Can we imagine the impossible? While the impossibilists give an affirmative answer to this question, the anti-impossibilists claim that imagination is limited to the possible and correspondingly deny that impossibilities are imaginable. My own sympathies lie with the former camp, and the aim of this paper is to make the case for impossibilism. The discussion proceeds in roughly three stages. In Section 1, I clarify the debate. This consists of two main tasks: elucidating the notion of impossibility involved and elucidating what imagination is and how it differs from other speculative states like supposition. In Section 2, I consider what I call the appeal to introspection, the key move often made by the anti-impossibilist in defending their position, and I aim to show why this appeal should be rejected. In Section 3, I turn more directly to a defense of impossibilism. As we will see, the defense requires the impossibilist to explain how impossibilities might be imagined. After first discussing two impossibilist strategies that I think turn out to be unsuccessful, I then turn to two more promising strategies: what I call the pathway strategy and what I call the disguise strategy.

Philosophers of mind have extensively debated the intuition that experience provides unique knowledge. Responding to influential thought experiments by Thomas Nagel, Frank Jackson and others, philosophers have developed a series of replies to the question of ‘what experience teaches’. Aside from these theoretical considerations, the same intuition (i.e., that experience generates knowledge) forms the foundation of a rapidly increasing development in psychiatry, namely the practice of expertise-by-experience, which is premised on the intuition that former patients have unique and complementary knowledge based on their lived experience with mental illness. However, the practice of expertise-by-experience is hindered by the same theoretical problem that philosophers have addressed: it is very difficult to pin down what experience teaches, exactly, and hence how we might justify or legitimize the role of experts-by-experience for specific tasks and roles.

Much of human imagining is to partake in one of the many practices of imagining that have been developed in human cultures. Much of human imagination is as much an essentially social phenomenon as speaking is.

I will explicate and substantiate these claims by referring to a particular historical episode of social imagination engineering: the building of Sacri Monti in Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy, and its explicitly intended use as shapers of the imagination by the conservative religious reformer Carolo Borromeo.

Returning to theory, I will argue that a proper understanding of this example illustrates important consequences for theoretical issues in the philosophy of imagination. First it shows how problematic the idea of imagination as by default disembodied is. Second, it shows that what an e-theorist has to do is not to deny the existence of representational phenomena, but rather to give an embodied, practice-based theory of representational phenomena. Third, and somewhat more far-fetched, I’ll argue that the proposed conception of imagination throws light on the question whether animals imagine as well as on the question whether memory can be conceived of as a form of ‘imagining the past’.

Imagery essentialism is the philosophical position that only mental states that involve sensory imagination, that is, the (quasi-)sensory experience of imagery content, should qualify as imagination (Gregory, 2016; Kind, 2001). An implication of this position is that people with global aphantasia, i.e., people who are unable to use sensory imagination in all sense modalities (Zeman et al., 2025), would be labeled as being incapable of imagination. I will argue that this implication is so undesirable that it should make us reconsider imagery essentialism. Furthermore, by drawing inspiration from the works of Ryle and Wittgenstein, as well as discussing recent experimental results from aphantasia research, I will propose a competency-based account of imagination, which, albeit not going fully ‘imageless’, aims to loosen the grip that imagery (experience) currently exerts on the concept of imagination.

Keywords: imagination, imagery, imagery essentialism, aphantasia

References:

Gregory, D. (2016). Imagination and mental imagery. In A. Kind (Ed.), The Routledge Handbook of philosophy of imagination (pp. 97–110). Routledge.

Kind, A. (2001). Putting the image back in imagination. Philosophy and phenomenological research, 62(1), 85-109.

Zeman, A., Monzel, M., Pearson, J., Scholz, C. O., & Simner, J. (2025). Aphantasia. Cortex, 182, 212-213.

Mind wandering—the drift of thought away from an ongoing task or while at rest—is often regarded as a mere lapse in cognitive control. This perspective is challenged by reframing mind wandering as a subtle yet significant expression of spontaneous agency. A detailed structural analysis reveals that a mind wandering episode typically consists of several segments, each involving distinct topics (semantic content) and diverse mental activities (e.g., memory, imagination, planning), often connected by automatic associations. This structural view allows for a precise determination of mind wandering’s controlled and spontaneous components. While the initiation of the entire episode and the transitions between segments are normally automatic, the process is not devoid of control. The whole episode occurs under the condition of perceptual decoupling, which relies on inhibitory control, and the unfolding of each segment is supported by working-memory capacity. Critically, the content of these segments is far from random; instead, it is often guided by personal goals and concerns. Therefore, mind wandering can be understood as an emergent mental process, arising from the specific dynamic interaction between controlled elements (such as goal representations, working memory, and inhibitory control) and spontaneous elements, thereby constituting spontaneous agency.

