We’re pleased to announce that Nils’ paper “Imagining in Oppressive Contexts, or ‘What’s Wrong with Blacking Up?’”, co-written with Robin Zheng, is now forthcoming in Ethics. The paper investigates the moral permissibility of merely fictive imaginings—roughly, imaginings carried out ‘just for fun’—that deploy unethical attitudes. It articulates three ways that such imaginings can be oppressive. Pre-print here.

We’re delighted to report that Stefan’s contribution “Metaphysically Understanding Why” will receive a Best Paper Award at the GAP.11 conference in Berlin!

We are very happy that Stephan’s paper “Mighty Belief Revision” has been accepted for publication by The Journal of Philosophical Logic. The paper develops and defends a hyperintensional theory of belief revision based on truthmaker semantics. Penultimate version available here.

We are holding a hybrid, two-day event on hyperintensional approaches in formal epistemology. The workshop is a satellite event, following the GAP.11 conference. It takes place in Berlin on September 16-17, 2022. Confimed speakers are Sena Bozdag, Johannes Korbmacher, Karolina Krzyżanowska, Hannes Leitgeb, Aybüke Özgün, and Timothy Williamson. For more information, including on how to register, please click here.

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.