Conference Report: SOPhiA 2022

The 12th edition of the SOPhiA conference—Salzburg Conference for Young Analytic Philosophy—took place from September 7 to 9 in a hybrid format, at the site of the University of Salzburg, Austria, and online.

More than 100 philosophers from over 20 countries took part in the conference. About 95 participants, who were mostly PhD and Master students, gave talks. Just under 60% of the talks were given in-person. All on-site and online talks could be attended both at the conference venue in Salzburg and online. All the talks were held in English. In addition to the contributed talks, the conference hosted four plenary talks and five affiliated workshops. The plenary lecturers were Otávio Bueno (University of Miami), Bas van Fraassen (Princeton University), Vera Hoffmann-Kolss (University of Bern), and Leonhard Menges (University of Salzburg). The titles of the workshops were: “Conventions in Science: Conceptual, epistemic and ethical perspectives”, “(Non-)Reductionism in the Metaphysics of Mind”, “The Metaphysics of Space-Time: The end of time?”, and “Reflecting on 10 Years in the Set Theoretic Multiverse”, and “Novel Approaches to Knowledge-How and Skilled Action”.

SOPhiA 2022 covered a multitude of areas of analytic philosophy: epistemology, ethics, logic and philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics and ontology, political philosophy, and philosophy of language. The contributed talks (each consisting of 20 min of presentation and 10 min of discussion) took place in six (physical and online) rooms in parallel.

The conference started with a short opening speech by the head of the Organizing Committee, Raimund Pils, immediately followed by the opening plenary talk of Bas van Fraassen. The title of the talk was “Scientific Theories and Their Empirical Support”. Van Fraassen explicated and discussed in his talk the concepts of experimental support, evidential support, and confirmation. By looking at examples from the history of physics and an illustrative made-up example, he argued for the importance of a clear separation between empirical support on the one hand and theories of confirmation on the other.

After the plenary talk, the conference hosted a publishing workshop with Otávio Bueno, Synthese editor-in-chief. Bueno’s presentation of insights into the publication process was followed by a lively Q&A session. The first afternoon of the conference started with contributed talks in the areas of philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic/philosophy of mathematics, ethics, metaphysics/ontology, and political philosophy.

In the evening, Leonhard Menges gave the conference’s second plenary talk. In his talk, entitled “A Moral Problem for Free Will”, Menges asked what the thing called “free will” is that makes a difference as to whether certain harmful responses to people’s bad actions are morally acceptable or not. Unless we are able to give a satisfactory answer to the question, we face what Menges calls the “challenge of moral magic”—the challenge that free will seems to change actions’ moral status by magic. Menges proposed several possible answers and dismissed each of them. One promising possible answer is that free will is a normative power, just like promises are, that can change actions’ moral status. This is unconvincing, according to Menges, since there is a number of crucial differences between standard normative powers and free will. Menges concluded by pointing out an upshot of his argumentation for our philosophizing about free will. The first day of the conference ended with a get-together and a warm evening buffet for all participants at the venue.

The second day started with contributed talks in the areas of philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of science, ethics, metaphysics/ontology, and philosophy of language. Subsequently, the conference hosted a De Gruyter Session: Get Your First Book or Article Published. Christoph Schirmer, commissioning editor of De Gruyter publishing house, gave an introduction to publishing for early-career philosophers as well as an overview of De Gruyter’s publishing modalities and activities. KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy editors-in-chief Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla and Alexander Gebharter presented facts, numbers, and tips on publishing in KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy. The session was followed by a reception sponsored by De Gruyter.

The afternoon program started with the conference’s third plenary talk. Vera Hoffmann-Kolss gave a lecture entitled “What Can You Do with Causal Models? Grounding, Levels, Individuation of Properties”. Hoffmann-Kolss pointed to a trend to use causal models to analyze not just the concept of causation but also other metaphysically relevant notions. In particular, causal models have potential applications in the analysis of the notions of grounding and levels, and the problem of property individuation. Hoffmann-Kolss considered each of these notions and discussed the prospects and limitations of using causal modals for gaining metaphysical insights about them.

The remainder of the day was dedicated to the affiliated workshops. The workshop “Conventions in Science: Conceptual, epistemic and ethical perspectives” was organized by Ina Jäntgen, Charlotte Zemmel, and Ahmad Elabbar from the University of Cambridge and featured talks by Shivani Aggarwal (University of Cambridge), Gerald Teng (Tufts University), Miguel Ohnesorge (University of Cambridge), and Ilvie Prince (Leibniz University Hannover). The workshop “(Non-)Reductionism in the Metaphysics of Mind” was organized by Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla (University of Cologne), Alexander Gebharter (LMU Munich), and Maria Sekatskaya (University of Düsseldorf). It featured talks by Thomas Blanchard (University of Cologne), Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla, Alexander Gebharter, Vera Hoffmann-Kolss, Andreas Hüttemann (University of Cologne), Raphael van Riel (University of Duisburg-Essen), and Maria Sekatskaya. The organizers of the workshop on “The Metaphysics of Space-Time: The end of time?” were Niels Linnemann and Thorben Petersen from the University of Bremen; talks were given by Natalja Deng (Yonsei University), Lucy James (University of Bristol), Niels Linnemann, Joshua Mozersky (Queen’s University), Thorben Petersen, and Kian Salimkhani (University of Cologne). The workshop “Reflecting on 10 Years in the Set Theoretic Multiverse” was organized by Matteo de Ceglie (University of Salzburg) and featured talks by Carolin Antos (University of Konstanz), Michal Tomasz Godziszewski (University of Warsaw), Joel Hamkins (University of Notre Dame), and Claudio Ternullo (University of Barcelona). The fifth workshop, “Novel Approaches to Knowledge-How and Skilled Action”, was organized by Peter Brössel and Eline Kuipers from the University of Bochum. It featured talks by Chiara Brozzo (University of Barcelona), Eline Kuipers, and Joshua Shepherd (Carleton University and University of Barcelona).

The third day of the conference started again with contributed talks, covering the same areas as the previous day, except the metaphysics/ontology sessions were replaced by sessions on the topic of logic and the philosophy of mathematics. The fourth and last plenary lecture was held online by Otávio Bueno (University of Miami) on “Models and Modal Knowledge”. Bueno engaged with different versions of the claim that modal knowledge results from knowledge of models and argued for the contrary view. The source of modal knowledge, he asserted, are the properties of the objects under consideration themselves, rather than models, which play only an auxiliary role by their encoding relevant information about the objects and their properties. Bueno concluded that we should endorse a form of empiricist modalism. The conference closed with a final get-together over dinner.

The conference was supported by: KRITERION – Journal of Philosophy, Land Salzburg, Stadt Salzburg, the University of Salzburg, De Gruyter, Springer, Schwabe, GAP (Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie), OEH-Salzburg, and StV Philosophy (Salzburg). The members of the organizing committee (programme and local) were: Christian J. Feldbacher-Escamilla, Alexander Gebharter, Gregor Greslehner, Sebastian Krempelmeier, Benedikt Leitgeb, Stephen Müller, Silvana Pani, Raimund Pils, and myself, Leonie Eichhorn.

Further information about SOPhiA 2022 is available in the history section of: http://sophia-conference.org.