Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held next Tuesday (20th October). We are delighted to welcome Professor Amie Thomasson (Dartmouth), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Should Ontology be Explanatory?'. The abstract for the talk is as follows:
*Since Quine, it has been common to hold that the goal of ontology is to determine what entities we should or must ‘posit’ as part of a best total explanatory theory. Accordingly, whether putative entities such as meanings, properties, or numbers contribute explanatory power is often taken as a central criterion for whether we should accept that they exist.* *I will argue that this is a mistake. The explanatory power criterion arises from failing to understand the diverse functions that different areas of discourse can serve. A deeper understanding of the way these forms of discourse enter language, and of the functional roles they play, makes clear why we should reject the explanatory power criterion, and reject the explanatory conception of ontology. I will close with some remarks about how we should rethink our approach to existence questions—and, more deeply, how we should re-focus our philosophical efforts.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 on Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/98343588455 (Meeting ID: 983 4358 8455). Best wishes, Christopher, Emma, Sofía and Wouter -- Christopher Benzenberg, Emma Curran, Sofía Meléndez-Gutiérrez and Wouter Cohen Acting Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk <msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk> 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: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
