Sayid Bnefsi (University of Neuchâtel), "The Concurrence Doctrine"
In criminal law, the “concurrence doctrine” states that committing a crime must involve “concurrence,” the existence of a certain intrinsic unification between the mental and physical elements of the crime. This intrinsic unity is considered to be a metaphysical relation of dependency, like causation, supervenience, or constitution. Yet various types of cases in criminal law where the doctrine should apply seem to deviate substantially from it. In this paper, I argue that concurrence in criminal law should be interpreted as a resemblance relation between a prior intention and an intention in action. The resemblance view reintegrates the doctrine in theory with the doctrine in practice, it explains why concurrence morally matters in itself, and it suggests making a significant change to accomplice liability in criminal law.
Marta Campdelacreu (University of Barcelona), "The Property-Inheritance Problem"
Suppose that a sculptor molds a statue out of a lump of clay. Under the supposition that the statue and the lump are two distinct objects standing in the constitution relation, the following puzzle arises. Suppose the lump weighs 10 kg; then the statue also weighs 10 kg. However, when considered together, they do not weigh 20 kg, but just 10 kg. Furthermore, it seems evident that the statue weighs 10 kg because the lump of clay weighs 10 kg, and not the other way around. We will refer to this problem as the Property-Inheritance Problem. In this paper, after presenting and discussing the most relevant proposals offered to solve this problem, we will propose our own solution. In doing so, we will address three different questions: (i)What properties can be shared by objects in the constitution relation, whether in virtue of being in this relation or not? (ii) Which of these properties can be inherited by one object from another? and (iii) Given two objects in the constitution relation and an inheritable property, under what conditions does one object inherit the property from the other?
Sharon Casu (University of Fribourg), "On The Necessity of Awareness for Intentional Actions"
Knowledge of our own intentional actions is required for intentional agency: we cannot act intentionally if we do not know what we are doing. Moreover, we know of things in the external world differently than we know of our intentional actions, because the objects of this knowledge are different. While objects in the external world are out there, available for us to discover, we are the makers, in ways, of our intentional actions. Thus, our knowledge of them seems more direct, and continually evolving as we act intentionally. I’ll argue that this is possible because we acquire this knowledge by being directly aware of our intentional actions – more specifically, our mental states and bodily movements. This awareness is the basis of all knowledge of intentional actions. But it is obviously not all there is to knowledge of our own intentional actions. Some intentional actions are more complex, require more planning, diferente cognitive capacities. Thus, I will make a distinction between complex intentional actions – what we intentionally do by intentionally doing something else – and basic intentional actions – what we intentionally do without intentionally doing something else. While we can acquire knowledge of our own basic intentional actions just by being aware of our mental states and bodily movements, complex intentional actions also require propositional knowledge – and possibly more. This proposal would explain the directness of our knowledge of intentional actions, and, additionally, it would allow the attribution of intentional agency to entities unable to acquire propositional knowledge.
Daniel Deasy (University College Dublin), "The Contingency of Times"
It seems plausible that there (metaphysically) could have been no instants of time (times), and therefore that reality could have been timeless in that sense. In this paper, I describe and assess an argument for the surprising conclusion that there must be at least one time. The paper is structured as follows: in §1, I describe four plausible and widely accepted temporal theses: SOMETIMES EQUIVALENCE (necessarily, something is sometimes the case just in case there is a time at which it is the case); ALWAYS FACTIVITY (necessarily, if something is always the case, it is the case); SOMETIMES-ALWAYS DUALITY (necessarily, something is sometimes the case just in case it is not always not the case, and necessarily, something is always the case just in case it is not sometimes not the case; and CONTINGENCY OF TIMES (possibly, there are no times). I then show that given one additional plausible assumption, the first three theses jointly imply the falsehood of the fourth, i.e. they jointly imply NECESSITY OF TIMES, the view that there must be at least one time. In §§2-3, I consider some of the ways in which those who accept CONTINGENCY OF TIMES can avoid this conclusion. Finally, in §4, I describe a view on which NECESSITY OF TIMES is true. I conclude that although those who accept CONTINGENCY OF TIMES can resist the argument against their view, there is also a view of times on which NECESSITY OF TIMES can be reasonably accepted.