The term imagination refers to a heterogeneous range of mental states and experiences (Kind 2013), yet what unites these under a single conceptual category remains an open question (Nanay 2023). One influential view—what Wiltsher (2019) calls the imitation theory—holds that the essential feature of imagination lies in its capacity to imitate, recreate, or simulate other mental states. This model underpins prominent accounts, from Walton’s (1990) theory of fiction, to Currie and Ravenscroft’s (2002) notion of re-creative imagination, as well as Peacocke’s (1985) and Dokic and Arcangeli’s (2015) accounts of experiential imagination.

Despite its explanatory value in the philosophy of mind, the imitation model has significant limitations—especially regarding the epistemic role of imagination. It risks reducing imagination’s epistemic power to that of a mere surrogate for perception. In this talk, I argue for rethinking the essential feature of imaginative experience. Rather than imitation, I propose that imagination is best characterized by its re-combinatorial power—its ability to draw on diverse mental states and combine them in novel ways. This shift brings imagination closer to models of linguistic creativity, better captures its diverse manifestations, and, crucially, offers a clearer account of its unique epistemic power.

Depersonalisation is typically described as a distressing experience of detachment from self and world, characterised by feelings of disembodiment, emotional neutrality, and alienation, as if one were an external observer of one’s own mental and bodily processes. However, empirical research consistently highlights experiential dimensions systematically neglected by contemporary clinical and theoretical frameworks. These overlooked dimensions encompass heightened interconnectedness, blurred self-other boundaries, expanded spatiality and timelessness, intensified empathic resonance, and episodes of self-transcendence.

To address this critical explanatory gap, I propose a novel philosophical account integrating Eugene Gendlin’s phenomenology of radical embodiment and situatedness with Karl Jaspers’s existential ontology of boundary situations and authentic selfhood (Existenz). Current theories within 4E cognition, despite surpassing earlier cognitivist and individualistic approaches, implicitly retain an ontological dualism separating organism and environment. By contrast, Gendlin reconceptualises body-environment interaction as fundamentally nondual—an indivisible dynamic process from which experiences of self, environment, space, and time emerge as secondary derivative phenomena. Similarly, Jaspers’s notion of Existenz dissolves the subject-object dichotomy, identifying authentic self as emerging within existential boundary situations (Grenzsituationen)—limit-experiences such as suffering, anxiety, struggle, loss, and death, which compel us to confront the intrinsic contingency of our self-conceptions and empirical existence.

My central thesis is that depersonalisation represents such a boundary situation. Negatively, it manifests as pathological alienation resulting from the breakdown of dualistic psychological structures of selfhood. Positively, however, it can actualise radical existential openness and the genuine possibility for self-transformation and transcendence. The proposed account provides theoretical insights and therapeutic implications absent from prevailing paradigms, thus advancing our philosophical and clinical understanding of depersonalisation.

Keywords: Depersonalisation, Existential Phenomenology, Radical Embodiment, Boundary Situations, Authentic Selfhood, Self-Transcendence

Dass Hoffnung praktischen und theoretischen Normen unterliegt, ist mittlerweile weithin anerkannt. In diesem Vortrag möchte ich der kaum beachteten Idee nachgehen, dass Hoffnung selbst ein Standard sein kann, an dem wir unser Handeln ausrichten sollten. Mein Vorschlag lautet, dass ein ethischer Standard sein kann, sich so zu verhalten, dass die Bedingungen vernünftigen Hoffens nicht untergraben oder sogar befördert werden. Diese Idee möchte ich an einem individuellen und einem politischen Beispiel ausbuchstabieren: Im Kontext von schwerer Krankheit und mit Blick auf die Klimakrise.

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Die Verzweiflung wird in der Philosophie seit jeher äußerst skeptisch bewertet - während Hoffnung motiviert und mobilisiert, so die gängige Sicht, führt Verzweiflung zu Passivität und Demoralisierung. Gerade Aktivist*innen argumentieren jedoch zunehmend, dass Verzweiflung angesichts sich zuspitzender Krisen wie etwa dem Klimawandel die einzig angebrachte Einstellung oder Emotion ist. Vor diesem Hintergrund haben auch Philosoph*innen zuletzt versucht, ein differenzierteres Bild der Verzweiflung zu zeichnen. Dabei wird häufig der epistemische Wert der Verzweiflung in den Vordergrund gestellt: diese könne uns wertvolle Einsichten über den Zustand der Welt und unsere eigenen Werte verschaffen. Ich hingegen möchte den praktischen Wert der Verzweiflung genauer unter die Lupe nehmen und fragen, wann welche Art von Verzweiflung welche Formen der Handlung hervorbringen kann. In anderen Worten, was genau ist die sprichwörtliche „Verzweiflungstat" und unter welchen Umständen (wenn überhaupt) sollten wir sie gutheißen?

