UE584 - Research Seminar in Metaphysics

Intervenant·e·s

• Valentin Teillet [référent·e]   doctorant chargé d'enseignement, EHESS / Centre de recherches sur les arts et le langage (CRAL)

Semester: S2
Number of hours: 15 (1.5 x 10)
Rerequisites: None
Course taught in: English
Where? ENS, 45 rue d'Ulm, 75005 Paris, Pavillon Pasteur (1st floor)
When? On Thursdays 10.30am - 12pm, from 24/02 to 02/06

All students have to sign up via the EHESS platform, which you access here: https://participations.ehess.fr/demandes/__nouvelle__?seminaire=584 You must be enrolled to receive the assigned readings.

Readings. Some of the assigned readings are available online, but all of them will be sent to participants via email.
Course Requirements. Participants should do the readings for each meeting, and attend in participate in each week’s discussion.

Course description. The purpose of this seminar is to provide an introduction to some of the most important issues and debates of contemporary discussion in social ontology. We will examine together the nature of social reality through the different relationships, processes and objects that compose it. We will be particularly interested in such general questions as:  Is social reality a fiction or are there social facts? How can we cooperate and think together? Is there a social rationality? Are there group agents, that is groups with minds of their own? What was the role of cooperation and culture in natural selection? If our environment is social, is our brain also social? The common thread running through all of these issues is the possibility of social naturalism. One of the main challenges of this seminar will be to show how much philosophy and psychology can contribute to the understanding of social reality. We will follow these topics through the reading of important and influential texts in metaphysics, epistemology or cognitive psychology. After the first introductory session, each session will be run as a discussion-intensive seminar, where all students are expected to ask questions and participate in the discussion.

Session 1: What is Social Ontology? (24/02)

• Hawley , K J. (2018) Social science as a guide to social metaphysics?, Journal for General Philosophy of Science , vol. 49 , no. 2 , pp. 187-198 

Session 2: Realism and Anti-Realism (10/03)

• Passinsky, A (2020). Social Objects, Response-Dependence, and Realism. Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 6(4), 431-443

Session 3: Individualism and Holism (17/03)

• Epstein, Brian (2014b). What is Individualism in Social Ontology? Ontological Individualism vs. Anchor Individualism, in Zahle & Collins 2014b: 17–38

Session 4: Social Externalism (24/03)

• Amia, Srinivasan (2020). Radical Externalism. The Philosophical Review, 129 (3): 395–431

Session 5: Emergence and Supervenience (31/04)

• Kim, Jaegwon (2003). Supervenience, emergence, realization, reduction. In Michael J. Loux & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Metaphysics. Oxford University Press.

Session 6: Collective Intentionality (14/04)

• Searle, John (1990). Collective Intentions and Actions. In Philip R. Cohen Jerry Morgan & Martha Pollack (eds.), Intentions in Communication. MIT Press. pp. 401-415.

Session 7: Social Rationality (21/04)

• Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber (2020). Bounded reason in a social world. Routledge Handbook of Bounded Rationality

Session 8: Social Groups (19/05)

• Thomasson, Amie (2019). The ontology of social groups. Synthese 196 (12):4829-4845.

Session 9: Cultural Evolution (26/05)

• Claidière N, Scott-Phillips TC, Sperber D. How Darwinian is cultural evolution? Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2014 Mar 31;369(1642)

Session 10: Socially Extended Mind (02/06)

• Farina, Mirko (2016). Three Approaches to Human Cognitive Development: Neo-nativism, Neuroconstructivism, and Dynamic Enskillment. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 67 (2):617-641

Core Readings

Nef, Frédéric & Berlioz, Sophie (2021). La nature du social. Le bord de l'eau
Epstein, Brian (2015). The Ant Trap. Oxford University Press