Mattia Sorgon

The Forum Theoretical Philosophy is a research network for young academics. It has its origins in the Philosophy Department of the University of Bamberg, Germany where it was founded in 2010 by philosophy graduate students. In the last four years the group has organized various philosophical events, all focused on MA and Ph.D. students. Among these, the two Bamberg International Summer Schools in Theoretical Philosophy organized in summers 2012 and 2014 are certainly the most important activities that characterize the Forum as one of the most interesting, enterprising and fruitful European student organizations.

“Another world is possible”, the conference in memory and in honor of David Lewis (1941-2001), took place at the University “Carlo Bo” of Urbino, on the 16th, 17th and 18th of June. In these three days several philosophers have presented and discussed some of the most interesting Lewisian themes, showing their current research development. The conference has been structured into five 90 minutes plenary talks, each one followed by a session focused on a particular topic. Andrea Bottani from University of Bergamo, Sònia Roca-Royes from University of Stirling, John Collins from Columbia University, John Divers from University of Leeds and Vincenzo Fano from University of Urbino presented their papers in the first ones, while the latter ones were “Semantics and Convention”, “Mereology, Properties and Persistence”, “Counterfactuals”, “Modality and Possible Worlds” and “Causality and Time”. Each post-plenary session consisted in three 45 minutes talks about the selected topic. In this reportage we will keep this structure reporting all five plenary talks and the abstracts of every session. We would congratulate for the efficient organization with the Organizing Committee, composed by Aphex’s editorial team, thanking them warmly for their willingness, without which this reportage could not have be written.

What if there is no hard problem with consciousness? Daniel Clement Dennett, King’s College London, The Philosophical Society, January, 13th, 2014. [Daniele Mario Cassaghi] How is it possible to distinguish a system which is conscious of its internal states from one which is not? In other terms, on which methods can we rely to discern a human being from a zombie with no “consciousness” at all? If I perceive red, I am, quo human being, conscious of the “redness” of the strawberry in front of me. How is it possible for a non-conscious system to be different from me? After all, it just perceives that strawberry without being internally aware of the “redness”. How is it possible, indeed, to differentiate two behaviourally indistinguishable systems on the basis of the presence of a certain conscious element within them? All these questions are what we call The Hard Problem with Consciousness: there is no a specific method to separate systems endowed with the so-called consciousness from those which work unconsciously. Why isn’t there more progress in philosophy? David Chalmers, Royal Institute of Philosophy, London, December, 13th, 2013. [Mattia Sorgon] There has not been large collective convergence on the big questions of philosophy. Concerning the most fundamental issues, such as the mind-body problem, the access to the external world, or the principles of morality, the debate is still very intense and controversial. Therefore, philosophy has not already reached neither a definitive result on its major topics and every theoretical perspective is still a viable position within the debate.

The three-yearly conference of Italian Society for Logic and Philosophy of Science (SILFS) has taken place in Bergamo, the 15th, 16th and 17th December 2010. The charming venue has been the former convent of Sant’Agostino, nowadays University of Bergamo. The conference program has been structured distinguishing plenary and parallel sessions: the first ones were 40 minutes long and designed for international guests: S. Abramsky from the Wolfson College of Oxford, A. Hagar from Indiana University, P. Janich from Philipps Universitaet of Marburg and S. Okasha from University of Bristol. The complete program of the conference can be downloaded here: . We followed all the plenary sessions, and the first part of our report concerns them. There is just the exception of professor S. Psillos’ talk, which was indeed programmed, but didn’t take place due to greek unrest of the last December. The second part of our report concers the parallel sessions, that were 20 minutes long and designed for concurrent talks split between subject areas. We will keep this division into areas in our report and we chose four talks per area. However, it must be said that we had not watch the parallel sessions completely, since their being simoultaneous. This means that our review of the conference will be perspective, both because of subjective standpoint and because of the mentioned limitation. Still we hope we can offer a quite complete picture of the three-days conference, as we hope this overview may be considered as a general review of it. Just a few words must be still said to introduce to our review. The structure of each review will consists in a presentation of the talk’s author(s) (which we faithfully copy hereinafter) followed by a brief remark by us. Since many compliments could be surely done to the SILFS’ organization and to the University of Bergamo, an overall effect seems hard to be drawn, because of some arising perplexities. Although these are just our shared impressions about the conference, we think they must be remembered. One could note outward that the conference have had three official languages: English, French and Italian. Apparently, this is something that has not been justified since French has been useless and Italian has often prevented the comprehension by foreigner attendance. Many defections have taken place, something that could be said about the conformity with the program (in spite of the high number of speeches). Of course these defections have been caused by different reasons, but they become an indication of lack of professionalism as the number grows. Coming to an estimation of the inner issues, first we are seriously puzzled about the selection criterion (if any) which the SILFS has chosen the invited speakers with. One can notice that excellent talks have been put together to shallow speech without substantial scientific commitment. One has to keep in mind that who is just worthless, much lowers the general level. The topics have been various, although many were historical reconstruction and the "historiographic" approach in the study of Philosophy of Science seems therefore prevailing. Those talks whose subject was Logic and its applications, have been the highest-quality ones, by the fact that they were close to contemporary researches. More specifically, we would like to quote those concerning Quantum Computation and Logic of Quantum Mechanics. Talks of Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Science were first-rate works, too, having showed high proficiency, though even specialistic topics were often technically handled, to the detriment of laymen (as us).

