affective Considerations in Meta-metaphysics |
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15 October 2015 |
Huw Price |
The End of the World |
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22 October 2015 |
Philip Gerrans (Adelaide) |
A Processing Account of Emotion |
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29 October 2015 |
Alex Moran |
On the Thinking Parts Problem |
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5 November 2015 |
Tim Crane | The Significance of Behaviourism | ||||||||
12 November 2015 |
Rae Langton |
After Words: The Being in Time of Speech Acts |
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19 November 2015 |
Fiona Doherty |
The Ontology of Abstraction |
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26 November 2015 | Arif Ahmed |
TBC |
Easter 2015 Termcard
23 April 2015 |
Hugh Mellor |
Truthmaking vs Physicalism |
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30 April 2015 |
Natalja Deng |
Religion for Atheists |
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7 May 2015 |
Heather Dyke |
Invoking Evolutionary Explanations: Relief and other temporal experiences |
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14 May 2015 |
Toby Friend | Can parts cause their wholes? | ||||||||
21 May 2015 |
Carlo Rossi |
TBC | ||||||||
28 May 2015 |
Fredrik Nyseth |
Could the Source of Modality Be Contingent? |
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4 June 2015 |
Kyle Mitchell |
Rejecting 'Everything' |
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11 June 2015 |
Annika Boeddeling |
TBC |
Lent 2015 Termcard
15 January 2015 |
Piotr Szalek |
The Minimal Definition of Goodness and the Problem of Generalisation |
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22 January 2015 |
Alex Moran |
Dion's Foot and Aristotle's Hand: A New Solution to the Paradox of Decrease |
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29 January 2015 |
Gábor Betegh |
Colocation |
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5 February 2015 |
John Heil |
Causal Relations |
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12 February 2015 |
Jossi Berkovitz |
A New Interpretation of De Finetti's Theory of Subjective Probability |
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19 February 2015 |
Adam Bales |
Decision-theoretic impossibility proofs: an impossibility proof |
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26 February 2015 |
Luz Seiberth |
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5 March 2015 |
Alison Fernandes |
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Michaelmas 2014 Termcard
9 October 2014 |
Daniel Brigham |
Russell’s Multiple-Relation Theory of Judgement and its Critics |
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16 October 2014 |
Cheryl Misak |
Ramsey and Wittgenstein on Generalizations and Hypotheses, circa 1929 |
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23 October 2014 |
Alexis Papazoglou |
Naturalism and the Quest for Unity |
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30 October 2014 |
Mat Simpson |
Dispositions and General Beliefs |
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6 November 2014 |
Ali Boyle |
The Cognitive Significance of Mirror Self-Recognition |
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13 November 2014 |
Tuomas Tahko |
Fundamentality and Ontological Well-foundedness |
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20 November 2014 |
Fiona Doherty |
How Frege would object to the Neo-Logicist |
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27 November 2014 |
Adrian Boutel |
Downward Causation Without Tears |
Easter 2014 Termcard
30 April 2014 |
Daniel Gregory (ANU) - Inner Speech: Phenomenology, Pragmatics and Imagination |
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7 May 2014 |
Ali Boyle - Self-awareness |
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14 May 2014 |
Jonathan Birch - Punishment, Coordination and the Psychology of Norms |
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20 May 2014 |
Georgie Statham - Causal claims in organic chemistry |
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28 May 2014 |
Stephen Mumford (Nottingham) - Understanding Causation by Way of Failure |
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4 June 2014 |
Lukas Skiba - Modal Fictionalism |
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11 June 2014 |
Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck) |
Lent 2014 Termcard
22 January 2014 |
David Etlin (Munich) |
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29 January 2014 |
TBC |
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5 February 2014 |
Irena Cronin (UCLA) |
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12 February 2014 |
Rae Langton |
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19 February 2014 |
TBC |
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26 February 2014 |
Lucy Campbell |
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5 March 2014 |
Paulina Sliwa |
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12 March 2014 |
Alison Fernandes (Columbia) |
16 October 2013 |
Karen Crowther - Effective spacetime |
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23 October 2013 |
Luke Fenton-Glynn (UCL) - Ceteris Paribus Laws and Minutis Rectis Laws |
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30 October 2013 |
Tim Button - Truth |
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6 November 2013 |
Ella Whiteley - Human nature, dispositions, and gender |
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13 November 2013 |
Dan Brigham - Facts |
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20 November 2013 |
Shyane Siriwardena - Agency Theory of Causation |
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27 November 2013 |
Fiona Doherty - Abstraction Principles |
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4 December 2013 |
Lucy Campbell - Practical Knowledge |
1 May 2013 |
Jeremy Butterfield - Renormalization for Philosophers |
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8 May 2013 |
Christopher Clarke - On the Alleged Indispensability of Social, Psychological and Biological Explanations |
