What is it for something to be possible? And what have possibilities to do with us and the world? Can envisioning them tell us something about what there is and how to act? How do we know that something is possible, and how should we reason about it? Is there a core conception of possibility that runs through all such questions? If not, in what relations do these various conceptions stand?
The graduate students of philosophy at the University of Toronto invite papers exploring these and related issues for their 12th annual graduate conference. We welcome submissions from all fields in philosophy, including those making connections to other disciplines, and especially encourage those engaging the history of philosophy. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- The logic of future contingents in ancient and contemporary philosophy
- The concept of potentiality (dunamis) in ancient thought, and its relation to the modern notion of possibility
- Developments in medieval theories of modality in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
- The relations among various sorts of possibility, e.g., logical, conceptual, epistemic, metaphysical, mathematical, nomological, technological or practical
- The relations between various sorts of possibility and various kinds of modal logic, e.g., alethic, doxastic, deontic and so on
- Quantified modal logic and the Barcan Formula
- Realism and antirealism about possibilia
- The existence of unactualized or unactualizable possibilities
- The connections between intuitions, evidence, conceivability and possibility in counterfactual or thought experimental reasoning
- The relations between skeptical possibilities, justification and what it means 'to know that p'
- The conceptual relations between the notions of possibility and probability
- The supervenience of the normative on the natural, i.e. the impossibility of an identical world having the same natural but different normative properties
- The bearing of the principle of alternate possibilities on free-will and moral responsibility
- The best of all possible worlds and Leibniz's philosophical theology
- The role of utopias or ideal social arrangements in political and ethical thought
- The relation between the possibility of discourse and democratic institutions
Deadline for submission: JANUARY 5, 2012
Please submit through EasyChair. Submissions must be in doc(x) or pdf format and prepared for blind review. Papers should not exceed 4000 words and abstracts should not exceed 300 words. Only one submission per author. Limited travel stipends are available, with special funds for exceptional papers in ancient and medieval philosophy.