Philosophisches Seminar
PhilosophischesSeminar
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Institutskolloquium
Programm WiSe 2019/20 (Poster)
Bitte beachten: Im WiSe 2019/20 findet das Institutskolloquium im Sitzungssaal des Akademischen Senats (AS-Saal) im Hauptgebäude der Universität Hamburg in der Edmund Siemers Allee 1 statt (Lagebeschreibung des AS-Saals).
ACHTUNG PEP-Weihnachtsvorlesung, Hörsaal A, ESA 1
| Datum | Sprecher | Thema |
|---|---|---|
| 16.10.19 | BIRGIT RECKI (Universität Hamburg) |
Hans Blumenbergs ungeschriebene Ästhetik AS-Saal 18-22 Uhr |
| „Von nichts wimmelt unsere Zeit so sehr als von Ästhetikern.“ Jean Pauls maliziöse Notiz von 1804, gerade zwei Generationen nach der Initiation der neuen philosophischen Disziplin durch Baumgarten und Meier geäußert, könnte auch von Hans Blumenberg stammen. In der Zeit seiner reifen Philosophie, in den Jahren seines Wirkens (Münster 1970-1985), hat sich Blumenberg – in Vorlesungen wie in veröffentlichten Texten – immer wieder einmal missmutig, auch abfällig gegen die Konjunktur der philosophischen Ästhetik ausgesprochen. Was denn falsch (gewesen) sein könnte am Auftrieb der Ästhetik, ist nicht leicht zu sehen. Denn dem Leser Blumenbergs muss das ablehnende Urteil als performativer Selbstwiderspruch erscheinen: Allzu auffällig ist die ästhetische Appetenz, die aus seinen Texten spricht. Der Vortrag sammelt die membra disiecta der ungeschriebenen Ästhetik Hans Blumenbergs ein und gibt eine Antwort auf die Frage, wieso diese Ästhetik nicht geschrieben wurde. |
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| 30.10.19 | NICK JONES (University of Birmingham) |
Type Neutrality AS-Saal 18-20 Uhr |
| What kind of language should we use for metaphysical theorising? One prominent programme employs primitive higher-order quantifiers in the language of metaphysics. This programme faces two related objections: 1. There is an expressibility deficit: many important claims about the hierarchy of higher-order entities cannot be expressed in the language. 2. Higher-order theories can always be converted into first-order theories by translating into a first-order language containing predicates for each level of the hierarchy. This appears to both increase expressivity, and to make the complex syntax of higher-order languages unnecessary and metaphysically insignificant. I will respond to both problems. I will first present six attractive properties one might naturally want from a language of metaphysics, and show that no language can have all six properties. I then show how a standard kind of higher-order language arises naturally from failure of one of these properties, which I call Type Neutrality. After distinguishing two ways to lack Type Neutrality, I argue that only one of these ways resolves the incompatibility between the initial six properties. I close by defending languages that lack Type Neutrality in this way against problems (1) and (2). Against (1), I argue that the apparent expressive deficit is merely illusory. Against (2), I argue for two claims. Firstly, first-orderisation changes the subject, rather than delivering a different syntactic means of theorising about the same subject. Secondly, nobody motivated by expressibility concerns should adopt a first-order language; for analogous expressive limitations afflict all first-order languages. If there is time, I will also present two problems for languages not subject to those expressive limitations. Firstly, they treat as meaningful many questions that are not really so. Secondly, they suffer expressive limitations of their own, because they require unattractive restrictions on quantification. |
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| 13.11.19 | MILJANA MILOJEVIC (University of Belgrade) |
Persons, minds and bodies AS-Saal 18-20 Uhr |
| In this talk I will present one novel account of personhood and personal persistence conditions. The account I will be defending is inspired by unsatisfactory state of the current debate about the nature of persons, and it strives to unite different aspects of biological and psychological accounts of personhood. It starts from the basic assumptions of neo-Lockean, Parfitian psychological accounts of personhood, but it also adopts several insights from a number of novel approaches to mind and cognition, in particular the assumption that cognition is deeply embodied, embedded and sometimes extended. By expanding the physical base of the mental and the cognitive, the offered account attempts to re-marry the mind and the body in a new way. Thus, my primary focus will be on the reconciliation of the two views about persons – that persons are thinking narrative selves and that persons are animals – but this time not through psychologization of biology, as it was done in Ancient times, but through biologization of psychology. The proposed account will be able to solve many of the problems that other accounts face, or so I will argue, such as the problem of spatial coincidence of objects, “too-many thinkers problem”, contingency of identity, etc. On the other hand, this view will adopt and defend several seemingly radical claims, such as the claim that persons are properties and not individuals, and the claim that persons can be partially constituted of parts of the environement. | ||
