Core Strands
The group is currently investigating four
interrelated core strands: Relativism, Normativity & Rationality, 20th Century philosophy and Ontology: Emergence, Events and Explanation. Together
the detailed questions the group focuses on within these strands inform a
general and more full-fledged view, comprising a naturalistic and historically
informed perspective. Being pursued by both staff and younger researchers, the
group in addition invites contact from other people (both external researchers
and prospective students) interested in co-operative work in these areas.
A conference in 2008 (with Brandom as invited speaker) was dedicated to
the normativity & rationality strand.
A workshop in May 2009 (with Boghossian and MacFarlane as invited
speakers) was dedicated to relativism.
Relativism
Contact: Maria Baghramian (UCD), Paul
O’Grady (TCD)
Traditional relativism: recent work has seen a revival
of traditional forms of relativism. The group is interested in the coherency of
these accounts within contemporary philosophy of language and epistemology, and
in particular the structure of the self-refutation arguments.
New age relativism: through innovations in the philosophy
of language and epistemology, a ‘new age’ kind of relativism has been proposed
that avoids arguments levelled against more traditional kinds. Topics of
interest include semantic minimalism, contextualism, invariantism and
relativity of epistemic modalities.
Normativity
Contact: Jim O’Shea (UCD), Rowland Stout (UCD)
Human agency: working alongside cognitive science, the group maintains an interest in several topics in the philosophy of mind, including attention, the role of emotion, and how the causal relation of mental phenomena.
Normative naturalism: the particular feature of normativity in inferential and linguistic rules, giving rise to obligations and permissions, is sought by the group to be explained from a naturalistic basis. This gives rise to the challenge of providing a coherent theory that can both be integrated with the causal relations in human agency and semantic theories.
20th Century philosophy
Contact: Jim Levine (TCD), Jim O’Shea (UCD)
American pragmatism: with a particular interest in Sellars Quine, and the following inferentialist tradition, the group utilizes its historical work also as a background for discussing relativism and normativity in contemporary philosophy.
Origins of analytic philosophy: working on Frege and Russell, the group is particularly interested in their respective accounts of meaning and logic that has informed contemporary traditions with respect to theories of propositions and semantics.
Ontology: Emergence, Events and Explanation
Contact: Cynthia MacDonald (QUB)
Emergence: The group is interested in questions concerning levels of ontology and the layered conception of the world, and the relations between entities in the so-called ‘upper’ or ‘higher’ layers to those in the lower ones. Issues that form the focus of this are reduction, supervenience, and emergence, particularly in the context of mental causation.
Events: The group is working on the nature and status of events and their role in disputes concerning the fundamental nature of the world, the nature of mind and the nature of God. Events are a commonplace both in our everyday language and in scientific theorizing. We talk about wars, earthquakes, avalanches, deaths, and explosions, as well as birthdays, weddings, and funerals. We even use singular terms to refer to many of these occurrences. In scientific theorizing, events take central stage: they are the terms of causal relations, not material objects. Furthermore, some scientific theories, such as relativity theory, even go so far as to imply that events are the sole occupants of spacetime, omitting objects altogether. How should we think of events? Are they fundamental entities, or are they reducible to other entities, such as objects and their properties at different times? Do events essentially take up time, or can they be instantaneous? What are the dependency relations between events and objects and the properties involved in them? These are some of the questions that this research group is working on.
Explanation: What is the nature of explanation? Is there a single type of explanation that is common to all of the sciences, the core ones such as physics and the special sciences such as psychology, economics, and biology? Or do different sciences employ different and distinctive explanatory strategies, and if so, how do they relate to one another? These are some of the questions that the research group are interested in pursuing.
