Schema/Schedule 

🇸🇪 Senaste versionen av schemat kan du hitta här. Notera att ändringar kan förekomma framöver! Schemat uppdaterades senast den 7e juni kl. 10. 

🇬🇧 The latest version of the schedule can be found here. Note that this is subject to change! The schedule was last updated June 7th at 10AM.

Abstracts/Abstracts

🇸🇪Alla abstracts finns tillgängliga i en nedladdningsbar PDF här. Senast uppdaterad 7:e juni kl. 10. 

Abstracts för de inbjudna talarnas föredrag hittar ni även nedan.

Notera att vi av miljöhänsyn inte kommer att tillhandahålla fysiskt utskrivna versioner av denna PDF. Vill man ha den i handen får man alltså skriva ut och ta med sig den själv. 

🇬🇧All abstracts are available in a downloadable PDF-booklet that you can find here. Last update June 7th at 10AM.

Abstracts for keynotes and section speakers can also be found below. 

Note that we will not be handing out printed versions of this booklet at the conference. If you want a physical copy of it with you, you'll need to print it in advance and bring it yourself. 

Keynote, practical philosophy: Julia Driver

Gratitude and Duty

There is a classic puzzle surrounding gratitude and ingratitude.

(1)   There is no duty of gratitude.

(2)   An action is blameworthy if and only if it is wrong (barring excuses).

(3)   Instances of ingratitude are blameworthy.

Each of these claims seems intuitively plausible, and yet they cannot all be true.  In this paper I present arguments against (2).  Support for (2) is provided by considerations of accountability: holding a person accountable takes what P. F. Strawson has termed a participant stance towards that person, which involves holding them to demands. I adopt the view that actions that are not wrong can nevertheless be blameworthy is virtue of the violation of relationship norms that are non-demanding.  Thus, I argue it is apt to hold people accountable even when they have not failed to meet a demand or obligation.

Keynote, theoretical philosophy: Sally Haslanger

The Materiality of the Social World: Ideology and Social Change

On my view of social practices, agents rely on cultural tools (what I call a “cultural technē”) to interpret their circumstances and coordinate in distribution things taken to have value. So social practices involve both social meanings and material resources. Within the critical theory tradition, ideology functions to distort our understanding of the social world to sustain oppression; on my view, an ideology is a flawed cultural technē that guides agency in practice. However, the material world is shaped by our agency to enhance coordination, even if it is on bad terms. So unjust systems are stabilized by both cultural and material conditions on agency, and efforts to promote social change should leverage both.

Theoria Lecture: Cristina Bicchieri 

Spontaneous inferences: variability and asymmetry in social inferences from norm information

Providing norm information can alter baseline social expectations, and thus behavior, with negative empirical and normative expectations being particularly sensitive to such information. This implies that negative empirical information can inadvertently reinforce undesirable behaviors by leading individuals to infer collective endorsement. The study also investigates the impact of behavioral attributes like observability and perceived social consequences on norm inferences. While observability does not significantly affect inferences, perceived social consequences influence inferences drawn from empirical information, but the effect is moderated by individual costs, such as guilt and monetary costs.

Epistemologi/Epistemology: Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (University of Helsinki)

Guidance: Reflections Beyond Epistemic Access

Are there norms that can always guide us? Many epistemologists think that the project of seeking perfectly guiding norms and theories fails because there are no epistemically transparent conditions, conditions such that we can always know whether or not they obtain. My aims in this talk are twofold. First, I probe the connection between guidance and epistemic access. Second, I discuss worries about guidance that are distinct from the standard access worries.

Estetik/Aesthetics: Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann (Uppsala University)

What Do We Owe Beautiful Objects? A Case for Aesthetic Obligation

This paper has two main aims. The first is to examine our normative relations to artworks and cultural artefacts where these are threatened by damage or destruction. The second aim is to develop an argument for the notion of aesthetic obligation by offering an alternative model of explanation of such relations. On the proposed approach, an aesthetic obligation is primarily directed towards the aesthetic collective or community which appreciates an artwork or artefact for the sake of its aesthetic value. Crucially, this aesthetic value, while primarily pertaining to the object, acquires its normative force from within the context of the community of appreciators. The obligation can thus be said to be grounded both in the object and its aesthetic value (although it doesn’t direct the obligation solely towards that object), and in subjects and their practical identity (although it replaces the individual self with a specific socio-cultural collective to which the self belongs). It is an aesthetic obligation since the community to which it is directed is an aesthetic community, that is to say it is the aesthetic practices, values and traditions shared by the members of the community which unites it and makes it the specific community it is. 

Etik/Ethics: Ingmar Persson (Oxford University/University of Gothenburg)

Modern Moral Philosophy: Inconclusive and Esoteric to the Point of Pointlessness?

