Trinity College Dublin Philosophy Colloquium

'Doing Something for a Reason and Self-Awareness'

Clare Moriarty (TCD)

'Berkeley on Expertise: An Anxious Social Epistemology'

Kenneth Silver (TCD)

"What's Immoral About Investing in Immoral Corporations?"

Adina Preda (TCD)

'Can rights conflict?'

Burt Hopkins (Lille)

Brian Carey (TCD)

Øystein Linnebo (Oslo)

Abstraction and grounding
Are there “thin objects” whose existence does not make any substantial demand on the world? In my Thin Objects (OUP 2018) I develop an affirmative answer based on a Fregean form of abstraction. This talk explains two central aspects of the resulting view in terms of the notion of metaphysical grounding. First, every truth about some thin objects is grounded in a truth that does not involve these objects. Second, the notorious bad company problem can be solved by insisting that every truth about the desired abstracta be grounded in a truth that is solely about a prior and independently available ontology. ​

'Non-Interference, Freedom, and Ability: How the Value of Freedom Can Determine What Freedom IS'

'Before the Creation of Time in Plato's Timaeus'

David Albert (Columbia University)

'The Problem of the Direction of Time'

Donnchadh O'Conaill (Fribourg)

'The Problems of Universals'

Achille Varzi (Columbia)

'Ontology: Material vs. Formal'

No Colloquium due to Bank Holiday

Vasilis Politis (TCD)

'Why cannot essences, or Forms, be perceived by the senses?'

'Knowing by Another’s Understanding: an early modern debate about knowledge, testimony, and faith'

“What does chemistry bring to the table? – Sketches of a philosophy of chemistry”

Johnny Lyons (Trinity College Dublin)

‘The “history” of political philosophy’

Kirsten Walsh (University of Exeter)

‘Newton’s metaphysics in practice’

Kristina Musholt (Leipzig University) 

‘On the normative dimension of folk psychology’

Agnieszka Rostalska (Ghent University)

‘What makes one an authority? Nyāya's reference to current epistemology of testimony'

Philip Ehrlich (University of Ohio)

‘Cantorian and non-Cantorian theories of finite, infinite, and infinitesimal numbers and the unification thereof’

Justin Vlasits (Tuebingen University)

‘Aristotle on the hunt for essence’