Dear all, Just a reminder that Claudine Tiercelin (Collège de France) will be giving a talk entitled 'A Plea for Dispositional Essentialism' (abstract below) tomorrow (Tues 27th January) at the Moral Sciences Club.
The talk will begin at 2.30pm, ending at 4.15pm, and will be held in Sidgwick Hall, Newnham College (a map is available here: http://www.newn.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.newnham.local/uploads/files/About-Newnham/college_map_08.pdf). As usual, after the talk attendees are welcome to join us for tea and coffee in the philosophy faculty. There is a small charge for attendance at a single meeting (£2 for students; £3 for faculty); alternatively, those wishing to become members of the club may purchase an annual subscription (covering Lent and Easter term 2015) for £7.50 (students) or £15 (faculty). We hope to see you there. Best wishes, Matthew Simpson and Ali Boyle Claudine Tiercelin - 'A Plea for Dispositional Essentialism' After a few words of presentation about my conception of what a genuine metaphysical knowledge of nature amounts to, and why it commits me to dispositional realism, I shall give a brief description of the main characteristics and assumptions on which such a realism relies, namely, a scholastic (semantic) dispositional realism seeking to determine the meaning of our dispositional attributions, but also eager not to view properties as mere shadows of our predicates, assuming scientific realism as an abductive hypothesis, and committed to a causal theory of properties, a conditional dispositionalist account of laws, a partly teleological conception of causation, and finally involving some “thin” essentialism. After presenting in more details the main features of such a dispositional essentialism (much inspired by Duns Scotus and C. S. Peirce), which I name “dispositional aliquidditism”, and explaining why it should not be confused with a mere pandispositionalist or power account (Mumford), I shall try and show the merits of such an approach, not only over other essentialist frameworks (modalism ; quidditism, intrinsic essentialism and other forms of neo-aristotelianism), but also over other relational, ontic or causal structuralist accounts, and even over some other traditional dispositional essentialists frameworks (Ellis, Bird). In so doing, I hope to provide some tools for what I take to be the metaphysician’s much hoped for reconciliation between the « manifest » image and the « scientific » image of the world. -- Ali Boyle and Matthew Simpson Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
