Dear all, The next meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group will take place on Wednesday, November 4th at 4.30-6pm on Zoom (details below). Benjamin Marschall (Cambridge) will present a paper entitled 'Quine on ontology and the primacy of truth'.
Abstract Quine is often regarded as the person who made metaphysics a respectable philosophical enterprise again after the excesses of logical positivism. How accurate this story is has been controversial, however: while some contemporary metaphysicians describe their own methodology as ‘neo-Quinean’, others have stressed the continuities between Quine and Carnap, who famously rejected metaphysics. In my talk I will try to shed some light on this issue by using Quine’s philosophy of mathematics as a case study. On the face of it everything seems clear: Quine rejected Carnap’s conventionalism about mathematics, entertained the possibility of being a nominalist for a while, and then came to embrace a form of mathematical Platonism. I will show that the nature of Quine’s Platonism is not straightforward, however, as it raises some difficult questions about the relationship between ontology and truth. Based on this I will give some reasons for thinking that, unlike for many contemporary metaphysicians, ontology does not play an explanatory role in Quine’s philosophy. Topic: Serious Metaphysics Group Time: Nov 4, 2020 04:30 PM London Join Zoom Meeting https://zoom.us/j/91992338139?pwd=bFI2R3VJRjh3dHJtTTJJRXhjVmVmQT09 Meeting ID: 919 9233 8139 Passcode: 02947 Best wishes, Wouter _____________________________________________________ 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.