Moralische Urteile und Handlungen setzen eine Form von Wissen voraus – Wissen darüber, was moralisch richtig ist, welche Prinzipien moralische Normen begründen sowie über die Umsetzbarkeit solcher moralischen Urteile. Wenn wir nicht in einen Relativismus verfallen wollen, muss dieses moralische Wissen bestimmten intersubjektiven Standards genügen.

Allerdings gerät unser moralisches Wissen in einer komplexen Welt voller Unverfügbarkeiten und unterschiedlicher ethischer Wertbindungen unter Druck: Zum einen ist moralisches Wissen aufgrund gesellschaftlicher Situierung begrenzt und standortgebunden, zum anderen ist unsere Urteilskraft nur bedingt dazu in der Lage, alle Möglichkeiten dafür abzusehen, was aus unserem Handeln für Konsequenzen folgen.

Im Vortrag frage ich nach der Rolle, die Hoffnung in diesem moralepistemologischen Koordinatenfeld spielt. Gegen Ansätze, die in Hoffnung bloßes Wunschdenken oder die Bemäntelung von Ungerechtigkeit ausmachen, gehe ich in drei Schritten der produktiven Kraft von Hoffnung für unser Handeln nach.

1. Die epistemische Dimension von Hoffnung: Wie kann Hoffnung helfen, Brüche im Wissen zu überbrücken, ohne ins Beliebige abzugleiten?

2. Die kritische Dimension von Hoffnung: Wie hilft uns Hoffnung dabei, ein besseres Verständnis unserer eigenen Verstrickung in soziale Ordnungen zu gewinnen?

3. Die normative Dimension von Hoffnung: Welche Rolle spielt Hoffnung als motivationale Kraft, um trotz Ohnmacht und Krisenerfahrung an emanzipatorischen und utopischen Projekten festzuhalten?

According to the standard theory of hope, hope has two elements, a cognitive element and a conative element. It is now widely accepted that the standard theory of hope fails to distinguish hope from despair. In this talk, I will critically examine the focus theory of hope defended in Chignell (2023), which proposes a third element, the focus element, in order overcome this limitation of the standard theory. While promising, I will raise doubts about the focus theory of hope. Drawing on recent developments in zetetic epistemology, I propose an alternative understanding of the cognitive element. By reconceptualizing it in terms of inquisitive attitudes and question-settling, rather than beliefs about possibilities or probabilities, this revision delivers a variant of the standard account that can distinguish hope from despair without adding further elements.

According to Carnap’s AUFBAU, the concept of similarity occupies center stage in the logical constitution of the world. The basic method of constitution for Carnap was the method of quasi-analysis. Quasi-analysis crucially depends on the concept of similarity.

According to Goodman, Carnap’s similarity-based method of constitution was fatally flawed. On the other hand, Goodman praised the AUFBAU as a philosophical work of first rank relevant for future philosophy of science. “The AUFBAU cannot yet be relegated to the status of a monument having purely historical interest. Its lessons have not been fully enough learned.” Goodman claimed: “The function of an AUFBAU constructional system is …to map experience. A map is schematic, selective, conventional and uniform. And these characteristics are virtues rather than defects.” In this talk I want to argue that a representational generalization of quasi-analysis renders plausible Goodman’s reading of the AUFBAU as a theory of mapping scientific knowledge. This mapping account may be an interesting project even for contemporary philosophy of science.

I review the works of Gärdenfors (1990) and Scorzato (2013) and show that their combination provides an elegant solution of Goodman’s new riddle of induction. The solution is based on two main ideas: (1) Clarifying what is expected from a solution: understanding that philosophy of science is a science itself, with the same limitations and strenghts as the other scientific disciplines. (2) Understainding that the concept of complexity of a model’s assumptions and the concept of direct measurements must be characterized together. Direct measurements are the context where the concept of similarity becomes essential. I argue that conceptual spaces are part of the solution, but I emphasise that a concept of epistemic complexity must also be part of it, to remediate to the limitations of conceptual spaces. In particular, the fact that conceptual spaces are more robust for single-domain concepts (Strößner 2022) is not a serious limitation if their application is needed only for direct measurements.

As Sznajder (2016) argued, there are resemblances between Carnap’s attribute spaces and the conceptual spaces introduced by Gärdenfors (2000,2014). This connection keeps leading to interesting results, e.g. (Douven,Verheyen,Elqayam,Gärdenfors,Osta-Vélez,2025). Earlier in his Aufbau (1923,1928), Carnap sketched a theory of constructional systems of concepts based on the method of quasi-analysis, which reconstructs concepts as sets of similar objects, see (Richardson,1998), (Del Sordo; Mormann, 2022). But Carnap’s quasi-analysis faced Goodman’s (1953) companionship and imperfect community objections. These were discussed by Proust (1986), Brockhaus (1963), Mormann (1994,2009) and Leitgeb (2007,2011). Independently, Rumfitt (2015) and Mormann (2020,2021) developed polar spaces as an application of conceptual spaces to vagueness. Then, Belastegui (2022) showed that polar spaces are mathematically equivalent to the similarity structures of Carnap (1923), and that these avoid Goodman’s objections because they require the existence of objects that behave like prototypes (Rosch,1975). Unless one constrains the convex regions in a conceptual space, imperfect communities can arise. Nevertheless, these cannot arise when concepts are represented as Voronoi cells, because Voronoi tessellations are Carnapian similarities. Thus, using Voronoi tessellations avoids Goodman’s objections justifiably because it appeals to the prototype theory of concepts. Providing this justification is, I claim, what Carnap’s Aufbau can do for conceptual spaces.

