Postdocs: Philosophy of Cosmology (Rutgers)

The School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University is pleased to announce the availability pending funding (to be determined soon) of three postdoctoral fellowships in philosophy of cosmology. Fellows will be appointed in the Department of Philosophy in association with the multi-university  Project in Philosophy of Cosmology.  We hope to appoint one fellow in each of the following areas of concentration: 1) philosophy of physics, 2) cosmology, 3) philosophy of religion, metaphysics or philosophical theology.  For more information about the kinds of research that could be supported under these fellowships, please see the summaries of current project members’ research interests and aims here: http://philocosmology.rutgers.edu/who-we-are.  

Requirements for the fellowship include i) PhD in the last 5 years in a relevant area, ii) acquaintance with recent developments in cosmology and issues in philosophy of cosmology, iii) a research project related to the research of the Philosophy of Cosmology Project, iv) strong background in one of the three fields mentioned above.

The primary responsibility of a Fellow will be to conduct research on his/her project.  Fellows will also be responsible for teaching one course per year in their area of expertise. Fellows will be expected to participate in all of our conferences, seminars, and a summer school in the summer of 2013; they will work with faculty mentors in the organization, planning, editing and the other aspects of our project.

Fellows will be appointed for one year with the possibility of renewal for a second year. Appointments will be effective September 1, 2012 or January 1, 2013. Fellows will receive a stipend of $50,000 annually as well as an annual research allocation of $2,000; they will also receive Rutgers University health benefits. 

Requests for more informantion or applications, consisting of a CV, a research proposal, a writing sample, and the names of 3 references should be sent by email to Professor Barry Loewer at loewer@rci.rutgers.edu.  Review of applications will commence on July 8 and continue until the positions are filled.

Rutgers University is an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer. The institution values diversity in its faculty, staff, and students and especially encourages applications from women and underrepresented minorities.

Ruth Marcus Memorial Event (Yale, Sept 2012)

Students, colleagues, friends and admirers of Ruth are warmly invited to join us for a
CELEBRATION OF THE LIFE OF RUTH BARCAN MARCUS
Saturday afternoon, September 29th, 2012
Yale University Campus
New Haven, CT

Details of venue, time and program will be settled soon, and a more formal announcement will then be distributed.

Dispositions and Interferences: the Paper

As some of you may recall, a while ago I had a couple of posts in which I sketched a Qualified Counterfactual Analysis of disposition ascriptions. Well, after a few changes of mind, a very long gestation period and an equally long review process, I am pleased to announce that the paper that descended from those posts has been accepted for publication in Philosophical Studies (and can be downloaded here). I very much hope that the paper will contribute to debunking the myth that ceteris paribus clauses cannot be spelled out in a clear and non-circular manner.
Thanks again to all of you who commented on my original posts and, if you have any last-minute comments and suggestions, please do let me know as I haven't submitted the final version yet.

Internal space

As David Lewis taught us, time travel calls for something like a notion of internal time. If I am about to travel to the time of the dinosaurs, then maybe in an hour I will meet a dinosaur. But that's an internal time hour. If I am going to spend the rest of my life in the Mesozoic, then—assuming nothing kills me—I will grow old before I am born, but this "before" is tied to external time, since of course in internal time, I grow old after being born.

Perhaps ordinary travel calls for a notion of internal space. Let's say today I am in room 304 of the hospital, and yesterday I was in room 200. The doctor comes and asks: "Does it still hurt in the same place as it did yesterday?" I tell her: "No, because yesterday it hurt in room 200, and today it hurts in room 304." But that's external place, and the doctor was asking about internal place.

Internal place is moved relative to external place while the body as a whole is locomating. But it can also be moved when only parts of the body are moving. If my hands are hurting, and I clasp my hands to each other, I thereby make the internal places where it hurts be very close externally, but they are still as distant internally as they would be were I to hold my arms wide. If, on the other hand, my two hands grew together into a new super-hand, the two places would come to be close together.

I wonder: If I grow, does my head come to be internally further from my feet? I think so: There are more cells in between, for instance.

Rob Koons has suggested to me that the notion of internal place can help with Brentano's notion of "coincident boundaries": Suppose we have two perfect cubes, with the red one on top of the green one. Then it seems that the red cube's bottom boundary is in the same place as the green cube's top boundary. (Sextus Empiricus used basically this as an argument against rigid objects.) Question: But how can there two boundaries in the same place? Answer: There are two internal places in one external place here.

Podcasts: Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies Project

I think that Anna Marmodoro's Power Structuralism in Ancient Ontologies project is one of the most interesting metaphysics projects around at the moment. And it got even more interesting now that they have added to their website links to a series of podcasts, which include:


Jon Jacobs: "Is Causation a Relation?"

Stephen Mumford: "Mutual Manifestation and Martin's Two Triangles"

James Ladyman: "Identity, Individuality and Discernibility"

Peter Van Inwagen: "Relational vs. Constituent Ontologies"

I look forward to listening to all of them!

Metaphysical Mayhem 2012!!!

This makes me wish I was still a grad student :-)

Metaphysical Mayhem is back!!! Rutgers University will be hosting a 5-day summer school for graduate students May 14-18, 2012. John Hawthorne, Katherine Hawley, Ted Sider, Jonathan Schaffer, and Dean Zimmerman will lead the seminars on a variety of topics in metaphysics, including: natural properties, composition as identity, grounding, metaphysical explanation, and stuff like that...

For more information, see:
http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/mbenton/mayhem.html

Presentist counting

In a posthumous paper, David Lewis shows that one can find a presentist paraphrase of sentences like "There have ever been, are or ever will be n Fs" for any finite n. But his method doesn't work for infinite counting.

It turns out that there is a solution that works for finite and infinite counts, using a bit of set theory. For any set S of times, say that an object x exactly occupies S provided that at every time in S it was, is or will be the case that x exists and at no time outside of S it was, is or will be the case that x exists. For any non-empty set S of times, let n_F(S) be a cardinality such that at every time t in S it was, is or will be the case that there are exactly n_F(S) objects exactly occupying S. This is a presentist-friendly definition. Let N be any set of abstracta with cardinality n_F(S) (e.g., if we have the Axiom of Choice, we should have an ordinal of that cardinality) and let e_F(S) be the set of ordered pairs { <S,x> : x∈N }. We can think of the members of e_F(S) as the ersatz Fs exactly occupying S. Let e_F be the union of all the e_F(S) as S ranges over all subsets of times. (It's quite possible that I'm using the Axiom of Choice in the above constructions.) Then "There have ever been, are or ever will be n Fs" can be given the truth condition |e_F|=n.

This ersatzist construction suggests a general way in which presentists can talk of ersatz past, present or future objects. For instance, "There were, are or ever will be more Fs than Gs" gets the truth condition: |e_G|≤|e_F|. "Most Fs that have ever been, are or will be were, are or will be Gs" gets the truth condition |e_FG|>(1/2)|e_F|, where FG is the conjunction of F with G. I don't know just how much can be paraphrased in such ways, but I think quite a lot. Consequently, just as I think the B-theory can't be rejected on linguistic grounds, it's going to be hard to reject presentism on linguistic grounds.