Lugano Philosophy Colloquia. Spring 2025

The Lugano Philosophy Colloquia continues on this Spring 2025!

This series of events are held on campus for philosophy students and on Zoom for everyone. To participate in these events, please write to [email protected].

The recordings will then be posted on the ISFI youtube channel.

Provisional schedule and names (the abstracts and titles of the talks will be added in due time):

(1) On Friday, March 14 at 5.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)

Giuliano Torrengo (Milan)

One experience after another

Chaired by Cristian Mariani (USI)

Abstract:

In this talk, I scrutinize the phenomenology of having one experience after another and distinguishing it from other temporal experiences such as change, duration, and the passage of time. I then argue that even though the flow of experience is often described as smooth, we do not experience the temporal dimension as a continuous series of locations. This gives us reasons to believe that experience is not just discontinuous, but also constituted by disunified flows.

(2) On Friday, March 21 at 5.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)

Francesca Boccuni (Vita-Salute San Raffaele)

Forever Young: A Hundred Years of (Frege’s) Abstractionism

Chaired by Byron Simmons (USI)

Abstract:

Famously, Frege’s logicist programme for the foundations of mathematics, based on higher-order logic and abstraction principles, was doomed to failure due to inconsistency. Nonetheless, the legacy of his inquiry was not lost: A hundred years after Frege’s passing, the debate around his philosophy of mathematics is still vigorous, and investigation into the roots of the inconsistency of his programme has prompted alternative ways to use Fregean abstractions for foundational purposes. In this talk, we will explore Frege’s Logicism, its inconsistency, and several possible solutions proposed in the most recent logico-philosophical debate.

(3) On Friday, April 4 at 5.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)

Hans Halvorson (Princeton)

Reduction redux

Chaired by Joshua Babic (USI)

Abstract:

To his list of perennial philosophical questions, Kant might have added: can everything be reduced to the microphysical basis? I return to this question with, hopefully, wisdom gained from a hundred years of trying to make that claim precise, and of arguing about whether it is true. I take two focal points for discussion: (1) the worry (or hope!) that quantum physics shows reductionism to be false, and (2) the hope (or worry!) that new formal insights can save reductionism.

(4) On Tuesday, April 15 at 5.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)

Carlo Nicolai (King's College London)

On Non-Wellfounded Instantiation

Chaired by Leon Probst (USI)

Abstract:

Concerns about the expressive limitations of type-theoretic approaches to properties may lead philosophers to favour type-free options, typically formulated in a first-order language. Given the success of standard set theory and the iterative conception, there have been attempts to formulate theories of properties based on ZFC, justified by an iterative picture. Such approaches, although prima facie type-free, ban any form of self-predication/instantiation, which is in some cases desirable for properties, if not for sets. An obvious alternative is to explore theories of properties based on non-wellfounded set theories and the conceptions on which they are based. In the talk I will discuss and develop this alternative.

(5) On Friday, May 9 at 5.30pm (CET), Room 1.2 FTL Building (USI west campus)

Cristian Mariani (USI)

Non-Markovian Collapse Models

Chaired by Lorenzo Lorenzetti (USI)

Abstract:

Spontaneous collapse models (SCM) employ an imaginary noise term in the modification of Schrödinger's equation in order to achieve a stochastic collapse process. Such noise term is typically assumed to be white, and therefore uncorrelated in time, which results in the dynamics being Markovian. In this talk I begin by discussing the reasons why physicists are exploring the possibility to instead employ non-white stochastic noise terms in the dynamics of SCM, and I then briefly introduce these models. In the second part, I am going to evaluate two broadly philosophical consequences of the non-Markovian models. First, I challenge some arguments, made by Builes & Impagnatiello (forthcoming) and by Adlam (2018), pointing to a connection between Markovianity (or lack thereof) and temporal ontology. Second, I discuss the ontological status of the noise field within the context of SCM.

(6) On Friday, May 23 at 5.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)

Vincent Lam (Bern)

Modelling the Anthropocene and its Boundaries

Chaired by Cristian Mariani (USI)

Abstract:

Climate change is increasingly understood as one aspect of a larger story involving disruptive human interferences in fundamental, life support planetary processes. Navigating this new regime of drastic, human-induced global environmental changes requires forms of scientific knowledge that seriously address both the planetary scale as well as the deep entanglement of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ processes at the heart of what can be called the ‘Anthropocene challenge’. In this context, Earth system science (ESS) has emerged as a new scientific paradigm with the ambition to provide a unified understanding of the Earth system, explicitly including the interacting human dynamics. By framing possible societal responses in a planetary perspective, ESS involves fundamental normative and value dimensions whose wide-ranging ramifications are hard to fully grasp. In this context, this presentation will address the difficulties that the planetary scale of the ESS framework raises for the standard philosophy of science discussions on value management in science. Building on the social science and STS scholarship, the aim is to lay the ground for the development of new forms of value management that are characterized by careful attention to power structures and epistemic injustices. Specific attention will be given to the recent entanglement of justice considerations within the ESS framework of planetary boundaries in view of identifying “safe and just planetary boundaries”, in order to establish to what extent and in what sense exactly it can be understood as a form of justice-oriented scientific knowledge, and what the epistemic limitations and constraints can be.

If you want to stay updated on our incoming events, please visit this webpage, or subscribe to our mailing list.

For any question, please don't hesitate to write to [email protected].

Organisers:

Cristian Mariani, Marta Pedroni, Léon Probst.

Events of the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI)

with the SNSF funded projects:

Equivalence in Metaphysics, Intensionality in Metamathematics, Quantum Indeterminacy.