Dear all, As usual, the Serious Metaphysics Group will meet from 4.30 p.m. to 6.00 p.m. on Wednesdays this term.
The full termcard is available on the webpage <https://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/SMG>. Our first speaker is Lukas Skiba (Hamburg). His title and abstract are as follows. Title: From Higher-Order Modal Logic to Necessitism? Abstract: One of Williamson's main arguments for necessitism, the view that all being is necessary, is that necessitism coheres better with an adequate higher-order modal logic than its negation, contingentism, does. The argument has two parts. The first part argues that an adequate higher-order modal logic entails that necessarily everything necessarily has a haecceity, where the haecceity of an object is the property of being identical to the object. The second part argues from this plenitude of haecceities to necessitism. A major consideration here is that those who accept the plenitude of haecceities but resist necessitism incur an explanatory commitment that they are unable to discharge, namely that of explaining how it is that haecceities `lock onto' their target objects even when those objects are absent. In this paper I try to clarify this haecceity-based argument in several respects. In particular, I consider the question of what notion of explanation the argument is operating with. After arguing that the argument can be fruitfully understood as a challenge to provide metaphysical grounds for certain haecceity facts, I offer a contingentist response that draws on recent work on the connection between ground and essence. Best wishes, Alex Alexander Roberts Lecturer, Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge Website <http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd4036/> _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
