Advanced Logic and Metaphysics - A

The course will focus on the current logico-metaphysical debate between coarse-grained (intensionalist) and fine-grained (hyperintensionalist) frameworks. Roughly: intensionalists hold that necessarily co-extensive states of affairs, properties, and relations are always identical, while hyperintensionalists hold that they are sometimes distinct. We will discuss a range of apparent counterexamples to intensionalism, on issues concerning, for example, essential properties, metaphysical explanation and the Euthyphro Problem, ascriptions of intentional states such as knowledge and belief, provability in mathematics, and naturalism about moral properties, and the proper methodology for assessing them, including the relevance of heuristics in explaining our unreflective judgments. We will also consider contrasting theories of propositions as structured or unstructured, impossible worlds in semantics, the constraint of semantic compositionality, the Russell-Myhill paradox, and other issues. 

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In presence

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Evaluation method: essay.