| 27.11.19 | TAMARA JUGOV (Freie Universität Berlin) |
Strukturelle Beherrschung AS-Saal 18-20 Uhr |
| Viele Menschen teilen den Eindruck, dass sie nicht mehr durch konkrete Andere – etwa ihre Ehemänner, Chefs oder Vermieter – beherrscht werden. Stattdessen fühlen sie sich in einem diffuseren Sinne durch „den“ Sexismus, Kapitalismus oder den Wohnungsmarkt beherrscht. Wie können wir das verstehen und konzeptualisieren? Diesbezüglich mache ich zwei Vorschläge: Erstens, so argumentiere ich, verleihen sexistische oder kapitalistische soziale Praktiken und Regeln den Mitgliedern mancher sozialer Gruppen – etwa Ehemännern oder Chefs – willkürliche soziale Macht über andere. Ich argumentiere, dass diese soziale Macht strukturell konstituiert und robust ist: Personen „haben“ diese, auch wenn sie keine intentionalen Zustände in Bezug auf die Ausübung solcher willkürlicher robuster Macht haben. Zweitens müssen wir danach fragen, wer für diejenigen sozialen Praktiken und Regeln verantwortlich gemacht werden kann, die soziale Macht willkürlich verteilen. | ||
| 11.12.19 | KAUSHIK BASU (Cornell University, New York) |
PEP-WEIHNACHTSVORLESUNG |
| Kaushik Basu is an Indian economist who was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016. He is the Carl Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and began a three-year term as President of the International Economic Association in June 2017. From 2009 to 2012, during the United Progressive Alliance's second term, Basu served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. Basu is a columnist for BBC News Online, the Hindustan Times, Business Standard and is the author of several books on economics and a play, “Crossings at Benaras Junction”(published in The Little Magazine, 2005). His book, Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics, was published in 2011 by Princeton University Press and Penguin, India, and has been translated into Italian, Chinese, Russian, Spanish and Japanese. His most recent book is The Republic of Beliefs (Princeton, 2018) proposes a fresh way of thinking that will enable more effective laws and a fairer society. Basu believes that good moral qualities are essential for growth and development within the economy. Honesty, trustworthiness and integrity are important qualities that need to be inculcated in an individual for personal development as well as within the society for development. Basu also feels the need to promote quality thinking in government and public debate. |
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| 08.01.20 |
HAMID TAIEB |
Meinong on Varieties of Concepts |
| Meinong was not only interested in developing a theory of objects, but he also wanted to have a satisfying account of our representations of them, including of our general representations, or concepts. He was identifying in a fined-grained manner various kinds of concepts, namely those based on abstraction, those based on imprecision, and those based on association of ideas; while the first and second seem to gather together things which have relations of identity, the third kind of concepts have in their extension more or less similar items organized around a so-called “type”. Thanks to these distinctions, Meinong thought to adequately map our various sorts of general representations and the different ways we acquire them. In my paper, I will, first, carefully reconstruct his account and, second, compare it to contemporary views on concept structure, more precisely the definitional account and the prototype theory, in order to evaluate the originality and philosophical relevance of Meinong’s position. | ||
| 22.01.20 | ALEX STEINBERG (Universität Bielefeld) |
Fregean that-clause semantics |
| Frege famously argued for the view that expressions do not only have a denotation (Bedeutung) but also a sense (Sinn) that determines that denotation. For reasons of compositionality he also claimed that within that-clauses of propositional attitude ascriptions and speech act reports expressions do not denote their ordinary denotations but their ordinary senses (he called the former their gerade Bedeutung the latter their ungerade Bedeutung). Frege did not present a systematic semantics of that-clauses that would bear out this denotation shift thesis. Indeed, some have argued that any such semantics would have to incorrectly predict the validity of certain inferences (e.g., ‘Ann believes that Hesperus is a star. Therefore, there is a sense that Ann believes to be a star.’) while failing to predict the validity of others (e.g., ‘Ann believes that Hesperus is a star. Hesperus is a planet. Therefore, there is a planet that Ann believes to be a star.’). In this talk I show that this suggestion is based on a naïve view of the semantics of variables (or traces or pronouns) within that-clauses. In effect, there are at least three Frege-friendly ways for accounting for the behaviour of variables within that-clauses that get inferential relations right. In a second part I will sketch and contrast these three alternatives. | ||
Das Institutskolloquium im Wintersemester 2019/20 wird organisiert von Julia Zakkou
Kontakt
Philosophisches Seminar
Überseering 35, Postfach #4
22297 Hamburg
Tel: +49 40 42838-4714
Fax: +49 40 42838-3983
E-Mail: philosophie"AT"uni-hamburg.de
