“Properties, Modalities, and States of Affairs”
University of Constance January 24 and 25, 2003
David Armstrong is one of the most important and influential philosophers in the field of analytic ontology and metaphysics. In several books and nearly fifty major papers, he has developed a rich and comprehensive view on the world of being. His work covers many of the main issues in ontology, such as properties, states of affairs, modalities, notions of particularity, powers, dispositions, numbers, causality, and laws. The aim of this workshop is to explore some of these issues, concentrating on Armstrong's more recent interests.
Programme
For abstracts on the lectures click on their titles below.
Friday, January 24
| 9.00–10.30 | DAVID ARMSTRONG, Glebe (Australia): “Four disputes about properties” |
| 10.30–11.00 | COFFEE BREAK |
| 11.00–11.50 | DANIEL VON WACHTER, Leipzig: (Comments on Armstrong's talk) MICHAEL SCHMITZ, Constance: “Having and instantiating properties” (Comments on Armstrong’s talk) |
| 11.50–12.30 | DISCUSSION |
| 12.30–14.30 | LUNCH BREAK |
| 14.30–15.40 | BARRY SMITH, Leipzig/Buffalo: “Against Fantology: The case of properties” |
| 15.40–16.00 | COFFEE BREAK |
| 16.00–17.00 | FRANK SIEBELT, Frankfurt/M: “Conflicting intuitions on properties” |
| 17.00–18.00 | KARL-GEORG NIEBERGALL, Munich: “Some versions of nominalism and realism/platonism” |
Saturday, January 25
| 9.30–10.30 | FRANCESCO ORILIA, Macerata (Italy): “Two dogmas of ontology” |
| 10.30–11.00 | COFFEE BREAK |
| 11.00–12.00 | JOHANNES HÜBNER, Munich: “Particulars, universals, and states of affairs” |
| 12.00–13.00 | MANFRED KUPFFER, Constance: “Free lunch facts” |
The workshop is one of many activities of the research group “Logic in Philosophy”, sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. It is organized, on behalf of the research group, by Holger Sturm. It is free and open to the public, from Constance or elsewhere.
The day before the workshop David Armstrong will give another talk at Constance – title: “What is Consciousness”.
“Mental and Physical Reality”: Discussions with Galen Strawson
University of Constance October 24th and 25th, 2002
How do minds, especially conscious minds, relate to bodies, conceptually, causally, and otherwise? The debate about this question is as stormy as ever. The workshop is loosely arranged around the arguments of one of the leading figures from that debate, Galen Strawson.
Galen Strawson was a Fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, and is now Professor of Philosophy at the University of Reading. He is the author of numerous articles and of the monographs Freedom and Belief (Oxford U.P. 1986), The Secret Connexion (Oxford U.P. 1989), and, particularly pertinent to our workshop, Mental Reality (MIT Press 1995).
The workshop starts with a lecture by Galen Strawson on Thursday night (for an extended version of that talk click on the lecture title below). It continues on Friday with brief presentations from the other participants; each presentation refers to thoughts from Strawson's work, though not always to such thoughts alone, and is followed by a discussion.
Programme
Thursday, October 24, 2002
18.15–20.00: Galen Strawson “Real Materialism”
Friday, October 25, 2002
9.00–10.00: Michael Schmitz “Showing the Mental to Be (Really) Physical: Is It Possible? Is It Necessary?”
10.30–11.30: Manfred Kupffer “Conceivability and the A Priori”
11.30–12.30: Bernhard Thöle “How Stable Is Real Materialism?”
14.30–15.30: Holger Sturm “Is there anything special about real materialism?”
16.00–17.00: Christoph Fehige “Desires as Affects: Engineering Problems”
17.00–18.00: Neil Roughley “Wanting and Affect: Foundational Problems”
The workshop is conducted in English. The workshop is one of many activities of the research group “Logic in Philosophy”, sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The workshop is organized, on behalf of the research group, by Christoph Fehige and Michael Schmitz.
