Philosophy Seminar: Thomas Brouwer (Leeds)

Thomas Brouwer (Leeds) 'The Warp and Woof of Social Reality'

There’s a surge of interest in social ontology these days, no doubt helped by surges of interest in related fields such as the study of collective action, intentionality and responsibility, social epistemology, and the philosophy of race and gender. That’s good, because there is lots that needs doing in these areas, and we should probably have gotten around to it sooner. In this talk, I will be talking about the basic metaphysics of social reality: how, in general, do social facts come about? I will describe some recent and promising ‘two-dimensional’ approaches to social metaphysics (Einheuser 2006, Epstein 2015), and discuss some questions that arise within these approaches. Can social reality be indeterminate? Can it be inconsistent? In what ways can it undergo change? How real is social reality, really?

Location details

Baines Wing (G. 36)