So, I attended my first ever meeting of the American Philosophical Association (APA), Eastern Division, at Washington D.C. This is the huge yearly conference, where most of the job interviews of the US job market take place. I’m not in the market at the moment myself, as I still have two years of my 3-year postdoc left. But I decided to go since I was coming to the US anyway and I knew that a bunch of people whom I’ve met in NYC and elsewhere were going to be there. Of course, I was also a little bit curious about the APA, given all the recent (mostly negative) discussion in the blogosphere. Other than that I was there just to meet friends and listen to some talks really. By the way, it has just been announced that the Eastern APA meeting will be moved to January instead of late December. One of the issues that people have been complaining about is the inconvenient timing, so this is at least one improvement. Apparently this should be in effect by 2015 (due to hotel reservations).

Washington D. C.

I attended the infamous ‘Philosophy Smoker’ as well. Basically the idea is that hundreds of philosophers are stuck in one huge room, with a free bar, and departments (which are hiring) can rent tables in that room in order for the job candidates to feel awkward and compelled to attend another, ‘informal’ interview. I had no reason to do rounds in the tables, so my impression about what happens at them is a bit vague, but the event as a whole does seem very strange. I can appreciate the point of having a reception and providing an informal setting for socialising, but when the free bar consists of Bud and Bud Light, it’s a mystery to me why anyone would prefer it over a decent bar with actual seats… Well, I don’t feel that I got very good value for my $120 registration fee in that regard. More generally, the setting of the conference — a massive, fancy Marriott hotel — was peculiar. I’m used to attending conferences that take place at universities, not at posh, overpriced hotels. In theory such a location could be nice, if you can afford to stay at the hotel (I could not), but then you’re also stuck at the expensive hotel bar, as most people can’t be bothered to go look for anything nicer. The whole thing has an air of elitism about it.

Kit Fine

Fortunately there were some very interesting talks at the conference. Kit Fine’s dialectica lecture, a session with Peter van Inwagen and John Hawthorne, and a symposium on composition as identity are worth mentioning. Kit’s talk, which dealt with truthmaker semantics, was certainly the most interesting to me, although van Inwagen’s talk on relational vs. constitutive ontologies was also good. However, I could’ve gotten much more out of the talks if there had been some visual aids — all but one of the talks that I saw were lacking any kind of slides, and although many had a handout, there were generally not enough of them. This might appear to be a fault of the people giving talks, but no, apparently the Marriot charges extra for projection equipment, and the APA is presumably trying to make a profit by not proving any! This is absolutely outrageous to me, and just goes to show that the whole conference is a bit of a charade (I’m not even going to mention the registration problems…).

Peter van Inwagen & John Hawthorne

Well, despite all the shortcomings, I did enjoy the conference, mostly because I got a chance to see many familiar faces from my time at NYU last spring (in fact, there were much more people from the CUNY Graduate Center). It was also good to see what all the fuss is about, although I hope that if I ever enter the US job market, philosophy departments have abandoned interviews at the APA — it just can’t be a sensible way to do it.

Just briefly about Washington D.C. This was my first time there, and I didn’t really know what to expect. In general, I was positively surprised, as there are some nice restaurants and coffee shops etc. around, and the city has a good metro system and is quite easy to navigate. I also found a nice riverside trail for running, although I was only able to take advantage of it once before a flu virus incapacitated me. Unfortunately I had no time to visit any museums, but I am planning to make it back to D.C. at some point for the touristy stuff.

Cambridge promoted my Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume

Right now I’m settling in to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where I’m spending the spring as a Visiting Scholar. More details here. Updates about my visit will follow in due course…

Photos from the conference in my gallery (note that these were taken with my compact, so the quality may not be ideal).

The Duomo in Milan

I needed a few days to recover from the long and intense Seventh European Congress of Analytic Philosophy in Milan. A huge conference: something like 350 talks in eight parallel sessions over six days. I lost count as to how many talks I saw, even though I had to skip a good few just to keep myself moderately sane. With hindsight I even have some regrets for going for the whole conference, as many people seemed to just arrive for a few days (to give their own talk…). Then again, I do feel that if one expects an audience for one’s own talk, then it’s only polite to try to attend as many talks as possible, at least if they are of some interest. I did see some good, interesting talks. Many of them by people I knew from previous conferences — and it was great to see so many familiar faces — but some new faces too. I attended the previous ECAP conference in Krakow three years ago as well. Krakow was somehow a nicer place for it, because the smaller city was absolutely full of philosophers — in Milan we got too scattered.

