The Serious Metaphysics Group

Adham El Shazly (Cambridge) 

18 May

Ina Jäntgen (Cambridge) 

"How to measure effect sizes for rational decision-making"

 Andreas Hüttemann (Cologne)

“Modal aspects of laws and models”

01 June

“Counterfactual decision theory”

2 February

TBC

Alex Fisher (Cambridge)

16 February

[CANCELLED - to be rescheduled]

Nadine Elzein (Warwick)

Ian Rumfitt (Oxford) 

Joaquim Giannotti (Birmingham)

Alex Moran (Oxford)

20 October

Aiden Woodcock (Cambridge) 

tbc

Wolfgang Schwarz (Edinburgh)

10 November

Anna Mahtani (LSE)

05 May (week 1)

Thomas Hofweber (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

Inescapable Concepts

19 May (week 3)

Boris Kment (Princeton)

Ground and paradox

02 June (week 5)

Dee Payton (Rutgers)

The ways we are

16 June (week 7)

Annina Loets (Humboldt Berlin)

Simple and Strong? Plenitude Costed

27 January (week 1)

Jessica Leech (KCL)

Relative necessity redefended

3 February (week 2)

Wouter Cohen (Cambridge)

Frege on existence

10 February (week 3)

Thomas Schindler (Bristol)

Deflationary theories of properties and their ontology

17 February (week 4)

Cancelled

Cancelled

24 February (week 5)

Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez (Cambridge)

Reference, instantiation, and the ontology of fictional entities

Identity and relative fundamentality

10 March (week 7)

 Problems with the merely possible: actualism, naturalism and unmanifested dispositions

17 March  (week 8)

14 October (week 1)

No Meeting

21 October (week 2)

Owen Griffiths (Cambridge)

The collapse of logical pluralism

28 October (week 3)

Mat Simpson (Cambridge)

Universal generalisations and belief causation

4 November (week 4)

Benjamin Marschall (Cambridge) 

Quine on ontology and the primacy of truth

11 November (week 5)

Tim Button (UCL)

Metaphysicians hate this one simple trick for avoiding universals, but they can't stop you using it!

Essence, potentiality, and modality

25 November (week 7)

 Truth in interactive fiction 

January 22nd (week 1)

Lukas Skiba (Hamburg)

'From Higher-Order Modal Logic to Necessitism?’

January 29th (week 2)

Emanuel Viebahn (HU Berlin)

'Insincerity in Linguistic and Pictorial Communication’

February 5th (week 3)

Matt Farr (Cambridge)

'Do we need to explain initial conditions?’

February 12th (week 4)

Alexander Roberts (Cambridge)

‘Theories of Necessity'

February 19th (week 5)

James Cargile (Virginia)

‘Russell’s Paradox’

CANCELLED

Ben Brast-Mckie (Oxford)

‘Identity and Aboutness’

March 4th (week 7)

CANCELLED

Annina Loets (Oxford)

'Aspect Theories of Qualification’

March 11th (week 8)

CANCELLED

Owen Griffiths (Cambridge)

'The Collapse of Logical Pluralism’

October 16th (week 1)

Hugh Mellor (Cambridge)

The True Causes and Effects

October 23rd (week 2)

Bryan Roberts (LSE)

Causation when time unfolds in the wrong direction

October 30th (week 3)

Hasok Chang (Cambridge)

The Pragmatic Meaning of Reality [Time and room change: 3-4:30pm, Postgraduate Common Room]

November 6th (week 4)

Roland Krause (HU Berlin)

Wittgenstein's verification of verificationionism

November 13th (week 5)

Kenny Walden (Dartmouth)

Tom McClelland (Cambridge)

Attention & Attendabilia: An Affordance Theory of Salience

November 27th (week 7)

CANCELLED

December 4th (week 8)

CANCELLED

1st May

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Professor University of Oxford)

On a certain conception of metaphysical necessity
Abstract

8th May

Andrew Sepielli
(Assoc. Professor University of Toronto)

On the Superficiality of Normative Ethics
Abstract

15th May

Peter van Inwagen
(Professor Notre Dame)

Two Problems for a Truth-centered Ontology
Abstract

22nd May

Matthew Kramer
(Professor Cambridge University)

On the Mind-Independence of Legal Norms
Abstract

29th May

Aaron Hanlon (Associate Professor at Colby College)

Literary Studies Needs an Epistemology, and Philosophy Can Help
Abstract

Sahanika Ratnayake (Cambridge PhD student)

How Should We Understand 'The Shoulds'?: Contemporary Psychotherapy and Normative
Judgements
Abstract

12th June

Wesley Wrigley
(PhD student at Cambridge)

Is the concept natural number vague?
Abstract

23rd January

Hugh Mellor (Cambridge) and
Prof. Richard Bradley (London School of Economics)

