Location



The seminar is held in hybrid format, in person (Múzeum krt. 4/i Room 224) and online.

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5 April  (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE
Zoltán Jakab
Institute for the Psychology of Special Needs
Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
 
Mental files and metarepresentation: data and theory on the development of false belief attribution and intensionality
Recent data seem to support the view that the understanding of false belief emerges in infancy, way before fluent speech. A related question is, when children come to understand intensionality, that is, the idea that one and the same object may be represented in different ways by different people. Contrary to false belief, the latter question is not easily approached by the methods of dishabituation and preferential looking, therefore existing studies examine young children in preschool age. One central question is, does the understanding of intensionality constitute a separate stage of mindreading development that follows the mastering of explicit, verbal-response-based false belief tasks, or as soon as children succeed in verbal false belief tasks they have at least an initial grasp of intensionality. Empirical results are complex and controversial on this issue. An interesting contender in accounting for them is mental file theory, which suggests that children who understand first-order, but not second-order false belief can form the required kinds of mental files, but cannot yet handle them reliably in every respect, and this explains their interestingly faltering performance on dual-identity object tasks.



12 April  (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE
Jeffrey Strayer
Purdue University Fort Wayne
 
Art and Identity: Nothing, Something, and Everything
The history of art suggests that any artwork of any kind of artwork is an object of some kind of object that has been singled out by the artist whose work it is in a way that is consistent with the nature of the object that the work is intended to be. I have defended this view in my books Subjects and Objects and Haecceities as forming part of the basis for investigating the limits of Abstraction in art and the possibilities of producing radical works with kinds of identity whose novelty may test certain assumptions on which artworks are thought to rely. This paper concentrates on a single language-based work of art that can be understood to be nothing, something, or everything at the same or different times, thus suggesting that, given the relation of artistic intention to the creative determination of identity, Leibniz’s Law can be violated with certain works of art. It is reasonable to suppose that any artwork, no matter how radical, is something that results from at least one intentional conception that fits the nature of the thing that is produced according to that conception. And the basic conditions of making and apprehending works of art dictate that artworks either are, or depend on, particular objects that have particular identities that are determined and grasped according to certain conceptions. Given that these things are the case, one of the more reductive artworks possible would be something realized in an event of conception in which it is understood to become what it is meant to be in the act of conceiving of its being the being that fits the conditions of its conception. This can be achieved with directing language to its understanding in such a way that what is singled out by the language understood depends on conceiving of its relation to a conception that incorporates understanding the relation of that thing to the conceiving of that conception. The language of the artwork of this paper includes a gap that can be mentally filled in either of two ways, making two versions of the language. The first version of the language enables it to single out something or everything, depending on how that version is understood. Since everything, as an object, as something, consists of each thing of every kind of thing, including abstract, fictional, and impossible objects as well as spatio-temporal entities, it would appear to be impossible to produce a work of art that is everything beyond simply declaring a particular work of art to be everything. However, there is a more interesting, productive, and minimal way of making everything, as the all-inclusive object, be a work of art that fits the goal of producing a reductive object of radical identity. This can be done through so understanding the same language on which the work as something relies that, in virtue of its being affected by the forming of a particular conception, everything becomes linked to itself through the conception on which it depends to acquire the property of being linked to itself through the conceiving of that conception. Producing a work of art with a radically reductive identity depends in part on using perception and conception as media or means of producing an object so linked to an event or events of conscious conception that it reflects its relation to the event on which it depends to have an identity that exhibits its connection to that conception. On one interpretation of the language of this work, something is linked to itself through a reflexive conscious conception that is monadic and second order, and on the other interpretation everything, as the maximum object, is related to itself through an event of reflexive conception that is dyadic and first order. This shows that the form of an artwork may not be defined solely by the settled terms and relations of a perceptual object, but may be shaped or determined by the form of the conception on which it depends to be one or another object of conception. In this case, the form of the same single work of art can differ according to whether it is understood to be something or everything as either is determined by a particular conception to be the object of that conception. In addition, because of the odd nature of the object that is everything, an artwork that is understood to be everything has a complex form whose irregularity differs from the form of any other object of any other kind of object. The wording of the second version of the language of this artwork is designed to engage its comprehension so that nothing is delineated for thought through thought as that to which something conceived cannot be related through the conception of that to which something conceived cannot be related through its conception. As this version of the specification is understood, its language is so related to its understanding that there is an ensured failure to reach nothing in the reflexive understanding that incorporates its defeated relation to pure nothingness as a dimension of that understanding. This enables that version of the specification to establish one kind of ultimate radical identity, since ‘what’ is singled out by the specification understood must lack the identity that ‘it’ is understood ‘it’ cannot be conceived to have. Here the conventional object of art, with its form and content, is displaced by a conception in which the notion of object elimination is reached by language engaging thought in a way that ends in the conceptual vacancy that is tied to that conception. Since nothing is not an object, and yet can be understood to be a work of art in the ways indicated herein, considerations of the work of art that is the subject of this paper show that not every work of art has a conventional identity that is associated with a single stable object, thus raising novel questions about the relation of art, mind, objects, and ontology.


19 April  (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE
Bence Marosán
  Department of International Relations, Budapest Business School
 
Phenomenological and empirical investigations concerning the genesis and fundamental nature of minimal mind
Consciousness belongs to the most important and miraculous issues of contemporary philosophical and empirical scientific research. There are hundreds (maybe thousands) of different models that try to explain the genesis and fundamental nature of consciousness, yet, there is no consensual model today. In this lecture I would like to provide a specific branch of such models, namely, the subcortical models of consciousness, according to which certain neural mechanisms in the subcortical parts of the brain (most importantly in Mesencephalon and Diencephalon) are responsible for the emergence of consciousness at the lowest level. These mechanisms arose during the evolution to help the organism to cope certain environmental challenges. In this lecture I would like to offer certain suggestions, how such models could be tested and studied in a phenomenologically legitimate way, that is to say, in a way which is directly accessible for one’s first-person perspective. I would like to propose certain experiment which would help us to test such models, in such a way which would provide us direct evidence for the truth of this approach, (or, just the opposite way, which would weaken such claims).



26 April  (Friday) 4:15 PM  Room 224 + ONLINE
Sergi Oms
  Faculty of Philosophy, University of Barcelona
 
The epistemic structure of paradoxes and the Problem of Change
In this paper, we present an argument that shows that if something is, apparently, a paradox, then it is in fact a paradox. Furthermore, we apply our findings to a recent discussion on the so-called ‘Problem of Change’. Throughout the history of philosophy, many authors have viewed change as a paradoxical phenomenon. Recently, a number of philosophers have defended that the Problem of Change is not a paradox. In the paper, we argue that the Problem of Change is an apparent paradox, thereby establishing that it is a paradox.