PhD Seminars

Doing Philosophy

The course will be on the methods of contemporary philosophy. The emphasis will be on their similarity to the methods of other theoretical sciences, not exclusively the natural sciences, in opposition to the view that philosophy is somehow exceptional. The individual lectures will be:

Starting from Common Sense
Disputing and Clarifying
Thought-Experimenting
Comparing Theories
Model-Building

The PhD seminar for this year will be taught by Mario Gómez Torrente (UNAM, IIF), based on a forthcoming book.

The course will take place on May 24, 25, 29 and 30, in the seminar of the former department of History of Philosophy, room 4029, 11-13.


Roads to Reference

The talks in this series are parts of a potential book on the metasemantics of reference. In them I explore questions concerning the issue of how the referents of a variety of expressions are fixed. The ways reference is fixed are varied, both across kinds of expressions and across examples of one same kind of expression; in some cases some kind of descriptivism is reasonable, while in others some kind of anti-descriptivism holds, for example. However, the talks (and the projected book) will seek to draw some (more or less modest) patterns of unification. For example: descriptivism is only reasonable in some localized cases where the relevant description is relatively simple, and in other cases some kind of anti-descriptivist mechanism is at work; reference to abstract kinds is feasible via ordinary mechanisms of reference fixing, despite popular eliminativist considerations to the contrary coming from the philosophies of special scientific disciplines (mathematics, chemistry, biology...); etc.