Department of Philosophy, Bilkent University

28/04/2026

Title: The Formal Purposiveness of Nature: Did we Solve Kant’s Problem?

By Nick Stang (Toronto, Philosophy)

Date: Thursday, April 30, 2026

Time: 1530-1700

Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232)

Abstract: In the two Introductions to the Critique of Judgment Kant raises a problem for his own critical philosophy of Nature: in the first Critique proved that Nature must be governed by universal laws, but, he now points out, this laws might be so complex, or depart so much from observable regularities, that we could never discover them empirically. How is empirical knowledge of the laws of Nature possible? Kant argues that this is only possible if we investigate nature guided by the idea of its formal purposiveness; in short, we must investigate Nature as though it were created by a supersensible intelligence for the purpose of being cognized by us, without being able to assert that Nature is so created (much less explain it in this fashion.) In this talk, after explaining the problem and Kant’s argument for the formal purposiveness of Nature, I will turn to contemporary philosophy and ask: do we have a better explanation of how empirical knowledge of the laws of Nature are possible? I will argue that we do not, and that Kant’s argument in the Introductions to the third Critique thus merits serious philosophical reconsideration.

About the speaker: Nicholas Stang is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He works mainly on Kant, the German Idealists, and metaphysics. He is the author of Kant’s Modal Metaphysics (2016, OUP) and co-editor of The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds: New Essays on Kant’s Metaphysics and Epistemology (w/ Karl Schafer, 2022, OUP) and Systematic Metaphysics: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (w/ Aaron Segal, forthcoming, OUP). His work has appeared in such journals as the Kantian Review, Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

Organized by Bilkent University, Department of Philosophy

Title: The Formal Purposiveness of Nature: Did we Solve Kant’s Problem? By Nick Stang (Toronto, Philosophy) Date: Thursday, April 30, 2026 Time: 1530-1700 Room: Humanities Seminar Room (H-232) Abstract: In […]

28/01/2026

12/12/2025

Title: Counterpart Theory and The Problems of Advanced Modalizing

By Cansu Yüksel (KCL/ METU, Philosophy)

Date: Thursday, December 18, 2025

Time: 1530-1700

Room: H-232 Humanities Seminar Room

Abstract: Counterpart Theory provides a translation that converts every sentence of quantified modal logic into a sentence of a non-modal first-order language. While theoretically fruitful – given its puzzle-solving strength in metaphysics and its formal flexibility in logic – the theory faces challenges with advanced modalizing, where claims about spatiotemporally disunified entities are modalized. I begin by outlining a family of problems identified in recent literature. I then examine a promising strategy to bypass these problems, treating cases of advanced modalizing as instances of equivocation that fall outside the scope of the translation. However, this strategy does not satisfactorily extend to advanced modal claims involving abstract entities. Moreover, the indispensability of advanced modal claims made by Lewis himself shows that the equivocation response is ultimately limited, and that a proper account of advanced modalizing is required. I conclude by sketching one such alternative approach.

About the speaker: Cansu Yüksel received her PhD from King’s College London and is currently a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at Middle East Technical University. Her research lies at the intersection of metaphysics, philosophy of language, and logic, with a particular focus on modality. She is especially interested in the nature of modal truth – what makes a modal claim true, and what kinds of truthmakers can account for its truth. Dr. Yüksel’s recent publications include ‘Neo-Conventionalist Accounts of Necessity’ (2024) in Philosophy Compass and ‘On the Function of Advanced Modalizing’ (2024) in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society.