The point of moral philosophy is plausibly to produce a rational consensus about what is morally right and wrong in the situations life presents us with and about what the ground and meaning of this moral rightness/wrongness is. My hypothesis is that there are such deep divides in moral philosophy that the prospects of producing such a rational consensus are gloomy. In normative ethics, these divides are between (1) deontologists whose morality comprises the act-omission doctrine and/or the doctrine of the double effect, and consequentialists who reject such moralities; (2) desert or rights theorists for whom justice consists in getting what you deserve or what you have rights to, and more egalitarian theories that reject deserts and rights; (3) theorists who do, and theorists who do not, endorse a negativity bias to the effect that it is morally better to reduce what is bad by a certain amount than to increase what is good by the same amount; (4) theorists who believe we are morally permitted to be partial to ourselves and people near and dear, and those who espouse impartial moralities. In meta-ethics, there is a divide between externalists who take there to be moral reasons or values that are independent of attitudes and internalists who deny this. This means that it is futile to hope that meta-ethics could help us overcome the normative divides by firmly establishing objective reasons or values. If modern moral philosophy had not been so technical and esoteric, the disagreements raging in it might even have been harmful to public morality by undermining its authority.  

Filosofins historia/History of Philosophy: José Filipe Da Silva (University of Helsinki)

On the nature of objects of visual perception.

Instead of thinking of objects of perception in accordance with the different sense modalities in isolation, I propose that to investigate whether and if so how medieval thinkers considered perception from a more global sense, that is from the perspective of the aims of perception, or what perception is for. Does considering perception from this holistic sense changes what the objects of perceptual experience are? By focusing on authors from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, namely Roger Bacon, Albert the Great and Nicole Oresme, I argue that this is the case. The result is an overview of selected theories of perception that shows the close relation between sensation and appetitive motion and sensation and intellection. 

Logik/Logic: Valentin Goranko (Stockholm University)

Logics for Strategic Reasoning about Socially Interacting Rational Agents

I will discuss reasoning about strategic abilities of rational agents and groups (coalitions) of agents to guarantee achievement of their goals, while acting and interacting within a society of agents. That strategic interaction can be quite complex, as it usually involves various patterns combining cooperation and competition. 

In this talk I will show how formal logic can be useful in capturing such reasoning. I will first present as a background the basic “Coalition Logic” and then I will give a brief overview of some recently introduced and studied more expressive and versatile logical systems, including:    

i. the Socially Friendly Coalition Logic (SFCL), enabling formal reasoning about strategic abilities of individuals and groups to ensure achievement of their private goals while allowing for cooperation with the entire society;   

ii. the Logic of Coalitional Goal Assignments  (LCGA), capturing reasoning about strategic abilities of the entire society to cooperate in order to ensure achievement of the societal goals, while protecting the abilities of individuals and groups within the society to achieve their individual and group goals. 

iii. the Logic for Conditional Strategic Reasoning (ConStR), formalising reasoning about agents’ strategic abilities conditional on the goals of the other agents and on the actions that they are expected to take in pursuit of these goals. 

In conclusion, I will take a more general perspective on a unifying logic-based framework for strategic reasoning in social context.

Medvetandefilosofi/Philosophy of Mind: Hedda Hassel Mørch (Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences)

Subjects within subjects? Why consciousness can’t overlap

A number of theories of consciousness, in both philosophy and neuroscience, imply or at least raise the possibility of overlapping consciousness, i.e., that some or all of the contents of one mind may also be experienced by another (where these contents are numerically rather than merely qualitatively identical). Block, for example, raises this possibility as a “trouble” for functionalism and Unger as “the mental problem of the many”, which they both reject, but without much argument. Tononi’s Integrated Information Theory precludes it via its Exclusion postulate, but without it it would imply a massive amount of it, and the postulate has been criticized as inadequately supported. The most typical version of panpsychism, constitutive panpsychism, seems to imply that human minds overlap with a vast number of microminds, and the cosmopsychist version implies that we overlap with an overarching cosmic mind. In this talk, I argue that overlapping consciousness is impossible, because, given the most plausible view of the nature of subjects (a version of the deflationary “bundle” view), it involves a straightforward contradiction. Any theory that implies it must therefore be rejected or modified to exclude it after all.

Metaetik & Metanormativitet/Metaethics & Metanormativity: Andrew Reisner (Uppsala University)

The Project of De-moralisation and the Dualism of Practical Reason

Henry Sidgwick famously opined that the profoundest problem in ethics was the apparent impossibility of reconciling the conflicting requirements of morality and self-interest. One approach to addressing conflicts of morality and self-interest is the project of de-moralisation, which aims to expunge moral concepts from serious normative theorising. The project of de-moralisation is attractive, in part because it removes (perhaps) normatively irrelevant and judgement-clouding concepts associated with anger and emotions, like blame and sentiments of moral worth, from normative theorising. The general thought is (e.g. in Crisp 2006) that if reasons do not come in different kinds – if they are just reasons of wellbeing, for example – then one can determine what the totality of reasons says that one ought to do. I wish to raise some questions about the extent to which de-moralisation can help with solving Sidgwick’s dualism, in particular whether it is more difficult to make sense of our normative theorising without moral concepts than it might initially appear to be.