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15 May 2013 |
John Williams (Singapore) - Eliminativism, Dialetheism and Moore’s Paradox |
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22 May 2013 |
Kevin Mulligan (Geneva) - Explanation in Metaphysics |
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29 May 2013 |
Richard Teague - TBA |
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5 June 2013 |
Simon Evnine (Miami) - TBA |
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12 June 2013 |
Kyle Mitchell - TBA |
23 January 2013 |
Adam Caulton - Theoretical Analyticity, Revisited |
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30 January 2013 |
Will Davies - Colour Constancy and Discrimination |
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6 February 2013 |
Emily Thomas - Why Not to Reject Cartesian Dualism |
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13 February 2013 |
Carl Rossi - Defining Endurance |
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20 February 2013 |
Brian Hedden (Oxford) - Time-Slice Rationality |
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27 February 2013 |
Karen Crowther - Novelty and Autonomy as Alternatives to, or Bases for, a Conception of Emergence in Physics |
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6 March 2013 |
Mat Simpson - Wilfrid Sellars and Ostrich Nominalism |
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13 March 2013 |
Lukas Skiba - On Indirect Sense and Reference |
10 October 2012 |
Tim Crane - Things that don't exist |
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17 October 2012 |
Tamer Nawar - Truth and Epistemic Value |
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24 October 2012 |
James Cargile (Virginia) - Identity |
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31 October 2012 |
Alexander Greenberg - Maps by which we steer |
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7 November 2012 |
Daniel Brigham - Propositional Attitudes and Attitudes to Propositions |
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14 November 2012 |
John Maier - The Metaphysics of Ignorance |
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21 November 2012 |
Brian Pitts - How Almost Everything in Space-time Theory is Illuminated by Simple Particle Physics: The Neglected Case of Massive Scalar Gravity |
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28 November 2012 |
Shyane Siriwardena - The Suppositional Theory and Morgenbesser Counterfactuals |
25 April 2012 |
Prof. John Marenbon |
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2 May 2012 |
Prof. Richard Holton |
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9 May 2012 |
Kyle Mitchell |
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16 May 2012 |
Prof. Justin Broackes |
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30 May 2012 |
Prof. Hugh Mellor |
16 January 2012 |
Jeremy Butterfield |
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23 January 2012 |
Robert Northcott |
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30 January 2012 |
Yohan Joo |
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6 February 2012 |
Allan Hazlett |
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13 February 2012 |
Bence Nanay |
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20 February 2012 |
Shyane Siriwardena |
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27 February 2012 |
Daniel Brigham |
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5 March 2012 |
Max Hummel |
12 October 2011 |
Alexis Papazoglou |
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19 October 2011 |
Jody Azzouni |
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26 October 2011 |
Peter Smith |
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2 November 2011 |
Fraser MacBride |
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9 November 2011 |
Alexander Greenberg |
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16 November 2011 |
Shyane Siriwardena |
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23 November 2011 |
Jonathan Birch |
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30 November 2011 |
Tamar Nawar |
13 October 2010 |
Fraser MacBride |
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20 October 2010 |
Nathan Wildman |
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27 October 2010 |
Phyllis Illari |
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3 November 2010 |
Nick Jones |
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10 November 2010 |
Duen-Min Deng |
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17 November 2010 |
Markku Keinänen |
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24 November 2010 |
Josh Parsons |
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1 December 2010 |
Sam Coleman |
20 Jan 2010 |
Luca Incurvati - Iterative Conception and Metaphysical Dependence |
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27 Jan 2010 |
Fraser MacBride - Relations and Truth-Making |
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10 Feb 2010 |
Gemma Murray - Is Quantum Mechanics about Quantum Information? |
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17 Feb 2010 |
Duen-Min Deng - Wiggins' Individuative Essentialism |
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24 Feb 2010 |
Nathan Wildman - Hume's Dictum and Non-mereological composition: Lewis against Armstrong's States of Affairs |
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3 March 2010 |
Emily Thomas - Mereological nihilism in a gunky world |
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10 March 2010 |
Hugh Mellor - Successful Semantics |
28 April 2010 |
Daniel Nolan - She's Really Happening |
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5 May 2010 |
John Wright - Explaining the Novel Predictive Success of Science Without Realism or Truth |
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13 May 2010 |
Helen Beebee - What's So Scientific About Scientific Essentialism? |
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2 June 2010 |
Gemma Murray - Chance in Empirical Theories |
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9 June 2010 |
Adam Caulton - Weak Discernibility, But Of What? |