Make a note of this major conference coming up in Geneva next September. There have been some complaints about the lack of women in the list of invited speakers, but there are certainly some excellent philosophers on that list, including Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra, Fraser MacBride, Philip Goff, and a colleague of mine from Finland (although from a different department), Markku Keinänen.

CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT “NOMINALISM: A REASSESSMENT”

eidos, the Center in Metaphysics of the University of Geneva, and CUSO (Conférence Universitaire de Suisse Occidentale) are pleased to announce the conference “Nominalism: A Reassessment”. The conference will focus on nominalism about properties rather than nominalism about numbers, propositions or abstract objects in general.

Dates: September 17-19, 2012

Venue: University of Geneva, Switzerland

Nominalism about properties is a traditional view according to which all existing entities are particulars. Specifically, nominalism rejects universals or properties in general. The conference aims to address issues in the history of nominalism, the problems and objections faced by different versions of nominalism, whether historical or contemporary, the relations between different varieties of nominalism, and any other philosophical issues about nominalism.

Speakers

Paolo Crivelli (University of Geneva)

Richard Glauser (University of Neuchâtel)

Philip Goff (University of Liverpool)

Markku Keinänen (University of Turku)

Fraser MacBride (University of Cambridge)

John Marenbon (University of Cambridge)

Joseph Melia (Oxford University)

Claude Panaccio (UQAM)

Alexander Paseau (Oxford University)

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Oxford University)

For further information, please contact ghislain.guigon@unige.ch or visit the website at eidos.

Organising Committee

Ghislain Guigon (University of Geneva)

Gonzalo Rodriguez-Pereyra (Oxford University)

I’m pleased to report that just over a week ago the Academy of Finland awarded me a grant for a three year Postdoctoral Researcher’s Project, A Study of the Foundations of Metaphysics: The A Priori, Modality, and Essences. This is essentially the Finnish equivalent of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. The project will be based at the University of Helsinki, more precisely, at the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies in the subject of Theoretical Philosophy. The project also includes up to seven months of research abroad; I’m planning to spend the majority of this at New York University working with Kit Fine, presumably during the first year of the project. A probable option for the remaining time would be Geneva some time during the second year of the project, although this is still open. I spent a month and a half at the eidos Center for Metaphysics in Geneva a year ago as well.

The total funding awarded for the project by the Academy of Finland is 246.240€, which constitutes 80% of the full costs. The remaining 20% is covered by the department. I will start the project in January 2011, but I am already in the process of moving back to Finland. In the current economic climate I’m quite happy to have secured anything, but to secure funding for a three year project is excellent news. I’m looking forward to going back to Finland after spending five years in the UK, although ideally I may have preferred to stay here. In any case, I won’t be stuck in Finland given the time abroad within the project. There is also a good possibility that I will end up back in the UK at some point.

The following is the abstract of the project aimed at a general audience rather than experts. It emphasizes one topic in particular — the relationship between science and metaphysics — although the details of the project deal with rather more technical metaphysical topics, such as the relationship between essence and modality, and specifically the sense in which modality can be said to be grounded in essence.

What is it that we do, when we do metaphysics? There are as many answers to this question as there are metaphysicians. Yet, it seems impossible to engage in metaphysical inquiry if we do not have a very clear understanding of what metaphysical knowledge is about. This project is a survey of the foundations of metaphysics; I wish to offer an account of how we reach metaphysical knowledge, why we need it, and indeed what it is.

The project aims to develop my previous research towards a monograph — first of its kind about the foundations and methodology of metaphysics. The topic has recently gained a central role in analytic metaphysics and the role and nature of not just metaphysics but all of philosophy is currently being re-evaluated. One of the key questions is the relationship between philosophy and other disciplines, especially natural science. To determine the relationship between philosophy and science we must engage in a foundational analysis concerning the nature of philosophy. In this project I will put forward one suggestion as to what that nature is.

As I already suggested in my doctoral dissertation, metaphysics is what Aristotle calls ‘the first philosophy’. The key question here is: how do we acquire knowledge about the structure of reality? The obvious answer is that we do it by engaging in empirical research — perhaps in terms of physics. While I do not wish to question the importance of the natural sciences, I would like to consider their status in more detail. Specifically, what is the structure of empirical knowledge? On the face of it, empirical research is purely experimental knowledge, but in what sense is this the case? It is true that experiments are a crucial part of scientific inquiry, but is there anything else that scientific inquiry needs? It seems clear to me that the answer is: yes, there is indeed something else.

Consider theory-forming in physics. Typically, theories concerning the fundamental structure of the physical world start from mathematical models, not from experiments. These models are generally tested by empirical means, but this is not always possible. In any case, a central part of scientific inquiry uncontentiously concerns modelling possible explanations for our previous empirical observations. This is arguably the most important part of scientific inquiry. What is striking is that it is thoroughly non-empirical. Scientists construct thought experiments, models, theoretical frameworks and other such things with one goal in mind: to put forward a possible explanation as to why the world appears to us in the way it does. The project I am proposing attempts to get in the bottom of this part of scientific inquiry, and my claim is that it is grounded in metaphysics. The details of the project concern the metaphysical framework that enables scientific inquiry, this includes topics such as the possibility of non-empirical, a priori knowledge, and the nature of modal concepts like possibility and necessity.

