A central Quinean criticism of ontologies that admit properties and relations has been that there are no ‘clear’ identity conditions for such things. This is certainly true if by ‘clear’ one means generally agreed-upon. And arguably, relations (and their instantiations) pose problems of their own. Simmias’ being taller than Socrates, Aristotle’s being a teacher of Alexander, and Abelard’s loving Héloïse are all relational states—crudely put, instantiations of relations. On a standard treatment, such states have relations as ‘constituents’. But if it is supposed that a relational state is analyzable as the respective relation’s holding between the respective relata, we seem to be led into a vicious regress. The topic of this workshop is how best to conceive of the metaphysics of relational states, as well as that of properties and relations themselves. Are relations even needed for a viable metaphysics of relational states? If they are, should we think of them as ‘biased’ or as ‘neutral’? And if they aren’t, what other ingredients would a viable metaphysics of relational states need to have? This workshop will be associated with two SNF-funded projects: ‘Connectives, Predicates, and Priority’ and ‘Functions, Relations, and Types’.
Program:
Sunday, October 18
14:00 Joop Leo (Zoom): Reconciling Positionalism and Antipositionalism
15:30 Philipp Blum: If There Are No Relations, then...
17:00 Scott Dixon (Zoom): Biased Relations
20:00 Dinner (hotel restaurant)
Monday, October 19
09:00 Maria Scarpati: Instrumentalism about Qualitativeness
10:30 Francesco Orilia (Zoom): Relational Order, Thematic Roles and the Sparse/Abundant Distinction
12:00 Lunch (hotel restaurant)
14:00 Jonas Waechter: Truthmakers for Identity Claims
15:30 Claudius Berger (Zoom): Superpositionalism
17:00 Elle Benjamin (Zoom): In Defense of Relational Realism
20:00 Dinner (hotel restaurant)
Tuesday, October 20
09:00 Robert Michels: Graded Properties
10:30 Fraser MacBride (Zoom): Converse Predicates and Second-Order Logic
12:00 Lunch (hotel restaurant)
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, some of the talks will be given by Zoom, and the discussions are planned to occur simultaneously in physical and in virtual space.
Registration is free, but please contact jan.plate@gmail.com to register. Please note also that no further registrations for 'in-person' attendance will be accepted. Zoom codes for online participation will be emailed to registered participants on Saturday, October 17.
CHANGED VENUE: Please note that, contrary to the information given on the poster for the workshop, the venue will be Sala Spazio 3, not Sala Klee.
UPDATE: Videos of the talks are available on the YouTube channel of Associazione Ratio USI, the student organization of the Master's program in analytic philosophy at the University of Lugano (Università della Svizzera italiana).