The literature is abundant with similarity conceptions: qualitative similarity, structural similarity, set similarity, a.s.o. Do these similarity conceptions have anything in common, in virtue of which they are all similarity conceptions? I will propose that they can all be related to the concept of sameness, although in three different ways, corresponding to three different types of similarity conceptions: commonality conceptions, closeness conceptions and hybrid conceptions. These conceptions can be used to answer three different questions, relating similarity to sameness (where “sameness” should be understood as “full property-overlap”, not as “numerical identity”). The commonality conception can be used to answer the question: in what ways are A and B (partially) the same? The similarity of A and B is regarded as their commonality. The closeness conception can be used to answer the question: what changes would make A and B the same? The similarity of A and B is regarded as their closeness, the opposite of their distance. The hybrid conception tries to answer both questions. Examples of commonality conceptions are partial identity and number of shared properties. Examples of closeness conceptions are metric similarity and transformations. Tversky’s contrast similarity is an example of the hybrid type.

Using multidimensional scaling, Roger Shepard explained accurate generalisation across contexts by appealing to both geometric similarity representations and probabilistic inference. However, such an explanation would be more complex than if one appealed to either principle alone. There is currently no widespread agreement on whether similarity is more fundamental than probability, or vice versa, or how exactly the two relate. A different notion of similarity – structural similarity – highlights the action-relevance (‘exploitability’) of internal representations and requires these to map onto the environment statistics relevant to explain accuracy or adaptive success. I provide a new systematisation according to which the different notions of probability and similarity complement one another in explaining the possibility of accurate generalization based on learned concepts.

Similarity plays a crucial role in Rudolf Carnap's work on inductive logic. Carnap challenged the traditional view that inductive methods contradict empiricism due to their reliance on a synthetic a priori uniformity assumption. Carnap proposed a logical alternative to frequentist probability, advocating for a probabilistic uniformity assumption. He aimed to categorize all probabilistic statements as analytical and part of an inductive logic. In doing so, he faced several challenges. Two of which turned out to be particularly persistent. First, the challenge of an adequate logical probabilistic treatment of universal statements. Second, the challenge of adequately characterising so-called “analogical inferences”. Both, universal statements and analogical inferences, make up for an important core component of scientific theorising. Regarding the former, Carnap saw a solution in transforming the philosophy of science dealing with universal statements towards one of dealing with their inferential role. Regarding the latter, Carnap modified his systems of an inductive logic, adding more and more free parameters and specifying increasingly sophisticated notions and measures of similarity to account for such inferences. In this talk, we will outline the historio-systematic context and cornerstones of Carnap’s programme and detail the development of different notions of similarity involved in it.

This talk explores the connection between the account of qualities set out by Rudolf Carnap’s phenomenalist constitution system, as presented in The Logical Structure of the World and contemporary quality space theory (QST) as advocated by Clark and Rosenthal. Both frameworks assume that qualities can be characterized in terms of similarity relations: Carnap proposes that equivalence classes of elementary experiences, grouped by recollected resemblance, provide the basis for reconstructing qualities. QST, on the other hand, models qualities as locations in similarity-based quality spaces that are determined by perceptual discrimination in the relevant sensory modality.

I argue that, although there is a historical link from Carnap via Goodman to contemporary QST, the differences between the two accounts prevail. This is particularly evident in at least four respects: (1) Carnap considers total experiences, whereas QST considers modalities in isolation; (2) Carnap compares successive experiences, whereas QST compares experiences elicited by simultaneously presented stimuli; (3) Carnap relies on introspection, whereas QST relies on discriminatory behavior that may occur non-consciously; and (4) Carnap treats similarity as fundamental and distinguishability as derived, whereas QST reverses this explanatory direction.

(Joint work with Carl Hodgetts.)

How we judge the similarity between stimuli in the world is connected ultimately to how we represent them. Because of this, decisions about how we model similarity, either in terms of human behavior or patterns of neural activity, can provide key insights into how representations are structured and organized. Despite this, psychology and cognitive neuroscience continue to be dominated by a narrow range of similarity models, particularly those that characterize similarity as distance within “cognitive space.” Despite the appeal of such models, their topological nature places fundamental constraints on their ability to capture relationships between objects and events in the world. To probe this, we created a stimulus set in which the predicted similarity relationships (based on an alternative model of similarity) could not be simply embedded within Euclidean space. This approach revealed that the spatial model distorts these predictions, and the perceived similarities of human observers. These findings indicate that cognitive spaces—that underlie much recent work probing both visual and conceptual representations in cognitive neuroscience—are limited in fundamental ways that restrict their theoretical and practical utility.

