Dear all, Next week, Amie Thomasson (University of Maimi) will give a talk entitled "Extending Easy Ontology". An abstract is provided below.
The meeting will be held at 5:00pm on Tuesday, 20 May, in the *Dirac Room *(found in the Fisher Building), St. John's College. The meeting is to be held at 5:00pm rather than the usual 5:15pm as we will be having the AGM before Professor Thomasson's talk. A key issue of the AGM will being considering whether or not we should change the time of the MSC meetings for next year. So have a think about this before you come. For more information, including details about our fees, and the final two meetings of this academic year, please visit our website at http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc. Best, Kyle Mitchell and Shyane Siriwardena ABSTRACT: Easy ontological arguments suggest that questions about the existence of disputed entities can be answered by trivial inferences from uncontroversial truths. Until recently, however, such arguments were thought of as isolated to odd entities like numbers, propositions or fictional characters. Moreover, they were thought to give us only a deflated ontology of ‘lightweight’ entities. I have argued, however, that we can also use easy arguments to settle debates about the existence of ordinary objects such as tables and trees. In this paper I argue that expanding the program in this way makes a big difference to understanding easy ontology and its consequences. For it shows that the resulting entities cannot be understood as ‘ontologically deflated’ or as having any sort of reduced causal, epistemic, or modal status. Moreover, extending easy ontology in this way adds to its power to respond to objections, and to undermine a wide range of serious ontological disputes. -- Kyle Mitchell and Shyane Siriwardena Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