Title: Counterpart Theory and The Problems of Advanced Modalizing By Cansu Yüksel (KCL/ METU, Philosophy) Date: Thursday, December 18, 2025 Time: 1530-1700 Room: H-232 Humanities Seminar Room Abstract: Counterpart Theory […]

22/11/2025

Title: Commitment and the Relegation of Reasons

By Lilian O’Brien (Helsinki, Philosophy)

Date: Thursday, November 27, 2025

Time: 1530-1700

Room: H-232

Abstract: Commitments – to projects, people, principles – are central to many of our valuable pursuits. In spite of their importance, they have received comparatively little attention in the philosophy of action and agency. Recent attempts to characterize them have focused on the committed agent’s relationship to practical reasons. According to one view, the agent’s responsiveness to reasons explains the characteristic stability of commitment (Alonso 2024). According to another, committing to a person in an intimate relationship involves designating their interests as reasons for one to act (Chang 2013). But commitment often imposes strict requirements on the agent to act in commitment-relevant ways while rationally precluding the consideration of reasons. Given this, I argue for an alternative approach to commitment that relegates the role of practical reasons. It relies instead on characteristic changes in the agent’s reflexive evaluative attitudes. These rationally insulate the agent from the need to consider or generate reasons. In closing I briefly consider how commitment challenges the dominant reasons-responsiveness model of well-functioning agency.

About the speaker: Lilian O’Brien is Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University and University Researcher at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on issues in the philosophies of action and mind, and has appeared in such journals as Analysis, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility, Philosophical Issues, and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. She is Co-PI (with Arto Laitinen) of the project, Commitment and Self-Evaluation, Individual and Collective, funded by the Research Council of Finland (2024-2028), and member of the project, The Many Faces of Inquiry: Towards a Dynamic and Pluralistic Epistemology (PI Maria Lasonen), funded by the Kone Foundation, Finland (2024-2029).

Organized by the Department of Philosophy

Title: Commitment and the Relegation of Reasons By Lilian O’Brien (Helsinki, Philosophy) Date: Thursday, November 27, 2025 Time: 1530-1700 Room: H-232 Abstract: Commitments – to projects, people, principles – are central […]

16/11/2025

Sandrine Bergès recently presented the 2025 Antognazza Lecture at the Literary and Philosophical Library in Newcastle (UK). In her talk, she revisited Mary Astell’s analogy of marriage as a form of slavery, placing it within the broader context of transatlantic slavery and its philosophical implications. The annual lecture, organized by the British Society for the History of Philosophy (BSHP), honors the memory of the distinguished historian of philosophy, Professor Maria Rosa Antognazza (1964-2023). Sandrine is currently on leave as British Academy Global Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York (UK).

'‘WHO IS A SLAVE AND WHO SHOULD BE FREED? ASTELL, MARRIAGE AND CHATTEL SLAVERY'Scholars disagree as to how to interpret Astell’s analogy of marriage as slave...

14/11/2025

Title: Partial Houses, Entire Tourists, and Integrity Conditions

By Giorgio Lando (L’Aquila, Philosophy)

Date: Thursday, November 20, 2025

Time: 1530-1700

Room: H-232

Abstract: We often speak about partial houses or partial chess matches. The things to which we attribute partialhood are also those that may be counted fractionally, by saying, for example, that at the moment two-and-a-quarter houses have been built along a road and that three-and-a-quarter matches have been played in a tournament. Fractional counting is the subject matter of a puzzle elaborated by Nathan Salmon, and, because of this puzzle, is often thought to be utterly different from standard, non-fractional counting, in particular as fractional counting claims are not directly amenable to logical paraphrases in terms of identity and logical language. Partialhood, on the other hand, has been recently shown by David Liebesman to be an interesting metaphysical notion, which Liebesman suggests to be primitive. In this talk, I will defend a reductive account of partialhood and fractional counting in terms of mereology and modality. According to this account, partial houses are possible parts of houses and, when involved in fractional counting, are measured with respect to merely possible houses. The logical form of fractional counting claims is continuous with that of non-fractional claims. The account explains why some kinds of things are not involved in partialhood and are not fractionally countable, and others (like tourists) are only marginally involved in these phenomena. The account is exposed to the risk of overgenerating partial things, but I will show that this risk can be contained. At the end, I will suggest that, in order to make sense of some interpretations of fractional counting claims, an integrity condition for partial things is needed.

