[SydPhil] Time and Perspective Workshop: Nov 25 @ the University of Sydney

[Kristie Miller]

All welcome, please circulate as you see fit. 

Time and Perspective Workshop
 
Monday Nov 25 (Sydney Time).

N494, The Main quad, the University of Sydney  until 4 PM, and the Centre for time Room thereafter.

Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85947516767?pwd=h1G9eLQOHiRsG9aat8iMw3IxUiroTb.1

 
9.30-11.00am (6.30-8.00 pm NY Time) Clas Weber (UWA)
 

The Epistemic Gap between the Personal and the Impersonal
 
There appears to be an epistemic gap between the personal and the impersonal. The apparent epistemic gap presents a challenge to reductionism about personal identity according to which facts about personal identity are grounded in impersonal facts about physical and/or psychological continuity. In this talk, I discuss and reject two strategies of closing the epistemic gap, a phenomenalist and a Cartesian one. I then motivate an alternative account of the apparent epistemic gap based on the special perspectival character of inside imagination. The imagination-based account explains the appearance of an epistemic gap, and at the same time avoids a corresponding ontological gap.
 
11.-11.30 Morning tea break
 
11.30-1.00 Rita Li (Sydney)

Transient facts in a tenseless world
 
As spatial-temporally situated beings, we represent reality from within our own spatial-temporal perspectives. Call this representational perspectivalism. Some B-theorists, those who maintain that temporal reality consists only of tenseless facts, appeal to this view to account for our tensed language. We represent states of the world using perspectival modes of presentation. While the psychological effects of those tensed beliefs and statements (being action-explanatory, emotion-inducing, etc.) comes from this perspectival mode of presentation, what makes them true are tenseless facts. As such, our irreducibly tensed beliefs raise no issue for an overall tenseless ontology. Representational perspectivalism is different from the view that reality itself consists of perspectival facts, or facts that only obtain from some perspective. Applied to temporal reality, we get the view that reality (partly) consists of temporally perspectival, transient facts. Call this temporal perspectival realism.
 
Many theorists simply take perspectival facts and tensed facts to be equivalent. That is, temporal perspectival realism entails the A-theory, as realism about tensed facts. In this paper, I argue that it is compatible with a B-theoretic, tenseless ontology. This claim rests on distinguishing two readings of the notion of transient facts. On the first reading, a transient fact is one that obtains at the time of a particular perspective. This temporal perspective that which the fact’s obtaining is relative to, is part of what constitutes the fact itself. Its obtaining, in this case, remains an atemporal, and so tenseless, matter. On the second reading, the time-relativeness rests in the fact’s manner of obtaining, in how it comes to be the case, rather than what is the case. It is only this second reading that gives us an irreducibly temporary fact that is genuinely tensed. Admitting perspectival facts understood in the first sense into her ontology allows the B-theorist to provide an alternative account for tensed language. That is, our beliefs and statements are about and made true by temporally perspectival facts. I argue that this alternative account has a few strong points over the one which draws on representational perspectivalism.
 
 
1.00-2.30 Lunch

 
2.30-4.00  Shimpei Endo (Sydney)
 
Stupid Alien


Many philosophers have believed that our familiar language reflects reality. Their research program investigates a language (formal or informal) and reads off the structure of reality from the structure of the language, assuming that these structures mirror each other. This
paper maintains the link between language and reality, but considers a mostly abandoned possibility: What if the structure of reality is written in a language that is very unfamiliar to us? Following Sider's analogy and terminology, we might ask: What if the book of the world is written in an alien language? Matti Eklund is one of the few who has explored this realm of alien languages and alien structures.  Eklund attempts to defend the possibility of such alien languages and argues for the possibility that reality might be written in these unfamiliar tongues rather than our well-known ones. One way to make this argument, which I will explore, is to provide a concrete example of such languages. While Eklund is more interested in smart aliens and their richer language compared to ours, this paper focuses on simple aliens and their more limited languages.
 
4.00-5.00 Afternoon Tea 
 
5.00-6.30 
Olla Solomyak  (NYU) 9.00 AM Jerusalem time Monday 25
 
Temporal Structure and the Perspectival
 
My aim in this talk is to examine two different conceptions of what it takes for reality to have temporal structure. On one conception, the temporal structure of reality is seen as rooted in the obtainment of facts of a certain kind (e.g., tensed facts, or facts about how things are at different times). On an alternative conception of temporal structure — which I’ll argue is preferable —  the direction of explanation is reversed: the relevant temporal facts obtain becausereality has a (particular) temporal structure. I’ll develop of a version of the latter proposal that draws on the notion of temporal perspectives: It is, I’ll argue, because one or more particular perspective(s) is/are fundamental that reality has the temporal structure that it does, which then allows for the obtainment of temporal facts. I sketch a framework for thinking about perspectives and perspective-fundamentality which I develop in other work, and suggest how it might help clarify the relationship between temporal structure and the perspectival.
 
Challis Professor of Philosophy 
Chair of Discipline,
Joint Director, the Centre for Time
School of Humanities,
The Centre for Time
The University of Sydney
Sydney Australia
Room S213, A 14 Main Quad

kristie.miller at sydney.edu.au
kristie_miller at yahoo.com
Ph: +612 9036 9663
https://www.kristiemiller.net 
https://www.centrefortime.org






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