Conditionals: Truth and Safety
Abstract

30th January

David Oderberg
(Professor
Reading University)

Evil, Negative Being, and Truthmakers
Abstract

6th February

Li Li Tan
(PhD student
Cambridge)

On visual categorisation and recognition
Abstract

13th February

Raamy Majeed
(Lecturer
Auckland University)

The Indeterminacy of Unconscious Belief
Abstract

20th February

Benjamin Marschall
(PhD student
Cambridge)

Carnap’s Internal Platonism
Abstract

Jeroen Smid (rescheduled)
(Post-doc
Manchester University)

Aggregates and their role in the problem of coincident objects
Abstract

6th March

Nick Treanor
(Chancellor's fellow
University of Edinburgh)

The (Serious) Metaphysics of Epistemic Normativity
Abstract

13th March

Yael Loewenstein
(Research Fellow
Cambridge)

Heim Sequences and Why Most Unqualified 'Would'-Counterfactuals are Not True
Abstract

10th October

Penelope Mackie (Associate Professor at The University of Nottingham)

Essentialism and context-dependence: a New Argument against Lewisian Counterpart Theory
Abstract

17th October

Jonathan Schaffer (Distinguished Professor at Rutgers University)

Heavy Ontology, Light Ideology
Abstract

24th October

Owen Griffiths and Arif Ahmed (Cambridge University)

Inner and outer harmony
Abstract

31st October

(note: talk cancelled)

Jeroen Smid (Post-doc at Manchester University)

Aggregates and their role in the problem of coincident objects
Abstract

7th November

Rachel Robertson (PhD student at Cambridge University)

Embodied Agency in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science
Abstract

Nakul Krishna (Cambridge University)

Scepticism, Pessimism, Mitigation: The Amoralist in the 1950s
Abstract

21st November

Richard Gaskin (Professor at University of Liverpool)

Reference and Propositions
Abstract

28th November

Alex Jackson (Associate Professor from Boise State University)

Vagueness, Relativism, and Realism
Abstract

25th April

2nd May

Ali Boyle

Animalism, Dicephalus Twinning, and Biological Individuation

9th May

Nora Heizelmann

Weakness of Will as a Cognitive Bias

16th May

Kyle Mitchell

From Pragmatism to Easy Ontology—and Back Again

23rd May

30th May

Kasia Jaszczolt

Time: From Semantics to Metaphysics

6th June

Alastair Wilson

Emergent Contingency

13th June

Rachel Fraser

An Ontology of Narrative Belief

24th January

Tim Button

A Dogma of Metaphysics

31st January

Jack Lyons

Toward a solution to the generality problem for reliabilism

7th February

Dorothy Edgington

Indeterminacy and Conditionals

14th February

Bart Streumer

Reduction without Supervenience

21st February

Cavendish's Mereology

28th February

Nakul Krishna

*Cancelled*

7th March

Ali Boyle

*Cancelled*

14th March

Brian Pitts

*Cancelled*

11th October

Alexander Bird

“Fundamental Powers, Evolved Powers, and Mental Powers”

18th October

Emanuel Viebahn

“Deceptive presuppositions”

25th October

John Marenbon

“Avicenna and Duns Scotus on Universals”

1st November

Alex Moran

"Material Things, Russell's Principle and 'Grounding-Qua'"

8th November

“Chances and Conditionals”

15th November

Christian List

“Levels: descriptive, explanatory, and ontological”

22nd November

Anthony Fisher

“Thingification in Trope Theory”

29th November

Matt Farr

“Explaining Temporal Qualia”

27 April 2017

Joe Dewhurst (Edinburgh)

Folk Psychology and the Bayesian Brain

4 May 2017

Sarah Sawyer (Sussex)

Concepts, Conceptions, and Self-Knowledge

11 May 2017

Juliet Griffin (Cambridge Psychiatry)

Does the Free Energy Principle Have a Motivation Problem?

18 May 2017

Rachel Robertson (Cambridge)

Kant's Theory of Embodiment

25 May 2017

Towards a Non-Metaphysical Explanatory Strategy for Quietists

1 June 2017

Katie Robertson (Cambridge)

TBC

19 January 2017

Adaum Caulton (Oxford)

In what sense is quantum field theory a theory of fields?

26 January 2017

Sean Fleming (Cambridge)

How to Interpret Action-Sentences about States

2 February 2017

Ralph Weir (Cambridge)

The Compresence Relation: A Challenge for Property Dualism

9 February 2017

Wes Wrigley (Cambridge)

Sider's Ontologese Introduction Instructions

16 February 2017

23 February 2017

Glitterfree Fredom

2 March 2017

Hugh Mellor (Cambridge)

Stereoscopy: some aesthetic - and ontological - issues

6 October 2016

John Broome (Oxford)

Reason fundamentalism and what is wrong with it

13 October 2016

Natalja Deng

Does temporal ontology exist?

