Sumários

Apresentações

12 Dezembro 2025, 11:00 • David Yates

Group 3

João Afonso Santos Duarte 169186

Rodrigo Brunido Mira 162811

 

Group 4

Diogo Macedo dos Santos Rivera 169152

Pedro Ridrigo de Jesus Ernesto 169179

Edgar Syrenkov Ferreira Coimbra 169153

Simão Gualdino Alves 170051


Group 6

Alexandra Zvaryshchuk 169172

Guilherme Eduardo Santos 169182

Mariana Madruga Bernardino 169166

Francisco José Alcobia Veiga 169181

Apresentações

9 Dezembro 2025, 11:00 • David Yates

Group 1

Duarte Pinto Moura Fernandes 169188

José Mário Afonso de Sousa 169697

David Miguel dos Santos Fernandes 169698

Paulo Jorge Correia Lourenço 169785

 

Group 2

Afonso Viana Magalhães 169184

Margarida David Gabinete Zenário 169175

Sara Beatriz Freitas Caíres 169164

Gabriel Lucas Rodrigues Barreto 169154

Bruna Alexandra Fonseca Pinho 169158

Discussion

5 Dezembro 2025, 11:00 • David Yates

Here is (roughly) how the discussion went in the lectures:

  1. Following on from W. V. O. Quine's work, naturalists typically reject the possibility of a priori knowledge and conclude on that basis that the only true source of knowledge and justification is science. This thesis is known as "scientism" and its defenders argue, in addition to rejecting the a priori, that the natural sciences now address all questions that were traditionally considered to be philosophical (the origin of the universe, the nature of matter, the nature of mind, life, etc.). They conclude that there is no place for philosophy in a modern, scientific society.
  2. However, there is another way of looking at Quine's naturalism. In his classic paper "Two dogmas of empiricism", Quine does indeed argue that all knowledge is empirical - there is no a priori, necessary knowledge, because every proposition is revisable in the light of experience. But does that undermine philosophy? Only if we hold that philosophy is necessarily a priori! The alternative is to say that what Quine really shows is that disciplines traditionally thought of as a priori, such as logic, mathematics, and philsoophy, are really empirical and continuous with the sciences.
  3. So far so good. But if philosophy is continous with the sciences, why doesn't it make more progress? In logic and mathematics, there has been a huge amount of progress (by which we mean internal progress, e.g. in the formulation of new logical systems or new mathematical proofs). Can we say the same thing about philosophy?
  4. The "Aristotle goes to college" thought experiment is designed to show that there has been no serious progress in philosophy at all. Does it?
  5. One way of defending philosophy is to argue that it has been extremely important in the history of science, with even great scientists such as Einstein admitting that the inspiration for their revolutionary theories came from philosophy. But what if someone then argues that the work of philosophy (the "midwife of the sciences") is now done? We might respond that every new science raises new philosophical problems, which in turn require new sciences to answer them. If this is correct, then philosophical reflection may always be at the heart of scientific progress.
  6. A completely different way of defending philosophy is to say that it aims not at factual knowledge but at understanding. That is my own view, as I said in the lectures. I think that philosophy does indeed have a very important role to play in the development of new scientific theories, and that this role comes from trying to understand the world and our place in it. On this view, philosophy can help the sciences by doing what it does best: trying to figure out what it all means!
  7. One advantage of the view just described is that while disciplines such as metaphysics seem very closely related to physical science, disciplines such as aesthetics, political philosophy, phenomenology, etc., do not. One thing we might say is that all these disciplines try to make sense of the world, in their own ways, and that sometimes philosophical theories that aim at this kind of understanding can help to inspire scientists. But the fact that we can sometimes help scientsits to construct new theories does not entail that we must always do this in order to justify our existence!

Philosophy and science

2 Dezembro 2025, 11:00 • David Yates

This week we will examine the role of philosophy given the successes of modern science. There are those who think that philosophy should no longer be practiced, because it has been superseded in all areas by the natural sciences. Ancient philosophical puzzles concerning the nature of matter, space and time, the existence of the universe, and so forth, can all now be addressed from a scientific point of view. Furthermore, scientific methods have enabled us to make progress on these topics in a way that philosophy never could. Thus, they conclude, philosophy is dead and should therefore be abandoned. But are they right? Here are some of the questions that we will address this week:

  • What conception of philosophy do its critics, such as Stephen Hawking, depend on? Is that conception correct?
  • Is philosophy completely separate from the natural sciences or continuous with them?
  • Is it even coherent to use arguments such as the one given above to discredit philosophy?
  • Is it true that philosophy has made no progress?
  • Is it true that science can now address all the questions traditionally conceived as philosophical?


Readings relevant to this week's classes and next are chapters 2 and 3 of S. Overgaard, P. Gilbert and S. Burwood (2013). An introduction to Metaphilosophy. Cambridege University Press. Chapter 2 of this book is titled "What is philosophy?" and you might wonder why we didn't start the course with that. However, despite the title, the chapter is really about what philosophy ought to be, given the successes of science. Chapter 3 is also about that topic, from the more general perpsective of the value of humanities education. The final chapter of the book "What good is philosophy" is also relevant.

As preparation for this week's classes, in particular before the Friday class, please try to read the "Aristotle goes to college" thought experiment, which is to be found at pp. 52-54 of the above book.

Discussion

28 Novembro 2025, 11:00 • David Yates

Core themes covered this week included:

  1. What is the relationship between the Meno paradox and the paradox of analysis?
  2. What, according to Moore, are the conditions an philosophical analysis must meet? Is it possible to meet all these conditions simultaneously?
  3. Moore's open question argument: a very famous argument for the conclusion that it is impossible to give a true naturalistic analysis of any ethical concept, since it is always an open question whether something that satisfies the analysans (e.g. brings the greatest happinness to the greatest number) also satisfies the analysandum (e.g. is a morally good action).
  4. Must the analysans and the analysandum mean the same thing for a philosophical analysis to be a priori true? If so, what are the consequences for the claim that philosophical analysis must also be informative?
  5. We covered the analysis of knowledge as an example of why it is problematic to give an analysis that is both informative and true. We also covered LInda Zagzbski's recipe for constructing counterexamples to any analysis of knowledge. Does this recipe apply only to knowledge, or is it more general than that?
  6. One issue that is very important to think about in this context: is it really necesary for a philosophical analysis to be a conceptual analysis, or can it be more like an a posteriori theory concerning what the concept refers to? It is initially tempting to suppose that philosophical analyses can be a posteriori, but the problem with this idea is that we still seem to test such analyses by means of a priori thought experiments. If reliabilism, for example, is an a posteriori theory of knowledge, then does it matter if I can imagine a clairvoyant whose belief-forming mechanisms are ultra-reliable but who does not seem, intuitively, to know what they believe?