University of Sydney Philosophy Seminars

Welcome to Dave Macarthur!

2011-03-03T14:03:00.000+11:00

Rachel is in New York, philosophising, and your webmaster and host has acquired certain burdens that rule him out for a while so we will have Dave Macarthur running seminars for the next while. All offers to him, and welcome, Dave!

Welcome to Rachael Briggs

2010-08-09T14:13:00.001+10:00

Rachael has agreed to run the seminar series while I'm on leave. Welcome, Rachael! It looks like a great series. Hope you all enjoy!

The Sydney Conference Season!

2010-06-10T14:26:00.004+10:00

Dear All:

Well now that regular Wednesday seminars are over for the semester (though curent projects aren't letting you off so lightly) it's time to start thinking about the conference season. Of course AAP is in Sydney (at UNSW) this year, but at USYD we have two conferences back to back after the AAP: Reasons and Belief-Desire Psychology and the Engaging McDowell conference

A belated welcome to 2010

2010-03-25T16:16:00.002+11:00

Dear All

Welcome to the seminar series again. Next week we are pleased to offer Eliot Sober, one of the most eminent philosophers of biology there has ever been. And a terrific, entertaining speaker as well!

A big welcome to the pre-honours students who are attending the series this semester. If the rest of you were wondering who these keen young faces are, wonder no more.

More calendars now served

2009-08-28T08:14:00.006+10:00

Two new kinds of events are now on this calendar; Sydney Centre for Foundations of Science events, and the Postgraduate Work in Progress seminars. The latter are grey and the former are aqua.

Two other housekeeping matters: URLs have changed.

To subscribe or unsubscribe to the sydphil list go to www.sydhpil.info

For this blog go to www.seminarblog.sydphil.info

For the large calendar go to www.calendar.sydphil.info

Multiple calendars now here on UsydSeminars

2009-06-15T21:23:00.006+10:00

There are now three calendars being served to this page.

The gold entries are departmental seminars, the green entries are current projects seminars and the purple entries are philosophy conferences and workshops organized by the University of Sydney. It may be a couple of days before the current projects and conference entries will reflect all that we have planned for you!

Alexander Bird's talk last Wednesday

2009-06-13T13:41:00.005+10:00

I enjoyed Alexander's talk last Wed, so I thought I'd try out the discussion feature of this blog with some comments about a side-issue that came up: his objections to the idea that objects are essentially members of the natural kind of which they are actually members. The idea is that a sample of gold is essentially gold; it can't cease to be gold without ceasing to exist, and that very same thing couldn't be anything other than gold.

We had some compelling examples to the contrary; the decay of Barium to Cesium for one. A sample of Barium changes very little when it becomes Cesium. It loses only a tiny part of its mass. Surely the thing still exists, it's just that it's now a member of a different kind.

This example and all the other ones were examples of something persisting but as a member of a different kind. One thought is that if you are a four-dimensionalist, a persisting thing is just a fusion of temporal parts -- so it's not obvious why it can't be a fusion of things that are themselves members of various kinds. The persistence criteria for objects are usually causal ones -- each later temporal part has to be caused in the right way by the earlier one -- and in all of Alex's examples, this was plausibly the case despite the earlier being a member of a different kind that the later.

But none of that, I think, bears on the question of whether the minimal entities -- the smallest temporal parts themselves -- are essentially members of the kind that they are members of. While, as a matter of fact, I don't think that they are, I think that a defender of that doctrine who is a four dimensionalist ought think that it applies only at the fundamental level. So a particular atom-temporal-part of Barium couldn't be the very same thing without being Barium (in nearby worlds where decay happened earlier that atom-slice doesn't exist, but a Cesium one does)

So I guess I think we need an independent argument for the modal claims as applied to the temporal parts.