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Agency, Past and Future

International Workshop
Agency, Past and Future
University of Hamburg
18 - 20 July 2019

Talks
​Simona Aimar (UCL) - Causation and Causatives​
Julian Bacharach (UCL) - Agent-regret and the fixity of the past
Alison Fernandes (Dublin) - Asymmetries of Agency
Florian Fischer (Siegen) - The shape of things to come
Kim Frost (Syracuse) - The Temporality of Practical Mistakes
Jennifer Hornsby (London) - Events and the passage of time
Julia Jorati (Ohio) - Leibnizian agency and the importance of teleology for the direction of time
Roberto Loss (Hamburg) - Grounding the future (and the future of grounding)
Erasmus Mayr (Erlangen-Nürnberg) - Agent-causationandongoingactions 
Anne Sophie Meincke (Southampton) - Agency and Time: A Process Account
Hugh Mellor (Cambridge) - Causes and effects are facts
Calvin Normore (Los Angeles)​ - TBA
Thomas Pink (London)​ - Freedom as a power
Antje Rumberg (Stockholm) - Agency and branching time: Acting in the tree of possibilities
Michael Thompson (Pittsburgh) - "No One Deliberates about the Past" - or the Present or Future

Program

Thursday, 18. July 2019

10:00 - 10:15        
Welcome and introduction


10:15 - 11:15        
Julian Bacharach (UCL) - Agent-regret and the fixity of the past


11:30 - 12:30
Thomas Pink (London) - Freedom, Reason and Power

lunch break

14:30 - 15:30
Florian Fischer (Siegen) - The shape of things to come


15:45 - 16:45
Jennifer Hornsby (London) - Events and the passage of time

17:15 - 18:15
Hugh Mellor (Cambridge) - Causes and effects are facts​

Friday, 19. July 2019

10:00 - 11:00
Kim Frost (Syracuse) - The Temporality of Practical Mistakes

11:15 - 12:15​
Roberto Loss (Hamburg) - Grounding the future (and the future of grounding)

lunch break

14:30 - 15:30
Anne Sophie Meincke (Southampton) - Agency and Time: A Process Account

​15:45 - 16:45
Simona Aimar (UCL) - Causation and Causatives
​

17:00 - 18:00
Michael Thompson (Pittsburgh) - "No One Deliberates about the Past" - or the Present or Future

19:30
conference dinner - Restaurant: Abaton (
http://abaton-bistro.de)

Saturday 20. July 2019

10:15 - 11:15        
Antje Rumberg (Stockholm​) - Agency and branching time: Acting in the tree of possibilities

11:30 - 12:30​
Julia Jorati (Ohio) - Leibnizian agency and the importance of teleology for the direction of time

lunch break

14:30 - 15:30
Alison Fernandes (Dublin) - Asymmetries of Agency

15:45 - 16:45
Erasmus Mayr (Erlangen-Nürnberg) - tba

17:15 - 18:15
Calvin Normore (Los Angeles) - tba

Venue
Hauptgebäude der Universität
Flügelbau West
Großer Hörsaal (ESA 1 W 221)
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg   


Organisation
Julian Bacharach, Florian Fischer and Magali Roques

​​​Registration
All participants are welcome, but please send a short email to now@spotime.org to let us know you are coming.

Picture


​​​The SPoT is very thankful to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation for the generous funding of this event!

Abstracts

Asymmetries of Agency
Alison Fernandes

Agency is, at least for us, temporally asymmetric. We deliberate on the future, but not the past. We remember the past, but not the future. And we direct our care to what happens to us tomorrow, but not yesterday. How should we account for these asymmetries? I’ll lay out a program for explaining such asymmetries in scientific terms, focusing on asymmetries of deliberation. The fact that we deliberate on the future reflects a deep temporal asymmetry in the physical probabilistic structure of the world. While such a view might seem committed to an unbridled Physicalism about agency, I’ll argue that features of agency turn out to be equally important for understanding scientific relations. Physics and agency are both required to make sense of the temporal asymmetries we encounter. 
​
The Shape of Things to Come
Florian Fischer

In this talk I evaluate the shape of things to come. After a short strike up about change and persistence, I muse about what makes the shape of things to come: present dispositions. I argue that we need to take the interactions of dispositions ontologically serious - something which I have coined wirkungen. We also need to understand this interactions radically dynamic. Following Henri Bergson, I argue that `things' are abstractions of underlying processes. These abstractions are not arbitrary however, they follow our potentialities for acting.
​
Leibnizian agency and the importance of teleology for the direction of time
Julia Jorati

​Teleology, or end-directedness, is enormously important for Leibniz’s philosophy of action. Action, in turn, is a key notion in Leibniz’s theory of time: all substances change constantly in ways that are closely analogous to human agency; without such change, there would be no time. My paper explores the role that the teleological activity of substances plays in Leibniz’s philosophy of time. I argue that the end-directedness of this activity grounds the directionality of time. Substances always change in order to realize the ends toward which they are naturally directed. Hence, the doctrine that all change is teleological allows Leibniz to explain the otherwise puzzling directionality of time.
​
Grounding the future (and the future of grounding)
Roberto Loss
​
According to what may be labelled ‘serious Ockhamism’, (i) the future is open, (ii) the openness of the future consists in the fact that what exists is insufficient to determine the truth-value of (at least some) future-directed statements, and yet (iii) future-directed statements all possess a determinate truth-value. Serious Ockhamism appears to be in tension with the idea that truth is grounded in reality. Some serious Ockhamists bite the bullet and accept some truths to be indeed ungrounded. Others prefer, instead, a more sophisticated approach and claim that even if future-contingent statements are not grounded in the way reality is, they are nevertheless not ungrounded, as they are ‘cross-temporally’ grounded in the way reality will be. In this talk I will construe the grounding challenge faced by serious Ockhamists as involving the notion of metaphysical grounding and I will argue that, although the kind of ‘cross-temporal grounding’ serious Ockhamists appeal to is in tension with a set of rather ‘orthodox’ grounding principles, serious Ockhamists appear to have independent reasons to embrace at least a certain kind of grounding ‘heresy’.