Coffee break at the University of Milan

The conference was rather expensive, so you’d expect everything to run smoothly. Well, the basic organization did, except that 20+10min is too short for a talk and there were no breaks between talks, which made it difficult to move between parallel sessions. I found that we hardly got value for money: the conference was divided into two main venues, San Raffaele University and the University of Milan, the first of which is anything but convenient to reach, as it’s quite far from the centre. At San Raffaele there are hardly any services, it felt almost like having a conference at an airport hotel or something. At least they had organized us access to some computers, but we didn’t get wi-fi. In this day and age people will have to check their e-mails during a week-long conference! The conference dinner doesn’t even deserve a comment. I knew it would not be worth 60 euros, but the quality of the food wouldn’t even justify a six euro bill. Besides, even though I had designated myself as vegan, they actually tried to serve me ham. All this was emphasized by the fact that the previous night I had an excellent dinner at one of the few vegan restaurants in Milan for quarter of the price of the conference dinner. Oh well, it was a social event…

Robert Michels

Anyway, on to some philosophical content. Of the invited speakers, I was most interested in Kevin Mulligan’s and Tim Crane’s talks. Mulligan talked about the different varieties of ‘because’, and the talk was interesting, but it did seem more like a survey. I think this is because he didn’t have so much time to explain his own suggestion. Some great examples though, and he gave a good explanation of the *essential because* and the *because of essence*, the two varieties that are of most interest to me. In this connection it’s worth mentioning that there is a CUP volume edited by Fabrice Correia and Benjamin Schnieder on non-causal explanation which is forthcoming (maybe late next year?).

Tim Crane talked about (what he called) psychologism. Not about logic, but (as I understood) about intentionality. The talk was very well presented and I recall being convinced about the thesis, but unfortunately it was the last talk on a very long day and I have to admit that I was nearly asleep. Not because of the presentation, mind you, in fact it was one of the most fluent talks at the conference. Well, it was good to see Tim&Kati in any case!

Matteo Morganti

I’m just going to pick a few of the submitted talks that I saw and enjoyed the most. As it happens, they’re all young metaphysicians (who you should keep your eye on). Call it my unofficial top 4 (in the order of presentation):

• Robert Michels: Wordly Indeterminacy and Modality

I met Robert, who is currently with the eidos group in Geneva (which I’ve visited previously), at the Scott Soames workshop in Cologne last year, where we both gave a talk. At ECAP 7 he developed an interesting account of how to handle worldly indeterminacy (i.e. vagueness) so that it doesn’t cause problems for alethic modality. The talk was a bit technical and I don’t think I got everything out of it in the short time that was available, but you will hear about Robert Michels I think! He’s got a paper on Soames’ critique of the 2D framework forthcoming in Phil Studies.

• Matteo Morganti: On Science and Metaphysics

Matteo is currently based in Rome, I’ve met him in previous conferences as well. He has published a number of interesting papers, and I quite enjoyed his talk at ECAP, in which he pointed out some caveats in the recent deflationary attacks towards metaphysics, especially those due to van Fraassen and Ladyman & Ross. I was sympathetic to many of the points he made, and in fact they are very close to the ones I make in my chapter of the forthcoming Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume.



Pablo Rychter

• Pablo Rychter: Truthmaker Theory Without Truthmakers

Pablo, another old conference aquitance of mine, is now in Valencia. He has done some work on metametaphysics, which has always been a topic close to my heart. At ECAP he talked about truthmaking though, and I’m not quite sure that I agree with him. The talk sketched what Pablo calls a ‘figuralist’ approach to truthmaking, which, it seemed to me, is a bit of a watered-down version of truthmaker theory. The appeal is supposedly that both friends and foes of truthmaker theory could get something out of it, but I’m not convinced that the core idea of truthmaking is preserved in a truthmaker theory without truthmakers (although truthmaking without truthmakers certainly has its defenders). Well, having said that, I do think that a stripped down version of truthmaker theory might be the way to go, it’s just not clear to me that we should do it this way. Interesting talk anyway!

