friends and eminees reading group

The group discusses working papers in metaphysics and epistemology broadly construed (including philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of math and logic, history of analytic philosophy, and so on). It's open to grad students, faculty, and visiting members of the Harvard and MIT philosophical communities.

Papers are available on this web page in Adobe Acrobat PDF; hard copies are in Robbins Library at Harvard, and in the file cabinets on the 9th floor at the MIT department.

For more information, to be notified of forthcoming meetings, or to volunteer a paper you're working on, please contact Dan Greco (dlgreco@MIT.EDU) at MIT or Tom Fehse (tfehse@fas.harvard.edu) or Jon Litland (jlitland@fas.harvard.edu) at Harvard.

7 March: David Etlin (abstract)
4 April: Sarah Moss
9 May: Lauren Ashwell
"Surface-level Dispositionalism"
Dispositions clearly have some kind of intimate relationship with counterfactuals, yet it is now well known that the counterfactual we would naturally associate with a disposition is not entailed by its dispositional ascription. * *Sometimes interfering factors can make the associated counterfactual false, without making it false that the object has the disposition. However, it is not clear in general where to draw the line between interfering factors which merely make the counterfactual normally associated with the disposition false, and those, if any, which also make the dispositional ascription false. It has recently been suggested that we should draw this line using the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction; if it is an *intrinsic *property of the object which would be responsible for the failure of the object to give a particular response in certain conditions, then the object fails to have the corresponding disposition. In this paper I argue that not only are there clear counterexamples to this claim but it also conflicts with other central theses defended by those who advance this claim.
16 May: Simon Rippon
23 May: Kenny Walden

Note to contributors: Please email a copy of your paper (or its URL) to Alex Byrne (abyrne@mit.edu) for posting on this webpage, and also email or deliver a copy to Dan or Tom so they can make it available for photocopying. Please format the electronic version in PDF, as this ensures that everyone has the same formatting, page breaks, special symbols, etc. If you can't make a PDF file, just send a Word file or whatever you have.

How to find the Harvard meeting place

Emerson Hall is the main Harvard philosophy building, in Harvard Yard.

How to find the MIT meeting place

MIT meetings are held at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, which is in the Dreyfoos Building in the Stata Center on Vassar Street (directions). Facing the Stata Center from Vassar Street, the entrance to the Dreyfoos Building is on the right (map). Meetings are either held in d461 (fourth floor) or d831 (eighth floor).