Teresa will be presenting her work on retractions at the Pervasive Context conference at Peking University, 24-25 October 2015. Her talk will incorporate her recent experimental results on the retraction and falsity of epistemic modals.

Teresa recently presented her “Character & Content in Hybrid Expressivism” at the 6th meeting of the Portuguese Society for Analytic Philosophy, ENFA6, at the University of the Azores, S. Miguel.

 

 

Teresa is an international partner of the new project running at Eidyn (led by Matthew Chrisman), Foundations of Normativity.

Foundations of Normativity (2015-17)

Funded by an IASH ‘International and Interdisciplinary Research Groups’ award

Project Type: International Network

Project Team

• Project Leader: Dr Matthew Chrisman (Philosophy)
• Executive Committee: Dr Matthew Chrisman (Philosophy), Dr Luis Duarte d’Almedia (Law), Dr Kieran Oberman (Politics)
• Edinburgh Participants: Dr Guy Fletcher (Philosophy), Tim Hayward (Politics), Dr Elinor Mason (Philosophy), Dr Claudio Michelon (Law), Prof Michael Ridge (Philosophy), Dr Debbie Roberts (Philosophy), Dr Mathias Thaler (Politics), Dr Patrick Todd (Philosophy)
• International Partners: Prof David Enoch (Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Philosophy, Law), Prof Nadeem Hussain (Stanford, Philosophy), Prof Graham Hubbs (U of Idaho: Philosophy, Politics), Prof Teresa Marques (Pompeu Fabra University: Law, Philosophy), Prof Michael Pelczar (NUS: Philosophy), Prof David Plunkett (Dartmouth: Philosophy, Law), Prof Gerald Postema (UNC: Philosophy, Law), Prof Rob Reich (Stanford, Politics)

Project Description

This project aims to unify disparate strands of research being conducted across Philosophy, Law and Politics into questions about the nature of norms, rules and laws—those that govern institutions, actions and thought—and how these connect to reasons, responsibility and prescriptive language. In addition to local interdisciplinary collaboration, we plan to foster an international network of scholars working on the foundations of normativity by formalising already existing research connections between University of Edinburgh researchers and researchers at other institutions in a way that promotes wider recognition of Edinburgh and Scotland more generally as a world-class centre for postgraduate courses and research on the foundations of normativity.

Related Project

This project grew out of the previous Eidyn pilot projects, Practical Modality and Foundations of Normativity.

Further Details

For more information about this project, including project events, please consult the project webpage here. Information about the 2015 Edinburgh Foundations of Normativity Workshop can be found here.

Teresa’s paper “Can metalinguistic negotiations and ‘conceptual ethics’ rescue legal positivism?”, is forthcoming in Alessandro Cappone and Francesca Poggi (eds.) Pragmatics and Law: Perspectives from Legal Practice. Springer.

 

Abstract:

In recent years, David Plunkett and Tim Sundell published a series of interesting articles that made an original use of linguistic resources from linguistics and philosophy of language to reply to arguments for legal antipositivism, the thesis according to which moral or value facts are part of what determines what the law is in a given jurisdiction at a time. Plunkett and Sundell’s strategy for resisting antipositivism appeals to the notion of a metalinguistic negotiation, a notion that incorporates that of a metalinguistic or context disagreement. Sundell 2011 had argued that metalinguistic disagreements are a possible component of disputes about evaluative matters. A further notion deployed is that of conceptual ethics, and it is an essential component of metalinguistic negotiations. This paper approaches a crucial concern about the deployment of both notions against disagreement-based arguments for legal antipositivism. Metalinguistic negotiations displace disagreements from the semantic to the metalinguistic level, but do not eliminate the appeal to moral or other normative reasons from legal disagreements. Conceptual ethics purports to be a normative activity, engaged with prescribing ways one ought to think and talk. On a broad understanding of legal reasoning and practice, metalinguistic negotiations and conceptual ethics are an integral part of it, and hence are consistent with evaluative and normative facts being essential to, and constitutive of, the law. Or so this paper argues.

 

 

The next session of the reading group on Born Free and Equal? will take place next Tuesday, May 19, at 12:00, on room 40.249 at the Ciutadella Campus of UPF.

We will be finishing the discussion of the last part of the chapter on ‘Objective meaning accounts’ in particular the discussion of Scanlon’s account, and will devote most of the session to the chapter ‘Harmed based accounts of discrimination’.

All welcome!

Teresa Marques will be a visiting professorial fellow at Eydin, in Edinburgh, during June 2015, as part of the CAND, Collective Attitudes & Normative Disagreement project.

Marques will also participate in the 2015 Legal Philosophy Workshop, and comment on Hrafn Asgeirsson‘s paper “Vagueness, Knowability, and Judicial Discretion”.

The European Society for Analytic Philosophy has a new webpage and a new facebook page. Teresa Marques is a member of the new steering committee of ESAP, presided by Stephan Hartmann at Munich.

The European Society for Analytic Philosophy (ESAP) promotes the discipline and profession of analytic philosophy in Europe. It was established in 1990 and brings together professional analytic philosophers and students from the whole of Europe (and the rest of the world) to foster collaboration and exchange of ideas among them.

ESAP organizes a major conference every three years. Previous conferences took place in Aix en Provence (1993), Leeds (1996), Maribor (1999), Lund (2002), Lisbon (2005), Cracow (2008), Milan (2011) and Bucharest (2014). The next conference, ECAP9, will take place in Munich, Germany, from August 21 to 28, 2017, and has a great lineup of speakers!

You can also read Catarina Dutilh Novaes over at the NewAPPS blog.

 

 

 

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.