About the speaker: Giorgio Lando is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Language at the University of L’Aquila. His work focuses on related issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of logic – in particular, issues in the metaphysics of parts and wholes. His work has appeared in such journals as Erkenntnis, the Monist, Philosophical Studies and Synthese, and he has authored several books, including Mereology: A Philosophical Introduction (2017, Bloomsbury) and (with Massimiliano Carrara, Ciro de Florio, and Vittorio Morato) Introduzione alla Metafisica Contemporanea (2021, Il Mulino).

Title: Partial Houses, Entire Tourists, and Integrity Conditions By Giorgio Lando (L’Aquila, Philosophy) Date: Thursday, November 20, 2025 Time: 1530-1700 Room: H-232 Abstract: We often speak about partial houses or […]

14/10/2025

Title: Abstraction and Critical Plural Logic

By Øystein Linnebo (University of Oslo, Philosophy) (joint work with Salvatore Florio)

Date: Monday, October 20, 2025

Time: 1730-1900

Room: H-232

Abstract: Frege’s attempt to found arithmetic on a theory of set abstraction foundered because of Russell’s paradox. Neo-Fregean have proposed to build instead on consistent forms of abstraction, such as Hume’s Principle for cardinality abstraction. However, this proposal faces “the bad company problem”, namely, that there are bad forms of abstraction mixed in among the good forms. Dummett wished to solve the bad company problem by requiring that abstraction be predicative in some sense. The dominant way to pursue this idea has been to impose predicativity restrictions on the second-order logic. I review why this strategy has not been a success. I propose an alternative development of Dummett’s idea, loosely speaking, that we successively abstract on “available” objects. This alternative is developed by (i) abstracting on pluralities of objects rather than Fregean concepts, and (ii) using the Critical Plural Logic recently developed by Salvatore Florio and myself rather than traditional plural logic. In this way, we obtain a large and natural class of permissible abstractions.

About the speaker: Øystein Linnebo is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. His work focuses on issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of logic, and the philosophy of mathematics. His work has appeared in such journals as The Journal of Philosophy, Mind, Noûs, The Journal of Philosophical Logic, and the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. He has also authored three books: Philosophy of Mathematics: An Introduction (2017, Princeton University Press); Thin Objects: An Abstractionist Account (2018, Oxford University Press); and, with Salvatore Florio, The Many and the One: A Philosophical Study of Plural Logic (2021, Oxford University Press).

Organized by the Department of Philosophy at Bilkent University

Title: Abstraction and Critical Plural Logic  By Øystein Linnebo (University of Oslo, Philosophy) (joint work with Salvatore Florio) Date: Monday, October 20, 2025 Time: 1730-1900 Room: H-232 Abstract: Frege’s attempt […]

03/10/2025

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28/09/2025

PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM

Title: Kepler’s Geometrical Epistemology and the Structure of the Mind

By Domenica Romagni (Colorado State University, Philosophy)

Date: Thursday, September 25, 2025

Time: 1530-1700

Room: H-232

Abstract: When compared to other figures in the early modern period, there has not been much discussion of Kepler in philosophical contexts. However, his understanding of the mind and its interface with the world is highly original, and it is of the utmost importance for understanding other aspects of his work, like his approach to scientific methodology. In this paper, I will provide a detailed consideration of Kepler’s approach to knowledge acquisition as rooted in his philosophy of mind and show how it provides a unique and fascinating alternative to both his early 17th century contemporaries and to his philosophical predecessors. My discussion will focus primarily on his paradigm case of perception and knowledge acquisition: musical harmony.

About the speaker: Domenica Romagni is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Colorado State University. She earned her PhD at Princeton University and specializes in Early Modern philosophy, philosophy of music and aesthetics, and the history and philosophy of science, with additional interests in philosophy of mind. Her research focuses on philosophy of mind and perception in the 17th century, explanatory virtues and scientific theory-building in the Early Modern period, and musical perception. Dr. Romagni received a BA with a concentration in philosophy from Johns Hopkins University and a BM in cello performance from the Peabody Conservatory. Prior to her return to philosophy, she taught cello and worked as a freelance musician.

Organized by Bilkent Philosophy