Dear all,
The next meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group will take place on Wednesday 28th May at 11am in the philosophy board room. Our speaker is Stephen Mumford (Nottingham) who will be giving a talk entitled _Carnap and the Anglo-Austrian Conspiracy Against Dispositions _(abstract below). I hope to see you there! Best wishes, Mathew Simpson Stephen Mumford - Carnap and the Anglo-Austrian Conspiracy Against Dispositions. "Carnap's motivation for introducing reduction sentences for disposition terms are easily thought of as scientific and logical. However, it is argued here that Carnap's account had primarily a metaphysical motivation. The commitment to extensional logic, which generates the problem of dispositions, has a basis in Humean metaphysics in which there is only a truth value and no modal value. The chief ontological commitment of the dispositionalists should be to the reality of the modal connection in nature, as opposed to the Humean metaphysic in which all is loose and separate. This means that the dispositionalist cannot express their most important claims using the standard apparatus of classical logic, nor any logic that builds upon the classical base. It also shows that we cannot use the standard logical apparatus for adjudicating rationally between these rival metaphysical systems as logic will inherently favour Humeanism. This illustrates the Aristotelian doctrine that metaphysics is First Philosophy." -- Matthew Simpson PhD Student in Philosophy University of Cambridge Mail: Robinson College, Cambridge, CB3 9AN _____________________________________________________ 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.