The aim of this talk is to showcase and defend the use of computational methods , particularly network analysis, in Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS). I will begin by outlining several arguments for why network analysis is generally valuable for &HPS. I will then illustrate by way of discussing some examples how some core questions in &HPS can be addressed through empirical network analysis. I will conclude by raising a few thoughts about the relationship between empirical network analysis and more traditional methods within &HPS.

Presentations of philosophical movements normally have to choose a number of key actors for closer study, while making larger claims about a philosophical environment that consists mostly of forgotten participants. Digital methods can help to take the contributions of these participants into account. But extant bibliometric tools do not generalize well to the history of philosophy in the early 20th Century, as citation standards are much looser than in empirical sciences. This is why a group of historians of philosophy has developed mention-based bibliometry (Petrovich et al., 2024).

Our original application is a study of the reception of logical empiricist philosophers in the United States, based on 22,977 articles in 12 Anglophone philosophy journals published between 1890 and 1980. We can now show how and when Carnap rose to a philosophical dominance that could only compare with Kant’s. We also break down the reception of logical empiricism by institutions, confirming that Columbia University publications remained focused on Dewey while logical empiricist philosophy had become the prime topic in other leading departments. The audience is then referred to the web-application https://edhiphy.org through which our database can be explored further, and from where they can create network graphs and empirical studies for their own domain of expertise.

First, I will provide an overview of some of my research questions in the history and philosophy of science (primarily physics), for which the application of computational tools seemed promising. I will then introduce the tools that my collaborators and I chose to use, and present the outcomes of our investigations. I will also deliberately include attempts which have (so far) not come to fruition. These may help us to develop an understanding of which kinds of research questions can be best tackled with computational tools, and of the difficulties that may arise despite bright prospects. Based on this selection of concrete examples, I will attempt to develop some theoretical reflections on computational history and philosophy of science and address questions such as:

What kinds of tools do we have in mind when we speak of digital or computational tools? Clearly, the simple fact that a computer is used is not a sufficient condition.

What function do computational tools have in our philosophical research workflow exactly? Are they more than just heuristics?

Trust in the tools: Under what conditions are we willing to accept the results of computational methods without verifying them through close reading?

Philosophers of science need to be familiar with the object of their study. Part of this familiarity can come from their own scientific training, interviews, and interactions with working scientists, or case studies of historical developments. However, the picture emerging from these localized methods is likely to be incomplete: Modern science is fast, vast, and difficult to grasp in its interdisciplinary entirety. Data-driven methods have emerged in philosophy of science as one way to address this problem. In this paper, I introduce the audience to a new interactive tool that I have built to link philosophical investigations to large corpora of scientific material: OpenAlex Mapper (https://tinyurl.com/OAmapper).

OpenAlex Mapper allows users to project arbitrary search queries to the OpenAlex database (the largest open database of scientific material available) onto an interactively explorable, machine-learning-generated base-map of the sciences. This enables philosophers to quickly check whether hypothesized patterns in the structure, development, and interrelation of scientific fields hold up at scale. As a serendipitous search tool, it also opens the door to exploration of unexpected details and connections.

Conceptual engineering has played a prominent role in recent work in philosophy, and some have even argued that much traditional philosophical work should be understood or rethought in those terms. Here I argue that we need a notion of linguistic function to do work in conceptual engineering. For we need to understand how the relevant parts of language work, and what functions they have served, before we make forward-looking decisions about whether to retain, remove, repair, or revise them. But despite the usefulness of a notion of linguistic function, many philosophers have expressed skepticism against the idea that we can identify the functions of concepts or terms. Here I also respond these strains of skepticism and suggest how to begin to develop a notion of linguistic system function that can avoid these forms of skepticism, building on work in systemic functional linguistics, complemented by a 'concern-based' approach to linguistic functions. Better understanding how parts and aspects of our language function, I will argue, can enable us to make far better-informed decisions in conceptual engineering and can be especially useful in assessing and resolving many old philosophical problems.

Grammatical metaphor is a key resource in the evolution of language's semogenic potential: it allows for new meanings to be made by reconfiguring the relationship between lexicogrammar and semantics. In this talk, I propose a metafunctional perspective on its power. Grammatical metaphor is distinct from other semiotic shifts (such as transcategorisation or conversion) in that it draws on the stratified nature of language and involves a "constant decoupling and recoupling between the semantics and the lexicogrammar" (Halliday 2003: 253). It is therefore intimately tied to metaredundancy (Taverniers 2019), the dynamic mapping across levels that enables languages to stretch their meaning potential in context-sensitive ways.

