The 8th Latin Meeting for Analytic Philosophy is taking place in Milan, in June 2015, and it focuses on philosophical puzzles.

“Puzzles have a special place in philosophy. Philosophy itself has been said to be born in puzzlement. And a bunch of puzzles are sometimes what philosophy gets you in the end. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, as the heritage of philosophy lies as much in its theories and visions as it lies in its puzzles. Through their ubiquitous presence in metaphysics, logic, ethics, epistemology, and the rise of scientific thought, philosophical puzzles have contributed to shape the intellectual history of mankind. More modestly, philosophical puzzles are what the 8th Latin Meeting in Analytic Philosophy is about.”

The Latin Meeting in Analytic Philosophy is a biennial meeting that takes place under the auspices of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy (ESAP), the Italian Society for Analytic Philosophy (SIFA), the Portuguese Society for Analytic Philosophy (SPFA), and the Spanish Society for Analytic Philosophy (SEFA).

Latin Meetings, whose first edition dates back to 2001, have always been held in one of the Latin European countries. Their main purpose is to offer an opportunity to researchers (mainly) from these countries to dialogue, and to present and discuss their work. All the papers presented are non-published, and all participants are explicitly encouraged to help with their comments to make them better, with an eye to their submission to international peer-reviewed journals. Although this is not a necessary condition, preference is given to young researchers concluding their doctoral dissertations, and philosophers who have completed their PhD within the last 5 years. Each talk is followed by both a commentary and an open discussion.

 

Teresa Marques will present “A Puzzle for Conflicts”, and her paper will be commented by Sebastiano Moruzzi from the University of Bologna

Here is a summary of her presentation:

The first chapter of Stevenson’s 1963 Facts and Values is dedicated to the nature of ethical disagreement, and the book starts by drawing a distinction between two kinds of disagreement that philosophers, but mostly meta-ethicists, have assumed to exist ever since it was made. Expressivists (Stevenson, Blackburn or Gibbard), relativists (MacFarlane, Egan), contextualists (Sundell, Huvenes, etc.) all embrace it. Stevenson called them ‘disagreement in belief’ and ‘disagreement in attitude’, but they are doxastic disagreements and conflicting conative attitudes. This talk is concerned with the latter variety of ‘disagreement’, attitudinal conflicts.

Stevenson discriminated between two conditions for attitudinal conflicts. The first condition is one of rationality, the second is one of satisfaction.

RATIONALITY: if it is not possible for an individual to rationally have a pair of attitudes X and Y, then there is an attitudinal conflict between two people A and B where A has attitude X and B has attitude Y.

SATISFACTION: Attitudes X and Y are in conflict if X and Y can’t be jointly satisfied.

In this talk, I will first show that the individual rationality constraint depends on an individual satisfaction condition. I will then show that RATIONALITY is not a condition for interpersonal attitudinal conflicts. We are hence left with SATISFACTION as the only condition.

However, there is a puzzle for SATISFACTION: on most accounts (most expressivist theories, for instance) the majority of conative attitudes expressed in normative, evaluative or ethical disputes can be jointly satisfied. As theorists, we are left with two options:

(i)            We accept that people are massively in error when they take themselves to have attitudes that conflict with others’ attitudes.

(ii)          We seek a better account of the relevant attitudes, and of their contents, to accommodate satisfaction.