Heather Demarest (University of Colorado Boulder), "Resisting the Second Law of Thermodynamics"
The second law of thermodynamics states that entropy (almost) always increases over time. However, different systems do this in very different ways. In some systems, like boxes of gas, entropy increases smoothly and uniformly. In other systems, such as crystals, trees, zebras, and human brains, entropy actually decreases in parts of the system, while increasing in other parts. A zebra (together with its environment) does not violate the second law, but there is an important sense in which the zebra resists the second law. The zebra maintains or reduces its entropy by shunting its extra entropy into its environment. This is possible because the zebra consumes highly ordered, low-entropy energy (grass) and excretes higher entropy waste (heat and manure). In this paper, I defend a metaphysical account of this difference in terms of multiple realizability--the more microphysical realizers a specified state has, the less it is able to resist the second law.
Magdalene Dimitriadou (University of Pittsburgh), "Russellian Monism Without Pan(proto)psychism?"
This talk investigates whether a view known as Russellian Monism can be developed without appeal to a different cluster of views that fall under the label of Panprotopsychism. I argue that a central barrier to the relevant development is a widespread dualist conception of phenomenal properties as existentially dependent on conscious experience. If my argument is correct, then, to reimagine Russellian Monism without Pan(proto)psychism, we must first reimagine our conception of the properties we encounter in conscious experience. Is such a reimagination a reductio for Dualism?
Matt Duncan (Rhode Island College), "The Irreplaceable Value of the Awareness Relation"
Acquaintance is the relation of conscious awareness that we bear to the things we experience most immediately. It has enormous and irreplaceable value. For example, it has irreplaceable epistemic value. When Frank Jackson’s (1982) neuroscientist Mary leaves her black-and-white room for the first time and is acquainted with redness, she learns something new—something she couldn’t have learned without acquaintance. Something similar applies to other domains, too. For example, philosophers have argued that some aesthetic appreciation, emotional understanding, or moral motivation also require acquaintance. But there’s an objection. It’s that we don’t need to posit a relation of awareness (i.e., acquaintance) to explain all of this—all we need is experience, which can be thought of as intrinsic to its subject. To see the objection better, suppose your experience is a hallucination. Some argue that you could gain the relevant goods—epistemic justification, aesthetic appreciation, emotional understanding, moral motivation—by having such an experience, without it relating you to anything relevant. In this paper, I’ll defend the value of acquaintance. I’ll argue that the aforementioned goods really do require a relation of awareness.
Ned Markosian (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "What Is Time?"
Augustine says that he knows what time is as long as no one asks him to say what time is. Many of us are in the same boat. Nevertheless, the question What is time? is the topic of this talk. The standard way to answer our question is to say that time is one of four more or less similar dimensions that make up a unified manifold appropriately called spacetime. I will offer several arguments against this view. I will also consider several other proposals, including the claim that there is no such thing as time, and the claim that time is a logical construction out of maximal, consistent propositions that have been true, are true, or will be true. But in the end I will defend na answer to our question according to which time is best understood as a complicated and multifaceted dimension of reality (akin to the modal and moral dimensions) that is concerned with the ways reality has been, is, or will be.
Michaela McSweeney (Boston University), "Grasping by Depicting"
When we successfully draw the world as we see it, it seems that we gain a kind of distinctive understanding of it. In this talk, I will try to identify what that understanding is. Weirdly, it seems to involve deconceptualizing what we see, at least in some cases. I argue that it is a form of phenomenal understanding, or grasping. I also suggest that it involves an unusual form of expertise in perception.
Chaeyoung Paek (University of Massachusetts Amherst), "The Ownership View of Autonomy: a New Relational Approach to Local Autonomy"
The relational approach to autonomy maintains that autonomy essentially depends on one’s social environment. I point out that the existing relational views face a dilemma: they either set the standard for autonomy too high—making it an unattainable ideal—or define autonomy in terms of a particular sort of self-relationship, which risks categorizing even a completely manipulated or brainwashed individual actions as autonomous ones. To address this, I propose the ownership view of autonomy, according to which autonomy is a matter of the degree to which one possesses and exercises ownership over one’s actions. I argue that the nature of one’s social relationships influences this ownership. Under this framework, when an agent acts in a context that is bound by a particular relationship, in which she is required to yield ownership of her actions to some degree by the norms of the relationship, her action is not fully autonomous. By arguing that one’s action is autonomous proportional to the degree to which one has and exercises one’s ownership over the action, the ownership view avoids the dilemma of the existing relational theories.