This power is most visible in knowledge-based and technocratic discourse, where grammatical metaphor scaffolds abstraction, condensation and disciplinarity across ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions. But as Halliday reminds us, "with power comes responsibility" (2003: 269). In the final part of the talk, I explore the ethical and pedagogical implications: who gains access to this powerful resource, and how can it be taught? I argue for a socially engaged view of grammatical metaphor that foregrounds issues of access, appropriation, and linguistic agency in language education.

Halliday, M.A.K. 2003. Linguistics as metaphor. In: Halliday, M.A.K., On Language and Linguistics. Ed. by Jonathan Webster. Continuum. 248–270.

Taverniers, Miriam. 2019. Semantics. In: Thompson, Geoff, Wendy L. Bowcher, Lise Fontaine and Jennifer Yameng Liang (eds.) Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Cambridge UP.

Request, affirm, alert, offer, promise, threaten, declare ... - these are just some of the actions we humans perform when we communicate. A key question in animal communication studies is which sorts of communicative actions non-human animals can perform. In this talk, I will attempt to sketch an answer to this question. To do so, I first give reasons that explain the apparent similarities between humans’ communicative acts, so called "speech acts", and those of nonhuman animals. Second, I explain the main problems with the two dominant approaches to illocutionary acts currently on offer, Gricean intentionalism and Austinian normative conventionalism. Thirdly, I sketch out a new theory of illocutionary acts that is capable of accommodating both human and animal’s communicative interactions. On this theory, each type of illocutionary act is characterised by the functions of the signal and those of the response which constitute a communicative interaction. The final section of the talk discusses some advantages and consequences of the theory.

My aim in this (very much work in progress) paper is to bring the literature on praise into contact with contemporary literature on functions. Theorists have made claims about what praise is and does, attributing various functions to our practice(s) of expressing praise: communicative functions (Macnamara); agency improving functions (Vargas); community building functions (Calhoun); norm affirming functions (Shoemaker and Vargas, myself). But what sense of function do these theorists each have in mind? And how might this help us understand what our practices of expressing praise should do, if they are to be justified? This paper aims to make a start in answering these questions, and so to clarify functional approaches to moral appraisal.

Imagine some beings much like ourselves, but which are unable to dissemble. What exactly would be lost if we were such beings? Why, in other words, have we developed as dissemblers as opposed to non-dissemblers? I will argue that, given some plausible assumptions about our epistemic and psychological limitations, one important thing that would be lost would be our capacity for social repair---or at least much of it. On one plausible understanding of the functions of our capacities, then, the function of deception turns out not to be anything selfish, but rather something like social stability.

Philosophy of mind has for at least the past several decades been understood to be focused on two core questions: (a) the nature of consciousness and (b) the nature of mental representation. There are, however, other sets of question about the mind that concern how we can improve or emend our understanding, rightly reason. Discussions of these questions appreciate that the agency of reasoning subsists alongside habit formation, and that cultivating both reason and proper habits or virtues is important not only for each of us as individuals but also for the well-functioning of human society. In this talk, I will propose a course module on 17th century philosophy of mind understood through a concern with education or the improvement of human understanding. This course module will include familiar canonical figures such as Descartes, Spinoza and Locke, and situate them alongside Marie le Jars de Gournay, François Poulain de la Barre, Madame de Maintenon, and Mary Astell.

A great number of women were active in early analytic philosophy. However, there is still a lack of attention paid to their contributions in research and teaching. In order to change this situation, this talk sets out practical ways to incorporate women’s works into a core philosophy syllabus. One challenge in so doing is our sense of familiarity with works by, e.g., Russell, Carnap and Quine that comes from the fact that these are the texts almost all philosophy students are set as undergraduates. Pedagogically, it will thus be important to explain early analytic women philosophers’ style and context, i.e., state how their ideas diverge from that of their male teachers, mentors etc. For they often have different ideas and arguments, some of which pre-figure later moves that are more celebrated when written by men. For example, Constance Jones’s 1890 signification-denotation distinction is equivalent to Frege’s sense-reference distinction while dispensing with the third realm and explicitly making room for signification (sense) without denotation (reference). Susan Stebbing’s 1932 distinction between same-level and directional analysis made an advance on her mentor Moore and solved the paradox of analysis 10 years before it was formulated. Ruth Barcan’s 1946-47 quantified modal logic was not only the first such logic, but forced Quine to re-examine his anti-modal arguments and replace them with a more interesting and principled anti-essentialism. Stebbing, Alice Ambrose and Margaret MacDonald wrote compellingly about the nature and function of philosophy, in an original manner, distinct from Russell, Wittgenstein or Ryle, and still very much relevant to philosophers today. After briefly discussing some of these examples, this talk will focus on practical suggestions about how to integrate early analytic women’s work in teaching, such as interrogating ‘great man’ narratives by designing courses that are not person- but topic-based, examining women’s influence on others and their exchanges with others instead of presenting their ideas as a ‘critique’ of men’s, including women’s names in essay and exam questions, discussing the discrimination or disadvantages they faced as a result of their gender (and/or race, religion, disability) and how it shaped their lives and careers and, if applicable, their thought.

