March 30 & 31, 2012
Keynote Speaker: Timothy Williamson, University of Oxford
What is it for something to be possible? And what have possibilities
to do with us and the world? Can envisioning them tell us something
about what there is and how to act? How do we know that something is
possible, and how should we reason about it? Is there a core
conception of possibility that runs through all such questions? If
not, in what relations do these various conceptions stand?
The graduate students of philosophy at the University of Toronto
invite papers exploring these and related issues for their 12th annual
graduate conference. We welcome submissions from all fields in
philosophy, including those making connections to other disciplines,
and especially encourage those engaging the history of philosophy.
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
The logic of future contingents in ancient and contemporary philosophy
The concept of potentiality (dunamis) in ancient thought, and its relation to the modern notion of possibility
Developments in medieval theories of modality in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
The relations among various sorts of possibility, e.g., logical,
conceptual, epistemic, metaphysical, mathematical, nomological, technological or practical
The relations between various sorts of possibility and various kinds of modal logic, e.g., alethic, doxastic, deontic and so on
Quantified modal logic and the Barcan Formula
Realism and antirealism about possibilia
The existence of unactualized or unactualizable possibilities
The connections between intuitions, evidence, conceivability and possibility in counterfactual or thought experimental reasoning
The relations between skeptical possibilities, justification and what it means 'to know that p'
The conceptual relations between the notions of possibility and probability
The supervenience of the normative on the natural, i.e. the impossibility of an identical world having the same natural but different normative properties
The bearing of the principle of alternate possibilities on free-will and moral responsibility
The best of all possible worlds and Leibniz's philosophical theology
The role of utopias or ideal social arrangements in political and ethical thought
The relation between the possibility of discourse and democratic institutions
Deadline for submission: JANUARY 5, 2012
Please submit through EasyChair. Submissions must be in doc(x) or pdf
format and prepared for blind review. Papers should not exceed 4000
words and abstracts should not exceed 300 words. Only one submission
per author. Limited travel stipends are available, with special funds
for exceptional papers in ancient and medieval philosophy.
For more information, please contact us at: torontophilgradconf AT
gmail DOT com