The external panel that reviewed my application had some concerns about my extremely wide definition of apriority — understandably so because it is rather radical. Already in my ‘A New Definition of A Priori Knowledge: In Search of a Modal Basis’ (2008) I proposed that apriority deals in metaphysical possibilities and that any metaphysically possible statement can be regarded as a priori, whether or not it holds in the actual world. The panel asks, would I consider the proposition ‘It will rain tomorrow in Helsinki’ as a priori? The worry is legitimate, as this proposition does not seem to be a priori, but it might appear to fulfil my initial criteria, since it is surely metaphysically possible. I can certainly address this worry though, since I think that a priori justification requires more than just metaphysical possibility. So, although the above proposition is metaphysically possible, it does not qualify as a priori if someone with no knowledge of meteorology utters it in Paris based on a hunch of some sort. However, if the proposition is based on a predictive mathematical model which takes into account previous empirical information about weather, then it would indeed count as a priori according to my account. More generally, a priori knowledge concerns metaphysically possible scenarios which are compatible with our current best empirical knowledge and employ non-empirical, a priori methods to establish those scenarios. A lot of details remain to be specified, of course, but the account is supposed to rule out mere guesswork.

Although the external panel had this concern about my account of a priori knowledge, their overall assessment of the project states that ‘This is an extremely strong proposal by an applicant who has already built up an international profile in the area’. The panel appears to have been satisfied with my record so far as well, as they comment on my merits as follows: ‘He has built up a significant set of publications in this field already and has international recognition in this area. The other researchers that he plans to consult and work with (e.g. Kit Fine) are all of the highest international calibre’.

On that note, goodbye England!

Here is the rather delayed report on my second modality talk in Geneva. At the moment I am in Finland, but getting here was rather more difficult than it should’ve been, as I was stuck in London for two days. Anyway, all is well now, and I’m looking forward to going back to Durham in early January.

The slides from my second talk are available here. The slides from the first talk are still here. In the second talk I first covered what I call the conceptualist approach to modality very briefly, it is familiar from the work of Chalmers, Jackson and Sidelle. The main topic was the essentialist approach, mainly due to Fine and Lowe. I won’t go into details here, but basically I tried to motivate two things.

Firstly, we should reserve the term ‘metaphysical necessity’ for only those necessities which are not also conceptually or logically necessary, as Lowe has suggested in his The Possibility of Metaphysics.

Secondly, I think that the role of logical modality in the essentialist picture is debatable; specifically, if we take Fine’s arguments for the independence of natural and normative modality in his ‘The Varieties of Necessity’ seriously, we may have some good reasons to think that logical modality is independent as well. This is because there may be examples of logical necessities which are metaphysically contingent (for someone who thinks that alternative logics are metaphysically possible), and this would violate Fine’s requirement that to be able to subsume a type of necessity under metaphysical necessity, the necessity in question must also be metaphysically necessary. This may seem like a longshot, but I for one do take the metaphysical possibility of alternative logics seriously, or at least regard it as an open question.

Well, that’s that for now, but I do hope to develop the material that I covered in these two talks, and perhaps combine them into a survey paper for Philosophy Compass.

I gave my first talk on the Varieties of Modality at the Problèmes de métaphysique seminar in Geneva last Thursday. It went fine and we had some good discussions, but it was really only an introductory talk, I’m hoping to get into more detail in my next talk. The seminar has a bit of a mixed audience — I understand that it is compulsory for the MA students, but many PhD students and some staff come as well. Generally the talks seem to be pitched much too high for MA students, so I tried to make mine a bit more accessible. Anyway, the discussion is (unfortunately) generally just between the speaker and a number of PhD students and staff.

In my first talk I covered what I call the Kripkean account of different types of modality, which views metaphysical possibility as a proper subset of conceptual/epistemic possibility. It’s not quite clear what Kripke thought about logical possibility, but at times it seems as if it’s co-extensive with metaphysical possibility. I also talked about what I call the conservative account, which is somewhat hostile towards the Kripkean account of metaphysical modality. I looked into Bob Hale’s 1996 paper Absolute Necessities, which I mentioned in a previous post as well. Hale argues that logical necessity is absolute and metaphysical necessity is relative, or at best they are equally strong. In the end I think that the conservative account is not in much tension with the Kripkean account though, because contrary to what Bob Hale claims, a friend of metaphysical modality can easily acknowledge that metaphysical necessity is relative. My slides from the first talk are available here.

Next week I will cover what I call the conceptualist approach and the essentialist approach.