• Giuliano Torrengo: Points of View and Explanation

Yes, I know Giuliano too (you can’t blame me for going to the talks that I know are going to be interesting, eh?). He is with the LOGOS group in Barcelona, working on all sorts of interesting things, such as time. This talk was really on metametaphysics: Giuliano examined how we can determine the ‘representational correctness’ of a metaphysical explanation, starting with the intuition that a sentence is representationally correct if reality is composed by the facts that the sentence ascribes to reality. The view was then developed with some reference to Kit Fine’s work. I didn’t get enough material to adequately assess Giuliano’s suggestion, but there was certainly something interesting underlying there, and I think I was sympathetic to the main idea.

Giuliano Torrengo

Well, there were a number of other interesting and well presented talks, but I think I enjoyed these the most. As to my own talk, ‘Grounding Modality’, it went ok, but I made the mistake of trying to include way too much material. I had also just recovered from a flu, so my voice wasn’t at its clearest. I got very lucky with the timing though: I was in the very first slot after Mulligan’s keynote. Accordingly I got a very good audience, I think the room was nearly full. Not very much time for discussion, but a few people did come to me afterwards, so I guess the talk made at least some kind of an impression. One of the reasons for this may have been that it was very controversial; I sketched an account of the relationship between essence and modality which is based on Kit Fine’s idea that essence precedes modality ontologically, but I want to make their relationship very strict. Specifically, I wish to abandon what I call ‘pseudo-possibilities’ — things that are metaphysically impossible yet conceptually or logically possible. Now, I’ve got a way to do this, but it requires something very controversial indeed, namely abandoning the duality of possibility and necessity. I’m not sure whether this is worth the price, but I plan to toy around with this idea a little bit more…

My talk

So much for the actual conference. Because it was so intense, I didn’t get to do many touristy things in Milan, but I’ve been to the Duomo before, so no matter. I did plan to go to Bergamo, but in the end I didn’t have time for it, and the weather was a bit unpredictable too. However, I did manage to get in a rather long run: 58.5km, or 36miles. I looked for a nice running route on the first day, and was lucky enough to find a canal that went on for 38km. I explored it a bit and it looked good: flat asphalt with nice views right next to the canal. I learned about the town of Cassano d’Adda along the route, and set it as my arbitrary goal. I thought it would be a little bit closer though, and in fact I ran past it to the next tiny village at first. Still, the goal was to run over the marathon distance if I was feeling good, and maybe try to catch a train back if not. Needless to say, I was feeling pretty good! The whole trip with breaks took just over 6h, but the actual running was done at a fairly steady 5:20min/km pace. More details on my Garmin Connect page, since this post isn’t about running!

Just a quick report of the recent Hume’s Metaphysics and Humean Metaphysics conference at Tampere in the midst of my travels (I’m currently in the UK but heading to Spain tomorrow). I managed to edit my photos from the conference, which are here.

Stephen Mumford (Nottingham): Hume’s Argument against Powers

Jani Hakkarainen, who is based at Tampere, put together a very enjoyable conference. I was positively surprised by the quality and I enjoyed the social aspects as well, which included a couple of nice dinners and a sauna evening (we got extremely lucky with the weather). The idea of the conference was to combine contemporary and historical content on Hume’s metaphysics and Humean metaphysics, which is a welcome approach, even though I admittedly got much more out of the contemporary bit. The keynotes were Helen Beebee, Stephen Mumford, Anthony Eagle, Markku Keinänen, Don Garrett, Todd Ryan, and Donald Baxter. Beebee and Mumford were perhaps the most interesting for me, although it was in fact Crawford Elder’s talk on ‘The Alleged Supervenience of Everything on Microphysics’ that I enjoyed the most, and I had a long chat with him afterwards as well. I sympathised with many of Elder’s arguments against microphysics as a suitable supervenience base for *all* things, although I think that it is from people like James Ladyman where some of the most interesting challenges in this regard come from, and Elder didn’t really attempt to address Ladyman’s work. Elder’s new book Familiar Objects and their Shadows looks quite interesting as well.

Crawford Elder (UConn): The Alleged Supervenience of Everything on Microphysics

The content of the conference isn’t so fresh on my mind anymore and I’m supposed to be on holiday anyway, so I won’t go into the details of the talks. I did learn some useful things about Humean Supervenience though, especially while writing my own talk! I gave a talk with the title ‘The Modal Basis of Humean Supervenience’, arguing basically that HS’s claim that all laws of nature are just accidental regularities doesn’t seem right, since there are some good candidates for metaphysically necessary laws. However, I don’t agree with the scientific/dispositional essentialist (e.g. Alexander Bird, Brian Ellis) side of the debate either, since I don’t think that all laws are metaphysically necessary. In this regard I take my cue from E. J. Lowe, as ever. Lowe was also invited to the conference, but couldn’t make it because of previous commitments. I may post the paper here at some point, but I think I need to work on it a little more before that.