20 October 2016

James Hutton

Emotion as sensitivity to value: the implementation problem

27 October 2016

Raamy Majeed

The Cognitive Impenetrability of Recalcitrant Emotions

3 November 2016

10 November 2016

Rethinking Naive Realism

17 November 2016

Jessica Leech (King's)

TBC

21 April 2016

Henry Taylor

Powerful Qualities and Pure Powers: What's the difference?

28 April 2016

Alexander Greenberg

TBC

5 May 2016

Barry Maguire (UNC)

There are No Reasons for Attitudes

12 May 2016

Sahanika Ratnayake

Multiple Persons

19 May 2016

26 May 2016

Sider's Ontologese Introduction Instructions

2 June 2016

Stephen Duxbury

No Nonsense

17 June 2016
New Time:
12.00 - 1.30 p.m.

Knowledge-to-Fact Reasoning: Towards a Unified Solution to the Prediction Paradox*

*Organised by Arif Ahmed, if you have any questions please email ama24.

14 January 2016

Louise Hanson

The Real Problem with Evolutionary Debunking Arguments

21 January 2016

Margot Strohminger (Antwerp)

Perceptual Knowledge of Nonactual Possibilities*

28 January 2016

Christopher Mole (UBC)

Beauty is Objective

4 February 2016

Max Hayward

Practical Reason, Sympathy, and Reactive Attitudes

11 February 2016

18 February 2016

Growing Block Theories of Time

25 February 2016

Kyle Mitchell

Disposition Ascriptions as Possibility Ascriptions

8 October 2015

Bence Nanay

Affective Considerations in Meta-metaphysics

15 October 2015

Huw Price

The End of the World

22 October 2015

Philip Gerrans (Adelaide)

A Processing Account of Emotion

29 October 2015

Alex Moran

On the Thinking Parts Problem

5 November 2015

12 November 2015

After Words: The Being in Time of Speech Acts

19 November 2015

Fiona Doherty

The Ontology of Abstraction

TBC

23 April 2015

Hugh Mellor

Truthmaking vs Physicalism

30 April 2015

Natalja Deng

Religion for Atheists

7 May 2015

Heather Dyke

Invoking Evolutionary Explanations: Relief and other temporal experiences

14 May 2015

21 May 2015

Carlo Rossi

28 May 2015

Could the Source of Modality Be Contingent?

4 June 2015

Kyle Mitchell

Rejecting 'Everything'

11 June 2015

Annika Boeddeling

TBC

15 January 2015

Piotr Szalek

The Minimal Definition of Goodness and the Problem of Generalisation

22 January 2015

Alex Moran

Dion's Foot and Aristotle's Hand: A New Solution to the Paradox of Decrease

29 January 2015

Gábor Betegh

Colocation

5 February 2015
 

John Heil

Causal Relations

12 February 2015

Jossi Berkovitz

A New Interpretation of De Finetti's Theory of Subjective Probability

19 February 2015

Adam Bales

Decision-theoretic impossibility proofs: an impossibility proof

26 February 2015

Luz Seiberth

5 March 2015

Alison Fernandes

9 October 2014

 Daniel Brigham

Russell’s Multiple-Relation Theory of Judgement and its Critics

16 October 2014

 Cheryl Misak

Ramsey and Wittgenstein on Generalizations and Hypotheses, circa 1929

23 October 2014

 Alexis Papazoglou

Naturalism and the Quest for Unity

30 October 2014
 

 Mat Simpson

Dispositions and General Beliefs

6 November 2014

 Ali Boyle

The Cognitive Significance of Mirror Self-Recognition

13 November 2014

 Tuomas Tahko

Fundamentality and Ontological Well-foundedness

20 November 2014

 Fiona Doherty

How Frege would object to the Neo-Logicist

27 November 2014

 Adrian Boutel

Downward Causation Without Tears

30 April 2014

Daniel Gregory (ANU) - Inner Speech: Phenomenology, Pragmatics and Imagination

7 May 2014

Ali Boyle - Self-awareness

14 May 2014

Jonathan Birch - Punishment, Coordination and the Psychology of Norms

20 May 2014
(Note: change of date)

Georgie Statham - Causal claims in organic chemistry

28 May 2014

Stephen Mumford (Nottingham) - Understanding Causation by Way of Failure

4 June 2014

Lukas Skiba - Modal Fictionalism

11 June 2014

Jennifer Hornsby (Birkbeck)

22 January 2014

David Etlin (Munich)

29 January 2014

TBC

5 February 2014

Irena Cronin (UCLA)