Metafysik/Metaphysics: Matti Eklund (Uppsala University)

Three kinds of alienness

In my book Alien Structure: Language and Reality (OUP, 2024) I discuss the possibility of what I call alien languages and alien metaphysical structure. An alien language is a language with alien semantic structure. It is semantically different from familiar languages, in a broadly structural way, and through having kinds of resources not found in familiar languages. The world has alien metaphysical structure if its structure is best represented by an alien language. Here I illustrate what is at issue, discussing three different kinds of “alienness”. I also provide crucial distinctions and clarifications, and discuss how one can argue for the possibility of alien languages of various kinds, and for the existence of alien metaphysical structure.

Politisk Filosofi/Political Philosophy: Lena Halldenius (Lund University)

When philosophy meets the street. Lived experience as knowledge production

How can we know what matters for justice? In political philosophy the debate between ideal and non-ideal theory has been going on for a long time. Ideal theory of justice proceeds from abstract, idealised circumstances, ostensibly to sift out whatever is regarded as philosophically irrelevant. Non-ideal theory proceeds instead from description of real circumstances, claiming that what philosophers think is irrelevant for theories of justice could be decisive factors in people’s lives. Feminist philosophy – proceeding as it does from lived gendered experiences – is typically non-ideal theory. But what can methods of non-ideal theory look like? Description is not innocent. What is it that we should be describing and how can we find out? How about just asking people? In a recent project about the digital economy – where cash money is on its way out and digital literacy the new normal – my colleagues and I interviewed people who rely on cash because they are poor, have no credit, and cannot manage or afford digital technology, in order to find out what economic injustice is for them. We regard our interviewees as co-producers of knowledge that otherwise would have gone unacknowledged. In this talk, I will reflect on what philosophers can do to avoid committing epistemic injustice by not accounting for what it is like to live among the worst-off and what we understand differently about economic injustice if we proceed from lived experiences of this kind.

Språkfilosofi/Philosophy of Language: Anders Schoubye (Stockholm University)

Naming and Variability

Variabilism is the view that proper names are variables (rather than constants or descriptions). This view has been defended by a number of philosophers of language throughout the past 40 years, but with very different assumptions about the nature of these variables and hence the behaviour of proper names. In this talk, I will start by providing an overview of a number of variabilist positions, but ultimately defend one particular variant. This particular version of variabilism comes with a distinct descriptive component, but I will outline why this version of variabilism is not threatened by any of Kripke's well known anti-descriptivist arguments. I will then turn to a discussion of a more recent potential problem for the variabilist view, namely a circularity worry raised by Aidan Gray and explain why this likely is not a threat to variabilism after all. Lastly, I will argue that once a variabilist analysis of proper names is adopted, one (of the many) positive upshots is that we get a clean and elegant metasemantics for names that is both more uniform and has broader empirical coverage than the standard Kripkean causal/historical chain story.

Tillämpad Etik/Applied Ethics: Daniela Cutas (Lund University)

What do we owe our genetic relatives? 

Many people conceived with donor gametes – or otherwise raised separately from their close genetic relatives – want to know that they have close genetic relatives outside of their immediate family, and to know who these relatives are. Qualitative research with donor-conceived people testifies to their interest in knowledge of their genetic origins. In my talk, I will explore the interest to know of one’s close genetic ties and the implications that it may have for what others ought to do. Should gamete donors let themselves be known by the people conceived with their gametes – and how much knowledge is needed? Do they, for example, need to relate to them in specific ways? While reflection on the significance and risks of parent/child genetic ties outside of the family has not historically been encouraged in the context of IVF, the consideration of non-parental ties has been even scarcer. How should people relate to close genetic relatives they didn’t know they had, such as genetic siblings or grandparents or nieces and nephews or others? Do donor conceived people also have a claim against close genetic relatives other than the donors themselves – and if so, what claims do they have? These are the questions that I will explore in my talk. 

Vetenskapsfilosofi/Philosophy of Science: Julie Zahle (University of Bergen)

Bias and Debiasing Strategies in Qualitative Data Collection

According to a widespread view, qualitative research in the social sciences is of poor quality because it lacks effective debiasing strategies. In this paper, I zoom in on researcher bias in qualitative data collection, that is, bias which the researcher introduces into the process of gathering her data. I start by laying out an account of researcher bias. On that basis, I argue that qualitative researchers may mitigate bias through the combined use of two strategies that capitalize on main characteristics of qualitative data collection. Also, I defend the two debiasing strategies against possible objections to their effectiveness. Thus, I conclude that researcher bias does not undermine the quality of qualitative research.