A particular theoretical development of quantum mechanics, called the process matrix formalism (PMF), features what is called causal nonseparability. The PMF appeals to the notion of quantum process, which is a generalisation of the concept of quantum state allowing to represent quantum-like correlations between quantum events over multiple parties without specifying a priori their spatiotemporal locations. Crucially, since the PMF makes no assumption about the global causal structure between quantum events, it allows for the existence of causally nonseparable quantum processes having an indefinite causal order (ICO).

As a first step, this work aims at investigating the philosophical implications of causal nonseparability, especially for the notion of spatiotemporal relations. We show that, depending on the interpretative framework, causal nonseparability suggests some kind of indeterminacy of spatiotemporal relations. Importantly, this result hinges on the particular physical implementation of ICOs.

As a second step, we discuss possible implications on the laws of nature, and ask whether these results could help illuminate the status of spacetime in approaches to quantum gravity in which spacetime is emergent, rather than fundamental

Cases in which many agents contribute to an outcome, such as individual agents contributing to climate change, pose puzzles for theories of causation. Tiefensee has recently argued that these cases may be infected with indeterminacy, since it is sometimes indeterminate whether such actions can make a difference to an effect. This result is consistent with earlier arguments by Bernstein, Sartorio, and Swanson, that causal claims are sometimes indeterminate. In this paper, I develop a theory of causal indeterminacy that can adequately capture both cases. The theory I propose combines Woodward’s interventionist approach to actual causation with the conceptual tools of supervaluationism, which are commonly used to explain semantic vagueness.

The paper first investigates (some) relations between multidimensional properties, graded properties and indeterminate properties. It then proposes different formal models that are able to capture significant aspects of those relations.

The epistemology of mathematics has traditionally investigated the nature of mathematical knowledge. These accounts, often intertwined with a metaphysical theory of the nature of mathematics, focused on the philosophical justification of our mathematical knowledge. Flourishing as this enterprise may have been, it can no longer claim a monopoly on the epistemological study of mathematics. With the rise of the philosophy of mathematical practice, and following earlier practice-based trends in the philosophy of science, the scope of epistemological topics has been broadened significantly.

A recent topic which has garnered interest is understanding in mathematics. It is not controversial to claim that mathematicians understand the theorems they prove and teach. Yet the precise nature of understanding is itself a source of controversy. Understanding calls to mind a certain sensation, where we are suddenly struck with an insight and we feel like we have grasped the subject at hand. In attaining an understanding of a given subject, we are suddenly struck with a clarity which relieves the sense of perplexity which we may have experienced before. It is this seemingly subjective nature which in 20th century philosophy of science inspired the banishment of understanding to the field of psychology. Without denying that understanding could be an interesting topic to investigate, it was thereby considered to be well beyond of the scope of meaningful philosophical research. This preoccupation with the subjective side of understanding has not been shared by everyone though. While we may be most familiar with the feeling of understanding, this feeling is but one of the many aspects of understanding. Hence, even if we allow that there is a psychological aspect to understanding, this does not prevent us from investigating other features with a philosopher’s toolkit.

Given the developments just sketched, philosophers have fruitfully studied understanding within different fields of philosophy. The philosophy of mathematics too has seen a number of publications on the nature of mathematical understanding over the past decades. Interesting as these publications have been though, they mostly fit within a paradigm that has been dominant within epistemology since the inception of modern philosophy. Descartes famously set the agenda for the epistemological research dominant until this day. In founding the justification of all possible knowledge on the individual ratio, Descartes placed personal knowledge front and centre on the philosophical agenda. Indeed, almost all epistemological research thereafter would start from this first-person perspective. To investigate knowledge would be to investigate how I, as an actor, could attain or experience knowledge. Equally so for understanding, and, by extension, mathematical understanding.

From the paradigm introduced above, understanding of a mathematical theorem has been investigated with the aim of determining what it would mean for an individual mathematician to attain genuine understanding of said theorem. This first-person paradigm has not gone unchallenged though. During the past couple of decades, within the field of epistemology, the social nature of knowledge in general has been increasingly emphasised. Indeed, knowledge is never attained or held in a vacuum. Rather, an epistemic subject is continuously influenced in various ways by the actors surrounding it.