Since last year, major initiatives have been undertaken by the chair of theoretical philosophy at the University of Tübingen in order to enhance the reception of analytic metaphysics in the European landscape. Here we review the 2013 summer workshop, intended to be the first of an annual series, on “Existence, Truth and Fundamentality”, the invited speakers being Graham Priest (Melbourne), Stephan Leuenberger (Glasgow), Dan López de Sa (Barcelona), Francesco Berto (Aberdeen), Friederike Moltmann (Paris – Pantheon Sorbonne) and Jason Turner (Leeds). The workshop’s scope is fairly large, focusing on three different aspects of contemporary research in metaphysics. However, the underlying idea of organizers Thomas Sattig and Alessandro Torza consisted in exploring their interconnections and even new areas which possibly share the same problem spectrum. Also, they thought of bringing together both young and senior protagonists of the contemporary debate. In this sense, the main thread followed by the speakers consisted in enquiring the ideas of fundamentality, dependence and grounding with respect to ontology (Berto, López de Sa, Turner) and the truthmaking debate (Priest, Moltmann, Leuenberger), thus pretty much in line with some latest tendencies in metaphysics, such as, prima inter paria, the works of Kit Fine. When we say that something is more fundamental than something else, we move into a non-conventional (for the standards of 20 th century philosophy) metodological framework, hardly focusing on the question about what there is, and rather tackling the issue of how fundamentally there is what there is, or how the existence of something is required as a ground for the existence of other things. Here is how Jonathan Schaffer explains the methodological transition in his influential “On What Grounds What” (2009): Among the many assumptions Quine and Carnap share is that metaphysical questions are existence questions, such as whether numbers exist. They only disagree on the further issue of whether such questions are meaningful (at least as the metaphysician might pose them). But why think that metaphysical questions are existence question of this sort? Return to Aristotle’s Metaphysics. There are virtually no existence question posed. The whole discussion is about substances (fundamental units of being). At one point Aristotle pauses to ask if numbers exist, and his answer is a brief and dismissive yes. [. . . ] For Aristotle, the question about numbers is whether they are transcendent substances or grounded in concreta. The question is not whether numbers exist, but how. (Schaffer, 2009, p. 347) The conference opened with Graham Priest’s intriguing and peculiar review of Buddhist cornerstone “The Fundamental Verses of the Middle Way” (Mūlamadhyakamakārikā) by Nāgārjuna (ca. 150-ca. 250 AD), seen as a unrecognized forerunner of multi-valued semantics and dialetheism. Priest shows that Nagarjuna’s thought indeed has valuable analytic grip (contrary to the traditional mystical dismiss of his works altogether) and is even in accord to some formal schemas rejecting both the laws of excluded middle and non-contradiction. Dan López de Sa was interested in the topic of grounding, raising concerns about how to explain the kind of “reality” exemplified by what is not fundamental, but rather derivative on something else. He proposes a conceptual and non-primitive analysis of grounding as linked to fundamentality and derivation, and argues that the view can be advocated along with the acceptance that at least something is not fundamental. Subsequently, he illustrates an impressive range of applications linked to contemporary debates in meta-ontology, truthmaking and philosophy of time. Stephan Leuenberger discussed a semantics for “total logic”, a variant of first order logic which is claimed to have several applications with respect to the issue of excluding negative existentials from the scope of theories accounting for a given ’totality’ of facts. For example, materialism is the claim that everything there is can be traced back to physical facts or to truth implied by those facts. What about the claim that “There are no angels”? According to Leuenberger, ordinary logic falls prey of modal arguments (if it is possible that there are angels, by modus tollens, that it is not metaphysically necessary that everything there is is physical). So, there is space for the introduction of a new operator, the totality operator, claiming of what enters its scope that “that’s the whole truth”. Consequently, total