Aristotelian Themes in Contemporary Metaphysics @ Boise, Idaho
Kit Fine in action
Last weekend I went all the way to Boise, Idaho for this conference which had a title almost identical to my forthcoming volume, Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. An ideal place to publicize the volume! Kit Fine was the keynote speaker, and he also gave a public lecture just before the conference. I attended this lecture as well, and was amazed by the turnout — there must’ve been some 300 people listening to Kit’s fairly technical talk on the ontology of mathematics, and only a handful of those were actually philosophers! He did a great job and gave an entertaining talk, even though much of the audience must’ve had great difficulty in following what he was saying (in a nutshell, it was that mathematics is based on certain basic principles from which we can derive as many classes of numbers etc. that we might need (natural, integer, rational, complex..) and is hence something between invented and discovered; to explain these basic principles Kit draws on computer science, or dynamic logic in particular).
Hawthorne on grounding
I enjoyed the conference, although I don’t think that all the talks fit under the conference theme that well. There were at least one or two which were much more in the Lewisian tradition than (neo-)Aristotelian. But with such an impressive list of speakers, including John Hawthorne, L. A. Paul, Kathrin Koslicki, and Daniel Nolan among others the conference was always going to be interesting. Hawthorne did a good job summarising the current state of the literature on ‘grounding’, giving a number of reasons to favour Fine’s picture rather than Jonathan Schaffer’s, who has also written on the topic (but wasn’t at the conference). Personally I found Laurie Paul’s talk on ‘Categorical Parsimony’ the most interesting, even if it did consist largely of criticising the different category theories out there. She was selling the idea that we only need one ontological category. I’m not quite convinced, but I haven’t really made up my mind on this issue…
L. A. Paul defending a one-category ontology
Kathrin Koslicki’s talk on ‘Existential Dependence’ was also good, although I couldn’t follow it quite as closely as the others since I was also chairing the session. Kathrin and Kit also contributed papers to my volume. Kit’s keynote address (in addition to the public talk) was rather technical, but very captivating. Unfortunately I didn’t follow it very well either, since it was on the determinate/determinable distinction which I’m not very familiar with (I guess I should be…). However, I recorded Kit’s talk with my video camera, so there’s a possibility of going back to it. I will probably make it public once I’ve had a chance to edit the video (but this may take some time, as my computing power is very limited while I’m still in NYC). Well, I don’t think that I will go into the details of the talks more than this since nothing gripped me that deeply.
Boise, Idaho is not the most interesting place in the world, but the organisers did an excellent job in entertaining us, and I didn’t mind the small town feel so much because I’m getting rather tired of wading through the tourists on Times Square every day. Boise is in a nice valley surrounded by some mountains though, so there is plenty of natural beauty around. In fact, on Sunday morning I ran up a nearby hill, called Table Rock. It’s only some 1120m high and since Boise is about 800m to begin with it was not too tough, but I’m missing the hills here in NYC! Anyway, my thanks to the organisers and especially to Andrew Cortens for inviting me to the conference, it’s was good fun! I also enjoyed seeing some old acquaintances from other conferences, as well as meeting a bunch of new ones.
One half of the conference audience
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