Dear All, This Thursday at the Serious Metaphysics Group, Kyle Mitchell will be giving a talk titled 'On Rejecting Everything' (abstract below). We will meet in the philosophy faculty board room from 1:00-2:30.
Also, our final meeting for the year will take place next Thursday (the 11th), at the earlier time of 11:30 (so that people will be able to go to Stephen Yablo's talk in the afternoon). Annika Boeddeling will be presenting on 'Between Scylla and Charybdis: what happens when you relax? - Scanlon's domain-specific account of existence'. All the best, Georgie On Rejecting Everything Ontology, according to Quine, asks what there is; and while the question can be answered in a word --- `everything' --- there is still room for disagreement over cases (1948: 1). Since Quine, metaphysicians have assumed the following strategy for arguing over whether or not there are numbers, composite objects, possible worlds, and other objects. First, take your best total theory of the world which maximally satisfies the theoretical virtues (simplicity, elegance, etc.); second, translate this theory into first-order predicate logic; finally, see that your quantifiers need to range over in order for your best theory to be true. Whatever your quantifiers range over will be your `ontology'. Many metaphysicians (Lewis, 1986; van Inwagen, 2009; Sider, 2011, et al.) claim that some project along these lines is the best way to determine what there is. However, this way of doing things simply assumes that the language used in our best theory will be in a language which involves quantification over objects. In this talk, I will consider what happens if we try to engage in this kind of project without quantification over objects. In effect, I'll consider what we loose if we decide to describe the world in a 'nihilist' language which, instead of making claims like 'There is a table', makes claims like 'it's tabling', which don't involved quantifying over objects. My tentative conclusion will be that our reasons for rejecting the nihilist's language are more practical than theoretical; vindicating something along the lines of William James' claim that 'the trail of the human serpent is over all' in the sense of establishing a more pragmatic conception of ontology. -- Georgie Statham PhD Candidate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge _____________________________________________________ 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.
