Colloquium: Dan Korman (University of Illinois)
Department: Philosophy
Date and Time: November 7, 2014 | 3:00 PM-5:00 PMEvent Location: 55 HIB
Event Details
"Arbitrariness Arguments Against Common Sense Ontology"
On our natural way of dividing up the world into objects, some collections of objects together compose something (e.g., the roots, trunk, branches, and leaves of a tree) and others do not (the trunk and the dog lying beside it). On closer inspection, our conventions for dividing up the world can seem intolerably arbitrary: there seems to be no ontologically significant difference between certain objects that we naturally take to exist and others that we are loathe to admit into our ontology. I attempt to defend a common sense ontology by examining and responding to a number of such arbitrariness arguments.
Professor Dan Korman
University of Illinnois