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The Forum is open to everyone, including students, visitors, and faculty members from all departments and institutes!

The 60 minute lecture is followed by a 10 minute break and a 30-60 minute discussion. The language of presentation is English or Hungarian.
The scope of the Forum includes all aspects of theoretical philosophy, including:
  • logic and philosophy of formal sciences
  • philosophy of science
  • modern metaphysics
  • epistemology
  • philosophy of language
  • problems in history of philosophy and history of science, relevant to the above topics
  • particular issues in natural and social sciences, important for the discourses in the main scope of the Forum.

Location



7 October (Wednesday) 5:00 PM  Room 226
Dávid Márk Kovács
Eötvös University, Budapest
Erasmus College, Budapest
 
Everything is One: In Defence of Multilocational Blobjectivism
In my presentation I will sketch the outlines of a new theory of physical objects. On the proposed view there is exactly one physical object: the world or, as Terry Horgan and Matjaž Potrč (2008) dubbed it, the Blobject. The Blobject has no proper parts, yet it is structurally complex and is in constant flux. According to the version of blobjectivism I advocate, the Blobject is wholly present not only at every time at which it exists but also at every region of space it occupies. That is, the world is a multilocated elementary particle. I will argue that Multilocational Blobjectivism (MB) is not only a coherent theory but it also has some serious advantages over its rivals. Besides being the most parsimonious account of physical objects to date, it also explains (away) a number of puzzles concerning them, including their apparent mereological fragility, the threat of worldly vagueness and the paradoxes of co-location. I will attempt to show that MB is not at odds with modern physics and squares nicely with more of our common-sense beliefs than we would have thought at first glance. Finally, I will consider some theoretical (that is, not common-sense based) objections to the view and maintain that they are not decisive. It will be concluded that MB is a viable and parsimonious theory that is by all means worth taking seriously. It may even be true!

12 October (Monday!) 6:00 PM  Room 226
(Please note the unusual day and time!)
Stewart Cohen
Department of Philosophy, University of Arizona
 
Bootstrapping and Defeasible Reasoning
Certain popular epistemological views about the structure of reasons seem to be subject to a bootstrapping problem.  I examine how this problem arises and argue that certain commitments built into the nature of defeasible reasoning afford a solution.  The solution comes with a cost, but I argue that virtually every theory of reasons has to pay this cost.