Lugano Philosophy Colloquia. Fall 2025

The Lugano Philosophy Colloquia continues on this Fall 2025!

This series of events are held on campus for philosophy students and on Zoom for everyone. To participate in these events, please write to [email protected].

The recordings will then be posted on the ISFI youtube channel.

Provisional schedule and names (the abstracts and titles of the talks will be added in due time):

(1) On Thursday, September 25 at 4.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)
Fabrice Correia (University of Geneva and USI) joint work with Sven Rosenkranz (University of Barcelona and ICREA)

Higher-Order Tense Realism

Chaired by: Andrea Lupo

Abstract: There are varieties of realism about tense. Kit Fine (“Tense and Reality”, 2005 and “The Reality of Tense”, 2006) offers a helpful taxonomy. In our paper “Eternal Facts in an Ageing Universe” (2012), we improve upon this taxonomy, identifying a further type of view that Fine: Dynamic Absolutism. Both these taxonomies construe the different versions of tense realism in terms of first-order quantification over facts or states of affairs. Our goal is to show that the logical space of these first-order tense-realist positions can be replicated using higher-order quantification instead: there are matching varieties of higher-order tense realism. Along the way, we rebut an argument given by Lukas Skiba in his “Higher-Order Being and Time” (2025) to the effect that there is no coherent higher-order version of Dynamic Absolutism.

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(2) On Friday, October 31 at 4.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)
Matteo Morganti (University of Rome 3)

Haecceitism and (Quantum) Physics

Chaired by Cristian Mariani

Abstract: Space-time points and quantum particles of the same type are permutation invariant: exchanging two of them does not give rise to a physically distinct situation. This is commonly taken to entail that these entities violate haecceitism and, consequently, are not individuals. My aim in this talk is to carefully analyse this line of argument – focusing, in particular, on the quantum domain - and show that it is not as straightforward as it may seem. Rather than to claim that quantum particles (and perhaps space-time points) are in fact individuals, however, my more modest goal is to provide a clearer overview of the situation and of the available options.

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(3) On Thursday, November 6 at 4.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)
Bence Nanay (University of Antwerp and USI)

The Translucent Mind

Chaired by Byron Simmons

Abstract: Some of our mental states are translucent: we can't fully elaborate some parts of their content, by which I mean we can't make some of the represented properties more determinate. More generally, mental states come on a spectrum when it comes to whether and how much we can elaborate some parts of their content. I argue that translucency is an overlooked but extremely important feature of mental states and I give case studies of this importance in the case of translucent beliefs, translucent emotions, translucent memories and translucent desires.

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(4) On Wednesday, November 26 at 5.00pm (CET), Room A23 Red Building (USI west campus)
Ulrich Meyer (Colgate University)

Brute Facts

Abstract: This paper defends brute facts against recent attempts at resuscitating the Principle of Sufficient Reason by Michael Della Rocca, Gordon Belot, Shamik Dasgupta, and others.

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(5) On Friday, December 5 at 4.30pm (CET), Room 0.5 FTL Building (USI west campus)
Lorenzo Rossi (University of Turin), joint work with Johannes Stern (University of Bristol), will give a talk on Friday, December 5 at 4.30pm (CET), Room 0.5 FTL Building (USI west campus), as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia of Fall 2025.

Supervaluational Truth and Quantifiers

Chaired by Léon Probst

Abstract: Quantification has long been both a stumbling block and a testing ground in semantics. Building on Frege, Tarski developed the modern model-theoretic semantics for first-order logic (FOL), but many quantifiers (because of the Compactness and Löwenheim–Skolem Theorems) cannot be expressed within FOL. Mostowski and Lindström extended Tarski’s framework to capture quantifiers such as "finitely many" and "most", giving rise to Generalized Quantifier Theory (GQT), now a standard tool in formal and natural language semantics. Still, challenges remain, especially where semantic indeterminacy arises. We focus on three sources of indeterminacy: (P) presupposition failure, (V) vagueness, and (L) semantic paradoxes. To address them, we propose a general framework for quantifier semantics in the presence of indeterminacy, and we develop two formal systems that (a) meet key desiderata for handling P, V, and L, and (b) recover a substantial fragment of GQT.

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(6) On Friday, December 12 at 4.30pm (CET), Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus)
Marco Santambrogio (University of Parma)

On the Creation of Some Abstract Artefacts

Abstract: How are abstract artefacts—assuming they exist—brought into being? Focusing on such examples as the chess queen, the senate of a constitutional state, and the fictional character Sherlock Holmes, it is argued that these entities are created through speech acts of stipulation, which are governed by a principle first introduced by Frege in Begriffsschrift. According to this principle, sentences initially used to make a stipulation can subsequently be used to make true assertions. This principle not only accounts for the creation of stipulated entities, but also explains why sentences such as ‘Sherlock Holmes is a detective'—unprefixed by locutions like ‘fictionally’ or ‘in the story’—can truthfully report what holds in Conan Doyle’s stories. Although such sentences ascribe properties of flesh-and-blood human beings to abstract objects, no category mistake is involved, it is argued, since predicates like ‘being a detective’ undergo a meaning transfer (in Geoffrey Nunberg’s sense). Finally, a classification of stipulative speech acts is offered within a Searlean framework. 

If you want to stay updated on our incoming events, please visit this webpage, or subscribe to our mailing list.

For any question, please don't hesitate to write to [email protected].

Organisers:
Andrea Lupo, Byron Simmons

Events of the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI)
with the SNSF funded projects:
Temporal Existence, Intensionality in Metamathematics, Quantum Indeterminacy.