12 February 2014

Rae Langton

19 February 2014

TBC

26 February 2014

Lucy Campbell

5 March 2014

Paulina Sliwa

12 March 2014

Alison Fernandes (Columbia)

16 October 2013

Karen Crowther - Effective spacetime

23 October 2013

Luke Fenton-Glynn (UCL) - Ceteris Paribus Laws and Minutis Rectis Laws

30 October 2013

Tim Button - Truth

6 November 2013

Ella Whiteley - Human nature, dispositions, and gender

13 November 2013

Dan Brigham - Facts

20 November 2013

Shyane Siriwardena - Agency Theory of Causation

27 November 2013

Fiona Doherty - Abstraction Principles

4 December 2013

Lucy Campbell - Practical Knowledge

1 May 2013

Jeremy Butterfield - Renormalization for Philosophers

8 May 2013

Christopher Clarke - On the Alleged Indispensability of Social, Psychological and Biological Explanations

15 May 2013

John Williams (Singapore) - Eliminativism, Dialetheism and Moore’s Paradox

22 May 2013

Kevin Mulligan (Geneva) - Explanation in Metaphysics

29 May 2013

Richard Teague - TBA

5 June 2013

Simon Evnine (Miami) - TBA

12 June 2013

Kyle Mitchell - TBA

23 January 2013

Adam Caulton - Theoretical Analyticity, Revisited

30 January 2013

Will Davies - Colour Constancy and Discrimination

6 February 2013

Emily Thomas - Why Not to Reject Cartesian Dualism

13 February 2013

Carl Rossi - Defining Endurance

20 February 2013

Brian Hedden (Oxford) - Time-Slice Rationality

27 February 2013

Karen Crowther - Novelty and Autonomy as Alternatives to, or Bases for, a Conception of Emergence in Physics

6 March 2013

Mat Simpson - Wilfrid Sellars and Ostrich Nominalism

13 March 2013

Lukas Skiba - On Indirect Sense and Reference

10 October 2012

Tim Crane - Things that don't exist

17 October 2012

Tamer Nawar - Truth and Epistemic Value

24 October 2012

James Cargile (Virginia) - Identity

31 October 2012

Alexander Greenberg - Maps by which we steer

7 November 2012

Daniel Brigham - Propositional Attitudes and Attitudes to Propositions

14 November 2012

John Maier - The Metaphysics of Ignorance

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

28 November 2012

Shyane Siriwardena - The Suppositional Theory and Morgenbesser Counterfactuals

25 April 2012

Prof. John Marenbon

2 May 2012

Prof. Richard Holton

9 May 2012

Kyle Mitchell

16 May 2012

Prof. Justin Broackes

30 May 2012

Prof. Hugh Mellor

16 January 2012

Jeremy Butterfield

23 January 2012

Robert Northcott

30 January 2012

Yohan Joo

6 February 2012

Allan Hazlett

13 February 2012

Bence Nanay

20 February 2012

Shyane Siriwardena

27 February 2012

Daniel Brigham

5 March 2012

Max Hummel

12 October 2011

Alexis Papazoglou

19 October 2011

Jody Azzouni

26 October 2011

Peter Smith

2 November 2011

Fraser MacBride

9 November 2011

Alexander Greenberg

16 November 2011

Shyane Siriwardena

23 November 2011

Jonathan Birch

30 November 2011

Tamar Nawar

13 October 2010

Fraser MacBride

20 October 2010

Nathan Wildman

27 October 2010

Phyllis Illari

3 November 2010

Nick Jones

10 November 2010

Duen-Min Deng

17 November 2010

Markku Keinänen

24 November 2010

Josh Parsons

1 December 2010

Sam Coleman

20 Jan 2010

Luca Incurvati - Iterative Conception and Metaphysical Dependence

27 Jan 2010

Fraser MacBride - Relations and Truth-Making

10 Feb 2010

Gemma Murray - Is Quantum Mechanics about Quantum Information?

17 Feb 2010

Duen-Min Deng - Wiggins' Individuative Essentialism

24 Feb 2010

Nathan Wildman - Hume's Dictum and Non-mereological composition: Lewis against Armstrong's States of Affairs

3 March 2010

Emily Thomas - Mereological nihilism in a gunky world

10 March 2010

Hugh Mellor - Successful Semantics

28 April 2010

Daniel Nolan - She's Really Happening

5 May 2010

John Wright - Explaining the Novel Predictive Success of Science Without Realism or Truth

13 May 2010
(THURSDAY)

Helen Beebee - What's So Scientific About Scientific Essentialism?

2 June 2010

Gemma Murray - Chance in Empirical Theories

9 June 2010

Adam Caulton - Weak Discernibility, But Of What?