CfA Summer School Mereology and Beyond (Lugano, Switzerland)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
The Summer School Mereology and Beyond will take place at USI, Lugano (Switzerland) from 15 to 19 June 2026. The main instructors will be Achille Varzi (Columbia) and Claudio Calosi (Ca’ Foscari).
Deadline for applications: February 15, 2026.
The summer school provides a thorough survey of both classical mereology and beyond. ‘Beyond’ is articulated in three different ways: by providing alternatives, strengthenings, and extensions of classical mereology. All the sessions investigate both technical details and metaphysical issues that arise from those technical details.
How to apply: Application is open to graduate students and early career researchers. Please send a copy of your CV, a one-page motivation letter and a reference letter from a supervisor or colleague to summerschool.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Accepted participants will have the possibility to send a short abstract for consideration to present some of their research at the summer school.
For more information and the provisional schedule: www.usi.ch/mereology<https://www.usi.ch/en/education/summer-winter-school/mereology>
For any questions: summerschool.isfi(a)usi.ch<mailto:summerschool.isfi@usi.ch>
2 weeks, 3 days
REMINDER: Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, December 12 at 4.30pm (CET), Marco Santambrogio (University of Parma) will give the talk On the Creation of Some Abstract Artefacts as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Fall 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
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.
2 weeks, 3 days
Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, December 12 at 4.30pm (CET), Marco Santambrogio (University of Parma) will give the talk On the Creation of Some Abstract Artefacts as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Fall 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
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.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/32641
2 weeks, 4 days
Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, December 5 at 4.30pm (CET), Lorenzo Rossi (University of Turin), jointly with Johannes Stern (University of Bristol), will give the talk Supervaluational Truth and Quantifiers as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Fall 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
The talk will be chaired by Léon Probst.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room 0.5 FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
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.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/32641
3 weeks, 2 days
Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, December 5 at 4.30pm (CET), Lorenzo Rossi (University of Turin), jointly with Johannes Stern (University of Bristol), will give the talk Supervaluational Truth and Quantifiers as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Fall 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
The talk will be chaired by Léon Probst.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room 0.5 FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
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.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/32641
3 weeks, 4 days