Kevin Richardson (Duke University), "Relatively Inescapable Concepts"
Can we draw deep metaphysical conclusions about non-linguistic reality by relying purely on facts about language? Call this the bridge question. In Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality, Thomas Hofweber argues for a positive answer to the bridge question. He appeals to what he calls inescapable concepts, concepts that humans cannot rationally dispense of, for the purpose of rational inquiry. His paradigm inescapable concepts include logical concepts (AND), semantic concepts (TRUTH), and normative concepts (OUGHT). He argues that such concepts must apply to reality, independently of further non-linguistic facts. In this paper, I argue that Hofweber's theory both overgenerates and undergenerates inescapable concepts; for example, the concepts OUGHT and TRUTH are plausibly escapable. In response to these problems, I propose that we adopt a more flexible notion of inescapability. According to the functionalist account of inescapable concepts, inescapability applies primarily to families of concepts. A family of concepts is inescapable if and only if you cannot rationally jointly replace every member of that family of concepts, for the purposes of rational inquiry. Individual concepts are only inescapable relative to a family of concepts individuated by a conceptual function. On this view, the concept TRUTH is relatively inescapable because we need a concept that plays a truth-like function. By taking concepts to be relatively inescapable, we make the theory of inescapable concepts more plausible and thereby show that we can genuinely bridge the language-metaphysics gap.
Eliška Wichterlová (Boston University), "In defense of fragmentalism: phenomenological considerations"
In light of the challenges that the special theory of relativity poses to all A-theoretic views of time, Fine (2005) offers a fragmentalist account of the reality of tense, one which dissolves the tension between presentism and special relativity. According to this view, there is a single, though incoherent, über-reality, where the content of each frame-time is considered to be a maximally coherent set of facts. In opposition to fragmentalism, Slavov (2020) argues that perspectival realism about tense – which regards the existence of events as fundamental and their temporal order to be a matter of a choice of perspective – is better equipped to account for the ramifications of STR on the reality of A-determinations. Both views agree that A-properties are inherently perspectival and real. However, their basic ontologies are fundamentally different. While perspectival realism separates events from their temporal locations and maintains that events, themselves non-perspectival, form the material basis for our tensed claims, fragmentalism does not dwell on such a distinction. Reality itself is thought to be essentially perspectival, in that the fragmented frame-times form the fundamental constituents of that world. While perspectivalism places the truthmaking of statements about temporal locations into the perspective occupied by a given observer, fragmentalism places the truthmaking into reality itself. In this paper, I first present the fragmentalist and the perspectival realist positions, respectively, as ways of addressing the issues A-theorists face given STR. In the subsequent section, I identify three points of tension between the two views, each highlighting Slavov’s misunderstanding of fragmentalism. The first is the possible compatibility of absolute simultaneity and relativity. To insist that the fragmentalist’s invocation of Newtonian simultaneity by a multiplicity of “substantivalist frame-times” being in conflict with relativity, is to (mis)understand the tense-theoretic fragmentalist position in terms of ontic presentism. The second point of tension has to do with the nature of the relationship between reality and the truth of a proposition. Slavov treats the denial of the paradigmatic correspondence theory of truth as a simple fact entailed by STR, when in fact this conception of truth is an entailment of his own perspectival realist position. Third, the two views conflict on the nature of events. By focusing on the perspectival nature of only the temporal order of events, which are said to obtain ‘independently’ of an observer, and not on their other temporal properties, Slavov commits his view to a point-like conception of events, of which he is himself critical. I suggest, in the final section, that the unwillingness to endorse the fragmentalist position is governed by the tendency to establish the existence of a universal realm of naturally occurring entities and events, somehow completely separate from the observer. I contextualize this tendency within the historical debate between ontic realism and transcendental idealism about the nature of time and argue that to consider a choice of perspective – or rather the fragment itself – as constitutive of the events themselves is not to posit some subjective idealist view of reality.