“Possibilities, Context and Belief” – Zur Philosophie von Robert Stalnaker
University of Constance, April 18-20, 2002
Programme
Donnerstag, 18. 4. 2002
18.00 ROBERT STALNAKER: What is it like to be a zombie?
Freitag, 19. 4. 2002
10.00 ERÖFFNUNG
10.15 WOLFGANG SPOHN: In favor of a dispositional account of content as opposed to causal accounts
11.15 Kaffeepause
11.30 FRANK HOFMANN: The metasemantic interpretation of twodimensional semantics and the apriori
12.30 Mittagspause
14.30 ARTHUR MERIN: Reference and evidence
15.30 Kaffeepause
15.45: ARNIM VON STECHOW: The monstrous first person
16.45 Kaffeepause
17.00 EDE ZIMMERMANN: Proper and improper names
Samstag, 20. 4. 2002
9.30: HANS KAMP: Context representation and the knowledge and use of language
10.30 Kaffeepause
10.45: MANFRED KUPFFER: Conceivability
11.45 Kaffeepause
12.00: MARTINE NIDA-RÜMELIN: Phenomenal concepts and phenomenal properties. An argument for dualism
13.00 Ende
Belief States: On the Structur of Doxastic Alternatives
University of Constance 16. February 2001
Programme
| 10:00 | Hans Kamp “Einfach und mehrfach verankerte Repräsentationen: Denken, Wiedererkennen und Wissen, wer jemand ist” Background Reading: H. Kamp: “Prolegomena to a Structural Theory of Belief and Other Attitudes”. In: Anderson/Owen: Propositional Attitudes: The Role of Content in Logic, Language, and Mind. CSLI : Stanford, 1990 |
| 11:00 | Paul Dekker “Who is having an individual concept here?” Background Reading: Coreference and Representationalism, Grounding Dynamic Semantics |
| 14:00 | Ede Zimmermann “Against Finegrainedness” Background Reading: Zimmermann, Thomas E.: “Remarks on the Epistemic Rôle of Discourse Referents”. In: L. Moss, J. Ginzburg, M. d. Rijke (eds.), Logic, Language, and Computation. Vol. 2. Stanford 1999, 346–368. |
| 15:00 | Wolfgang Spohn “Why objects must be part of doxastic alternatives (besides a world, a subject, and a time)” Background Reading: W. Spohn (1997), “The Intentional versus the Propositional Conception of the Objects of Belief”, in: L. Villegas, M. Rivas Monroy, C. Martinez (Hg.), Proceedings of the Congress on Truth, Logic, and Representation of the World in Santiago de Compostela 1996, Santiago de Compostela, pp. 266–286. |
| 16:30 | Manfred Kupffer “Narrow content is qualitative” Background Reading: David Lewis “New Work for a Theory of Universals”. In: Lewis, D.: Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology. Cambridge: CUP. 1999, pp. 8–55. The talk wil focus on the notion of a qualitative duplicate p. 27, and the discussion of content on pp. 49–55. |
| 17:30 | Henk Zeevat “Pragmatic and Pragmatist Anchoring” Background Reading: H. Zeevat: “Demonstratives in Discourse”. In Journal of Semantics |
Mini-Workshop “Logic in Philosophy”
University of Constance 25. Oktober 1999
Programme
13.30
Hannes Leitgeb (Salzburg): Semantical Paradoxes and the Indeterminacy of Truth
15.00
Uwe Lück (München): Exactly which Orders of Periods Crystallize to Continua of Time Points?
16.30
Leon Horsten (Löwen): Platonistic Formalism
Proof-Theoretic Semantics
University of Tübingen January 17–19, 1999
Speakers:
- P. Contu (University of Tübingen): The justification of the logical laws revisited
- K. Dosen (University of Toulouse): Models of proofs
- M. Dummett (Oxford University): [Reply to Warren Goldfarb]
- R. Dyckhoff (University of St. Andrews): Permutation-free sequent calculi
- L. Hallnäs (Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg): Defining the semantics
- J. Hudelmaier (University of Tübingen): A semantical sequent calculus for intuitionistic logic
- R. Kahle (University of Tübingen): A proof theoretic view of intensionality
- P. Martin-Löf (University of Stockholm): The distinction between sense and reference in constructive semantics
- G. Mints (Stanford University): Partial proofs and cut introduction
- D. Prawitz (University of Stockholm): [TBA]
- W. Tait (University of Chicago): Beyond the axioms: the question of objectivity in mathematics
- M. Rathjen (University of Leeds): The Role of Ordinals in Proof Theory
- P. Schroeder-Heister (University of Tübingen): Frege’s sequent calculus
- R. Stärk (University of Fribourg): Proof theoretic semantics of logic programs
- G. Sundholm (University of Leiden): Inference versus Consequence: The semantic value of Natural deduction derivations
- G. Usberti (University of Siena): Towards a semantics based on the notion of justification