Weekly Meeting – Time and Location Change

Hi Philosophers! 

     We will have our weekly meeting on Thursday, April 28, from 4:30 to 6:00 in philosophy department library. Graduate student Ted Shear will be presenting on a paper he is working on with Professor Molyneux entitled “Identity Crisis: Logical Considerations on the Hard Problem of Consciousness”.

Here is a poster related to their work that they recently presented at a conference: http://www.tedshear.com/documents/identifications_poster.pdf 

Hope to see you there! 

Weekly Meeting

We will have our weekly meeting on Thursday, March 21, at 7 pm in Wellman 230. Tyrus Fisher will be presenting this week on “Are Indicative Conditionals Just Material Conditionals?”. Here below is the abstract for the speech.

“Philosophers care about which inference patterns are reliable and why. Indicative conditionals—sentences of the form ‘if P, then Q’—figure crucially in many of the in- ference patterns we employ. Whether such patterns are reliable is largely a function of the meaning of the indicative conditional. But theories of meaning for conditionals engender deep puzzles. My talk will be about one of these puzzles. Briefly, one way to motivate the puzzle is as follows. Indicative conditionals with false antecedents often seem false—e.g., the conditional ‘if the moon is made of cheese, then I will win the presidential election’ sounds awful. Nevertheless, if the material-conditional analysis is correct, then such conditionals must be true. That in mind, our puzzle arises when we take stock of the arguments in favor of the material-conditional analysis: There are a number of simple and forceful arguments which seem to show that our English indicative conditional must have the truth conditions of the material conditional; but, intuitively, it seems it cannot.”

Hope to see you there! 

Weekly Meeting

We will have our weekly meeting on Thursday, April 14, at 7 pm in Wellman 233. Hanti Lin will be giving a speech on The Problem of Induction and the Foundations of Scientific Inference. Here below is the Abstract.

Hope to see you there!

Abstract: If you have seen totally one thousand ravens in your life and all of them are black, are you justified in inferring (inductively) that all ravens are black? Well, if sample size one thousand is not enough to license the inductive inference, what about one million or one billion? The so-called inductive skeptic answers negatively: “no matter how large the sample size is, we are never justified in making an inductive inference, for we might see a white raven the next day.” So if the inductive skeptic is right, it seems that we should quit doing science, which sounds very bad. But how can we respond to the inductive skeptic? We will examine some possible responses.

Weekly Meeting

Hi Philosophers:

     We will have our weekly meeting on Thursday, April 7, at 7 pm in Wellman 233. Professor Ney will be giving a talk entitled “Are the Questions of Metaphysics More Fundamental than those of Science?”