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.

Next week our conference on Difference-Making and Explanatory Relevance starts. You can find the schedule and some abstracts on the conference page. Also: there is a poster.

We’re a bit late to the party, but you can now follow us on social media: @RelevanceHH on Twitter and Facebook.

We are happy to announce a small workshop on Explanation, Relevance, and Understanding, with Finnur Dellsén, Kareem Khalifa, and Angela Potochnik, to take place on June 1 via Zoom. Have a look here for more details.

We are delighted to announce a conference on difference-making and explanatory relevance, to take place via Zoom from July 12 to July 16. Invited speakers are Laura Franklin-Hall (NYU), Carolina Sartorio (Arizona), Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers), Michael Strevens (NYU), and Vera Hoffmann-Kolss (Bern). There are five slots open for contributed papers. For details, please have a look at the conference-website here.

I am very happy to report that I’ve got a paper forthcoming at Philosophical Studies. It examines the idea that grounding explanations can be accounted for by the counterfactual theory of explanation and eventually argues that they can’t. A penultimate version is here.

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.

We are delighted to announce that there will be another Summer School in Hamburg, taught by Franz Berto and jointly organized by the phlox research group and the Relevance team. This year’s topic will be The Hyperintensional Revolution: Topics and Non-Normal Worlds. For further information, please visit this page.