Agency and Time: A Process Account
 Anne Sophie Meincke 
 
In this paper, I give an ontologically robust account of the forward-looking temporal structure of agency on the basis of a process ontology of both actions and agents. I proceed in two steps. First, I present this ontology, which entails arguing for the following three claims: (i) agents-as-we-know-them are bio-agents, i.e., organisms endowed with a global capacity to act (bio-agency), (ii) organisms are stabilised higher-order processes whose stability results from their continuous interaction with processes in the environment, (iii) actions are a particular form of such self-stabilising interactions. Second, then, I defend the claim that actions, qua bio-actions, are temporally forward-looking just as, and because, bio-agents are. A bio-agent’s actions modulate the interactive process of self-stabilisation which is the bio-agent, transposing the temporal dynamics of this process into movement in or through space. These temporal dynamics flow from a bio-agent’s generative directedness towards possibilities. To act means to enact possibilities created in, and embodied by, the agent-constituting process of agent-environment interactions. Agents are their possibilities. Hence, actions cannot be reduced to events in time but are to be understood as intrinsically temporal, future-directed processes.
​
Causes and effects are facts​
Hugh Mellor

It is both odd and unfortunate that singular causation is routinely represented by a relational predicate, ‘causes’, linking singular terms ‘c’ and ‘e’. It is unfortunate because the extensionality of ‘c causes e’ makes it hard to account for: (i) negative causes and/or effects, as in ‘The bullet’s missing him caused him not to die’; (ii) the difference between causing something and affecting it, as in ‘Her parachute’s opening slowed her fall’; (iii) intensional causal statements like ‘His payment of his fine caused his release’, and hence (iv) much mental causation. These problems vanish if causation is represented not by a predicate but by a connective, ‘because’, linking truths, ‘C’ and ‘E’, as in: (i) ‘He didn’t die, because the bullet missed him’; (ii) ‘She fell slowly because her parachute opened’; and (iii) ‘He was released because he paid his fine’. This is because ‘C’ and ‘E’, unlike ‘c’ and ‘e’, can be (i) negative existentials, (ii) ascriptions of inessential properties to events, (iii) non-extensional, and hence (iv) no reason, given the non- extensionality of ‘E because C’, to distinguish mental from physical agency. Taking singular causes and effects to be events rather than facts (in the minimal sense of ‘It’s a fact that P iff “P” is true’) is not only unfortunate because it generates spurious problems. It is also odd, because the two basic theories of singular causation, in terms of (a) instances of covering laws or (b) counterfactuals, both make causes and effects facts in the above sense. Why, given this, the myth of event-causation ever arose and still persists is a mystery I shan’t discuss: my object here is not to explain its appeal but to discredit it.
​
Freedom, Reason and Power
Tom Pink

​A fundamental change in theories of agency occurred in the early modern period – the removal from the theory of action of appeals to powers other than ordinary causation. This paper examines the consequences of this change for moral theory, and, in particular, for the development of scepticism about practical reason.

As A Matter of Form

Right in the temporal vicinity of "Agency, Past and Future" there will be a workshop at the University of Rostock which is also content-wise in the vicinity. On the 21st of July 2019, Ludger Jansen (Rostock/Bochum) and Petter Sandstad (Rostock) organize As A Matter of Form. More information can be found here: https://www.iph.uni-rostock.de/forschung/formale-verursachung/workshop-21july-2019-as-a-matter-of-form/ 
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  • About
  • Members
  • Events
    • Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Persistence and Modality
    • Synchronic and Diachronic Individuality (in Quantum Physics)
    • Foundations of Synchronic and Diachronic Individuality
    • Time & Consciousness >
      • Time & Consciousness, Abstracts
    • The Phenomenology of Time
    • God and Time IV
    • Somewhere in Time
    • What better time than then
    • Time and Death
    • Time.Image
    • Reassessing Bergson
    • Time Continuum
    • The Metaphysics of Time Continuum
    • God and Time III
    • Agency, Past and Future
    • The Metaphysics of Agency, Past and Future
    • It's a Matter of Time
    • At the Edge of Time
    • Hyperstition
    • The Now Now
    • Change and Change-Makers
    • Der Gegenwartige Augenblick
    • God and Time II
    • Time, What is Time
    • Zeit fur Kant
    • Time after Time
    • It's About Time
    • The Power to Change
    • God and Time
    • Time and Modality
    • The Metaphysics of Time and Modality
    • Tense and Tensibility
    • Powers and Change
    • Time and Change
    • Being in Time
    • New Developments in the Philosophy of Time
    • Tense vs Tenseless Theory
  • Expeditions
    • Change and Change-Makers
    • God and Time
    • Time and Literature
    • Time since the Middle Ages
  • Publications