logic’s semantics tackles David Chalmers’ well-known conceivability-based argument in favour of zombie’s (subjects producing behaviour but experiencing no qualia) possible existence. Friederike Moltmann presented a massive array of natural language-based examples on the role played by case-constructions, such as “it is the case that Caesar crossed the Rubicon”, “the case of the stolen statue”, “the case in which it might rain”, and so forth. She suggests that we should take surface phenomena of our language very seriously with regard to the determination of ontological categories and truth-makers. Cases are provided by many natural languages with their own existence predicates (“to occur” and “to present itself ”), and these do not apply to other kind of entities, such as objects and events. Trying to derive a substantive thesis on their nature, she claims that they are filtered entities, a structure taking into account some features of the corresponding objects and events and preserving their relational pattern. Jason Turner discussed meta-ontological concerns against the claim that ontological debates are defective. Analysed the structure of a metaphysical theory and identified two different forms of defectiveness that can occur in ontological questions, the defection from without and the defection from within, the author provided an original solution in order to avoid such difficulties. He argued thus in favor of a logical constancy, a translation principle thanks to it would be possible reconceive an ontological defection. Lastly, Francesco Berto’s talk closed the workshop with a sagacious discussion of meinongian quantification. He substains that Meinongians and Quineans experience no conceptual equivocation. Even if the former claims that “There are things that do not exist”, something that the latter contrasts with the interpretation of existential quantifiers as all-including, they still rely upon the same concept of “existence” and they understand each other when they are outside the ontology room, so that it cannot be that they lack competence. Subsequently, Berto deals with the objection that Meinongians commit analytic falsehood in separating the meaning of “to be” from that of “exists”. The Quinean has no independent evidence for analytic equivalence aside from her emphatic stress on the “is” in “there is”. Meinongians, however, can retort to linguistic considerations and claim that existence predicates display fairly different functions. As for what regards our internal division of the “philosophical labor”, Fabio Ceravolo reviewed Moltmann and Berto’s talks; whereas Mattia Cozzi took care of Priest’s and Leuenberger’s, and Mattia Sorgon of those given by López de Sa and Turner. Conclusively, we would like to thank Thomas Sattig and Alessandro Torza for all of their organizational efforts and the kind welcome they reserved to us. We hope we will have further opportunities to collaborate with Tübingen in supporting similarly innovative and valiant european initiatives.

In this collection of essays, several authors, belonging to different generations and philosophical traditions, discuss ample ethical and metaethical issues together with their relations to questions of applied ethics. The volume provides a wide account of some of the main topics in these fields, thus dealing with nearly everything that human beings hold as valuable. Expert scholars and young researchers contribute to this virtual symposium, reframing the current philosophical debates about the definition and the history of the concept of Naturalism, the different declinations of Kantian Constructivism, the functioning of Rational Choice Theory, the complex role played by Neuroscience in redefining the contours of ethical theories and bioethics, the puzzles of Deontic Logic, and the bases of Animal Ethics. Divided into three sections, presented by comprehensive introductions by Sofia Bonicalzi, Leonardo Caffo and Mattia Sorgon, the present collection includes contributions by Martina Belmonte, Michele Borri, Luciana Ceri, Guglielmo Feis, Matteo Grasso, Andrea Lavazza, Sarah Songhorian, and Francesca Vitale. Each author develops a distinctive and independent position, while critically engaging with the central themes of contemporary reflection. This new, major study will benefit moral philosophers, philosophers of science, and scientists concerned with bioethics, while at the same time stimulating and challenging anyone who is curious about the nature and the origins of ethical and metaethical enquiries.