• Home
• Call for Papers
• Schedule
• Abstracts
• Directions
• Links

Avery Archer (Columbia), ‘Competing Aims: Velleman vs. The Guise of the Good Theory’

In his paper, “The Guise of the Good”, David Velleman attempts to impugn the Guise of the Good Theory of Desires (GG theory); the thesis that desires aim at the good. To this end, Velleman argues that desire aims, not at the good, but at the attainable (i.e., a possible future outcome). However, I argue that Velleman’s objection to GG theory only succeeds if we saddle the GG theorist with a commitment she need not have; namely, a commitment to the claim that the good is the constitutive aim of desire. Once we recognise that the GG theorist only needs to be committed to the weaker claim that the good is the normative aim of desire, Velleman’s objection to GG theory misses its mark.

Harjit Bhogal (NYU), ‘The Chancy Past’

It is generally taken to be a platitude about chance that past events cannot be chancy. I claim that this should not be the case. In section 1 I consider various accounts of objective chance. Most of these accounts do not make chances relative to time, however they still seem to be plausible accounts of chance. This provides a motivation for thinking that the past can be chancy, especially on Humean accounts of chance. I then move on to consider arguments against the chancy past. In section 2 I consider the argument that the openness of the future (and the fixity of the past) grounds the time-asymmetry of chances. In section 3 I consider the argument that the chancy past is in tension with the Principal Principle. And in section 4 I consider an argument based upon Lewis’s ‘labyrinth’ example. I find that none of the arguments provides strong support for denying the chancy past.

Justin Khoo (Yale), ‘On Stalnaker’s Unified Theory of Conditionals’

A problem for Stalnaker (1975, 2011)’s unified theory of indicative and subjunctive conditionals is raised. Several solutions to the problem are discussed and rejected. The tentative conclusion is that we shouldn’t account for the semantic differences between indicative and subjunctive conditionals in terms of the mutual presuppositions of speakers in the discourse.

Ryan Perkins (Oxford), ‘Of Grounding and Explanation’

This paper explores a challenge faced by the acolytes of grounding-theoretic metaphysics. The challenge threatens to render many contemporary accounts of grounding incoherent. I shall argue that the challenge can be overcome, though not without considerable difficulty.

Roughly speaking, the challenge is this. Grounding is said to be an explanatory relation: for x to

ground y is for x to provide a distinctive ‘metaphysical’ explanation of y. Plausibly, all explanatory relations satisfy various constraints: irreflexivity, asymmetry, factivity, non-monotonicity, and so forth. But it is possible to prove—with the aid of apparently platitudinous premises—that grounding cannot satisfy several of the foregoing constraints, and thereby fails to qualify as an explanatory relation.

Defenders of grounding must reject an apparently platitudinous premise, or modify the

explanatory constraints. To that end, we shall proceed as follows. §1 introduces the notion of

grounding. §2, §3 and §4 successively explore three versions of the challenge raised above. I argue that defenders of grounding have a satisfactory response to each version of the challenge.

Uwe Peters (King’s College London), ‘How We Don’t Know Our Own Thoughts – Self-Knowledge and Cognitive Phenomenology’

We typically know our own sensational states, e.g., pains simply by experiencing them. How do we know our own thoughts? Do we experience them as well? Do thoughts have phenomenal properties? In recent years, the existence of a sui generis cognitive phenomenology (CP) - a what-it’s-likeness of conscious thoughts and propositional attitudes that is distinct from and irreducible to any kind of sensory or imagistic phenomenology - has been hotly debated in the philosophy of mind. One major strategy in support of CP is the ‘argument from self-knowledge’ defended in particular by David Pitt (2004, 2011). Pitt contends that we are able to know our own thoughts non-inferentially and that CP is a prerequisite for this ability. His case rests on the assumption that if conscious thoughts had phenomenal properties, we could acquire self-knowledge of them via these properties. I shall argue that this assumption is mistaken. It is not possible to know one’s own conscious thoughts via their phenomenal properties. Thus, the argument from self-knowledge in support of CP collapses.

prconf2011@gmail.com