Printable poster:






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 November (Wednesday) 5:00 PM  Room 226
Balázs Gyenis
Institute of Philosophy,  Research Center for the Humanities,
 Hungarian Academy of Sciences
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh
 
Propagator equations as laws: reconciling Humean and anti-reductionist intuitions
It is commonplace to assume that the mathematical objects which represent the laws of dynamical physical theories are differential equations. Since differential equations are informative and simple systematizers of truth this assumption sits well with a Humean view on what laws of nature are. Differential equations, however, may not be natural objects of interpretation when we consider another strong intuition: that laws "govern,'' "evolve,'' "propagate'' or "bring about'' the states. There is another mathematical object which fits these anti-reductionist intuitions better: the so-called propagator. Depending on whether we view differential or propagator equations as appropriate mathematical representations of laws of nature we get different views on what kind of scenarios are physically possible. In this talk we point out that well posedness of differential equations allows for a happy marriage of these two viewpoints while failure of well posedness forces us to favor one intuition over the other.

14 November (Wednesday) 5:00 PM  Room 226
Gábor Bács and János Tőzsér
Department of Social Sciences
  University of Kaposvár
 
A műalkotások filozófiailag legártatlanabb pillanatainkban
(Works of art in our philosophically most innocent moments)
David Lewis az On the Plurality of World című könyvében vezeti be az őszinteség egyszerű maximáját. E szerint: „soha ne hozakodj elő olyan filozófiai elmélettel, amit nem hiszel a legkevésbé filozófiai és a hétköznapi felfogásodnak leginkább megfelelő pillanataidban” (Lewis 1986, 135).
Szerintünk a legkevésbé filozófiai pillanatainkban azt gondoljuk, hogy egy műalkotás befogadása vagy észlelése során azokhoz a tulajdonságokhoz férünk hozzá (azokat a tulajdonságokat észleljük), amelyek a kérdéses dolgot műalkotássá teszik. Ennélfogva a hétköznapi felfogásunkkal szembenállnak azok az elméletek, melyek szerint olyan tényezők tesznek egy dolgot műalkotássá, amelyek nem manifesztálódnak a műalkotás észlelése során a műalkotás észlelője számára.
Előadásunk első részében e filozófiailag ártatlan meggyőződésünket fejtjük ki és amellett érvelünk, hogy a műalkotások esztétikai értéke azok perceptuális tulajdonságain szuperveniál. A második részben megmutatjuk, hogyan lehet az álláspontunkat megvédeni az ún. „megkülönböztethetetlen párdarabok” érvvel szemben.


21 November
No seminar session!


28 November (Wednesday) 5:00 PM  Room 226
Péter Fazekas
Institute of Philosophy,  Research Center for the Humanities,
 Hungarian Academy of Sciences
 
From H2O to Water - The Prospects of Reductive Explanation
Reductive explanation aims at accounting for a higher level target phenomenon in terms of some lower level base phenomena. In doing so, reductive explanatory attempts need to make an explanatory leap from the lower level to the higher level. This move, however, is not trivial: in the most interesting, so-called heterogeneous, cases the target and the base levels are characterised by theories utilising different vocabularies.
The transparent version of reductive explanation -- the received view in contemporary philosophy of mind, -- claims that this is not a problem: there is an a priori passage from the level of the explanans to the level of the explanandum.
In this talk, I ague that the transparent version of reductive explanation is doomed to failure. I distinguish three varieties of the transparent version, and show that the problem of heterogeneousness is intractable for all of them. The problem of heterogeneousness poses a dilemma: either the target concept can be a priori analysed, in which case the conditions so determined cannot be applied at the base level, or vice versa. Either way, transparent reductive explanation becomes unable to secure the move from the level of the base phenomena to the level of the target phenomenon.