Beyond the recognition of social influence on individual knowledge, the possibility that knowledge itself is not exclusively held by individuals, but that groups of individuals can also be said to convey beliefs, dispositions and knowledge themselves has been considered. This new approach to epistemology, usually referred to as social epistemology, acknowledges that we assign epistemic states to groups and collectives on a daily basis, which has equally been applied to the mathematical community. According to it, individual mathematicians are not the only ones to whom we can assign beliefs and dispositions, but the mathematical community as a whole can also be said to know that this or that theorem has either or not been proven. While beliefs and even knowledge can more or less be readily assigned to groups however, the matter is not so clear with understanding. With the first forays into the idea of group understanding only being of recent date, it is far from clear what the concept would look like in mathematics. It is this topic which we shall further delve into.

This talk argues that hinge epistemology adds new insights which help us understand the role of certainties in mathematical practices. Subsequently, we employ these insights to account for disagreements on a local level coexisting with a high level of consensus in modern mathematics globally. We characterize mathematics as a set of partially overlapping practices instead of simply a tree or a building with secure foundations at the bottom. Explicit disagreements are often casted out of the forefront of mathematics and qualified as mere philosophical background of different practices, thus conventionally contributing to the prevalent image of mathematics as objective and uber-consensual. In a short excurse we also talk why this might have consequences for the idea of inner-mathematical explanations pushing a context-sensitive or even relativistic approach to the issue at hand.

This is jww: José Antonio Perez-Escobar and Jordi Fairhurst.

In my talk I will discuss the meaning of ‘mathematical explanation’ from an enactivist perspective. Enactivism was so named by Varela, Thompson and Rosch (1991) and has its origins in Maturana’s Biology of Cognition (Maturana, 1970/1980; Maturana & Varela, 1992; Maturana, & Poerksen, 2004). A central principle is the observation, derived from the biological study of perception, that living beings do not directly perceive features of an external world. This means in the current context that I must abandon the question, “What is a ‘mathematical explanation’?” and ask instead, “What happens in me when I say that I see something as a ‘mathematical explanation’?”. Hence it is this latter question that I will explore. I will make reference to the feelings of certainty and ‘knowing why’ that I experience in connection with proving and explaining. Along the way, I will also make connections with the ways ‘mathematical explanation’ has previously been characterised in the mathematics education literature, and discuss some implication of this perspective for teaching.

Sources:

Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (1992). The Tree of Knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Shambhala.

Maturana, H. R., & Poerksen, B. (2004). From being to doing: The origins of the biology of cognition. Carl-Auer Verlag.

Maturana, H. (1980). Biology of cognition. In Maturana, H. & Varela, F. (Eds.) Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (pp. 5–58). Reidel. Originally published in 1970 by the Biological Computer Laboratory, Department of Electrical Engineering, University of Illinois.

Varela, F., Thompson, E. & Rosch, E. (1991). The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. MIT Press.

This presentation investigates the pivotal role of mathematics in providing explanation and scientific understanding, grounded in Immanuel Kant’s anti-metaphysical philosophy of mathematics and my own research on abduction, diagrams, and cognitive affordances. Kant’s framework casts mathematics as a transformative tool that organizes empirical phenomena into a coherent system of relations, enabling advanced cognitive processes aimed at making the universe intelligible. I extend this perspective to explore three key aspects:

1) the generalization of Kant’s “Aesthetics” and “Logic” to support a naturalized and historicized view of mathematics, emphasizing the interplay between mathematical concepts and their historical development;

2) the critical role of mathematical modeling as a powerful method for generating explanatory scientific understanding, serving as a counterbalance to the overemphasis on big data; and

3) the importance of mathematically sound cognitive schemata to prevent superficial modeling mischaracterized as scientific.

Incorporating my own focus on abductive reasoning and diagrammatic thinking, I argue that mathematics functions as a dynamic explanatory framework that structures scientific knowledge and enhances our capacity to comprehend the world. This analysis offers a fresh perspective on the cognitive and epistemic contributions of mathematics to scientific inquiry and intelligibility.

This presentation explores the “practical turn” in contemporary philosophy of mathematics, focusing on the use of Interactive Theorem Provers (ITPs) and their intersection with artificial intelligence. In mathematical practice, the distinction between knowing-that a proof is correct and knowing-why it is correct is central. Knowing-that refers to the recognition of correctness grounded in evidential reasons (rationes cognoscendi), whereas knowing-why emphasizes conceptual understanding and explanatory reasons (rationes essendi). This distinction is especially relevant in mathematics education, where explanation—not mere verification—is key to fostering deep comprehension and intellectual autonomy.

The rise of ITPs, particularly in an era shaped by AI, raises important questions about the nature of mathematical explanation. While ITPs are highly effective at verifying proofs, their ability to clarify mathematical ideas and support explanation remains contested. This presentation critically examines the extent to which ITPs—alone or with AI tools—can contribute to the explanatory dimension of mathematical practice. Drawing on insights from philosophy, mathematics, and computer science, I assess the potential and limits of these technologies not only for discovering and verifying proofs but also for cultivating understanding and explanation. The discussion aims to clarify the evolving role of ITPs in the explanatory and practical landscape of mathematics.