On 17 September 2021, we’re having a small workshop with Peter Verdée’s Explanatory Inference group and Fabrice Correia’s project Describing the World. See here for more info.

We’re once more delighted to report upon a publication success. Stefan’s paper “In Defence of Explanatory Realism” has been accepted for publication in Synthese. Link to the (open access) paper to follow as soon as it is available. As the title would suggest, the paper defends Explanatory Realism — here understood as the view that all explanations provide information about causes, grounds, or other forms of determination — against recent criticism.

We’re delighted to report on two new publications!

Martin’s paper ‘Maybe Some Other Time’ has been accepted for publication by the Australasian Journal of Philosophy! In this paper, Martin develops a puzzle whose resolution requires us to recognize an unfamiliar distinction between two forms of metaphysical modality, each bearing a different relationship to time. A penultimate version is available for download here.

Singa’s paper ‘No Normative Free Lunch: Relevance and the Autonomy of the Normative Domain’ has been accepted for publication in Synthese! In this paper, Singa develops a ground-theoretic explication of the abstract autonomy claim according to which we cannot get normative statements from purely descriptive statements. The relevant autonomy thesis, formally explicated within the framework of truthmaker semantics, states that no normative proposition is fully grounded in a collection of exclusively descriptive propositions in a normatively relevant way. A penultimate version will be available for download soon.

I am delighted to report that I’ve had a paper accepted by Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. It is called ‘Singular Troubles with Singleton Socrates’, and it develops a modification of Fine’s truthmaker semantics in order to make it consistent with what I argue to be a very natural view of the structure of the grounds of the existence of the singleton set of Socrates (or anybody, indeed anything, else). A penultimate version is available here.

Some news on upcoming presentations by team members: Having barely started, Singa will already present some of her ideas on the Is-Ought Gap in a talk on Hume’s Law under Different Mathematical Guises at the GAP PhD-student workshop 2019 on Mathematical Philosophy in Munich. Moreover, Martin will be explaining What Time is it in Other Possible Worlds in Nantes at a workshop on Correlating Possibilities.

I am happy to report that I have a new paper forthcoming in a volume for Kit Fine in the Springer series Outstanding Contributions to Logic, edited by Federico Faroldi and Frederik van de Putte. It is called The Whole Truth, and a penultimate version is available here.

We are delighted to announce that Singa Behrens will be joining our team as a PhD researcher, with a planned start date of 1 August. Singa’s current and recent research is focused, among other things, on the grounds of normative facts, and the question of the logical and metaphysical autonomy of the normative realm. We are very happy to have her on board!

We are now accepting applications for a PhD position in the relevance project. The official advertisement is here. An unofficial, slightly more informative version can be found here.

 

Very pleased that my paper Ground-theoretic Equivalence has been accepted for publication in Synthese! The penultimate version is available for download from the publications page.

We are pleased to announce that video recordings are now available of some of the talks from our recent first RelEvent — a workshop on Varieties of Relevance. Click here to see talks by Gerhard Schurz on Relevance in the Theory of Confirmation and by Hannes Leitgeb on Relevance: Semantics, Logic, and the Logic of Belief. Thanks to the Lecture2Go team at the University of Hamburg for providing these!