My talk: The Modal Basis of Humean Supervenience

It was nice to meet some old friends at the conference as well, especially since this one took place on such familiar ground (well, I don’t know Tampere very well, but it’s not far from Helsinki). Anyway, enjoy the photos, and thanks to Jani for a great conference!

A lovely spot for the conference dinner & sauna!

My first visit to Canada! They say that Canada is a bit like Finland, and I can see why: things are generally fairly organized, it’s clean, and the weather is shitty — it rained most of the time. I did get an 18km run in along the shores of Lake Ontario before the bad weather set in though. I didn’t get (m)any shots of Toronto due to the weather, but my shots from the conference are here. Toronto did seem nice, with a number of interesting bars and (vegan) restaurants, although I didn’t get to explore as much as I hoped, and it wouldn’t have been much fun in the cold and rainy weather anyway.

Victoria College, the conference venue

This conference looked pretty good on paper, and for the most part it delivered as well. The keynote sessions on biology, physics, and methodology were all good, featuring James Ladyman, Katherine Hawley, and Anjan Chakravartty, among others. At many other philosophy of science conferences I’ve found that the talks are too detailed to follow unless you know the (scientific) literature, but not so here: all the talks I attended were quite well presented and not too technical. As expected the Ladyman-Ross book Every Thing Must Go got a fair bit of attention — my talk focused on it as well — and the discussion about the relationship between metaphysics and science was lively.

Stephen Boulter (Oxford Brookes University): On the Transition from Science to Metaphysics

There was a problem regarding discussion though: since even the keynotes only had 40min including discussion, and since many of them had no idea about how to pace their talks, there was hardly any time for Q&A. The general discussion at the end of each plenary session didn’t help much either, as at that point the schedule was broken already. I would’ve had a comment on maybe half of the talks I attended, but I didn’t get to make a single one of them.

James Ladyman (University of Bristol): Plenary session on physics

It was nice to see some familiar faces from previous conferences and I saw a number of new ones as well, but for me the timing wasn’t really ideal for socialising. I had to finish the index for my forthcoming volume while I was in Toronto, and on top of that I got a little bit ill, so I actually went out with the conference folk just once. Anyway, it was a pleasure to catch up with Stephen Boulter especially, since we share interests in the Aristotelian tradition.

Anjan Chakravartty (University of Toronto): Plenary session on methodology

As to the details of the talks, Chakravartty’s was perhaps the most interesting for me. I usually find myself agreeing with a lot that he says, since his approach to the relationship between metaphysics and science is much more relaxed than that of Ladyman’s for instance. Chakravartty argued that there is a clear sense in which a priori methods are involved in scientific inquiry as well, and sketched a system to evaluate such input. However, I would’ve been more interested in detailed examples about how these methods are manifested in science, since this is something that I try to defend myself, but which many philosophers of science find completely baffling. The key, it seems, is that philosophers of science are likely to think that the supposed examples of a priori input in science are just hypotheses and that there is nothing a priori about them. This may indeed seem to be the case if one is stuck with a Cartesian conception of the (infallible) a priori, but this is an obsolete conception anyway. Chakravartty’s project in this regard seemed to be very close to my own: to develop an understanding of the methods of inquiry used to come up with scenarios of what is possible — explanations — in both science and metaphysics.

My talk: Naturalizing Aprioristic Metaphysics

In my own talk, ‘Naturalizing Aprioristic Metaphysics‘ (pdf), I criticised the Ladyman-Ross case against a priori metaphysics by looking at their account of intuitions and general scepticism about being able to access the space of metaphysical possibility a priori. My positive account is a sketch of how this method of inquiry works, taking Lowe’s idea that possibility precedes actuality as a starting point. In fact, the paper is roughly one half of my own contribution to the Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume. The talk went well, but I didn’t have much of an audience. Fortunately those who did come had some interesting things to say in Q&A. It’s clear to me that an important part of this project is to convince philosophers of science (and scientists, I guess!) that there is something we can legitimately call a priori inquiry that science employs, and must employ. I hope to examine some specific examples of this in the future.