{"id":12766,"date":"2024-11-25T21:53:11","date_gmt":"2024-11-25T21:53:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/event\/metaphysics-and-logic-seminar-christopher-j-masterman-st-andrews\/"},"modified":"2024-11-27T22:08:11","modified_gmt":"2024-11-27T22:08:11","slug":"metaphysics-and-logic-seminar-christopher-j-masterman-st-andrews","status":"publish","type":"tribe_events","link":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/event\/metaphysics-and-logic-seminar-christopher-j-masterman-st-andrews\/","title":{"rendered":"Metaphysics and Logic Seminar: Christopher J. Masterman (58³Ô¹Ï)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Title<\/strong>: <strong>Saying Something with Nothing<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Abstract<\/strong>: Ontological nihilism is the view that fundamentally there are no objects. Whilst it is an increasingly popular view, nihilists face a so-called expressive adequacy challenge. Standard natural and formal languages carve up the world into at least objects and properties\/relations satisfied by those objects. But the nihilist doesn\u2019t think there are any objects! How, then, are they to express themselves? The dominant approach is modelled on natural language feature-placing sentences. Just as I can commit to \u201cIt is raining\u201d without thinking that any one particular thing is raining, nihilists develop sophisticated feature-placing languages to talk about how the world is a certain way without committing to there being any particular thing which is that way. I raise some issues for this approach and argue that the expressive adequacy challenge for nihilism is much harder to solve than people have recognised. I then suggest a general diagnosis of what goes wrong for the nihilist. In brief, I argue that there are two different underlying conceptions of nihilism which are mistakenly run together and only one of these leads to problems of expressive adequacy. To end, I sketch one way of developing the less-discussed conception of nihilism in response to the expressive adequacy worry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Title: Saying Something with Nothing Abstract: Ontological nihilism is the view that fundamentally there are no objects. Whilst it is an increasingly popular view, nihilists face a so-called expressive adequacy&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_tribe_events_status":"","_tribe_events_status_reason":"","_tribe_events_is_hybrid":"","_tribe_events_is_virtual":"","_tribe_events_virtual_video_source":"","_tribe_events_virtual_embed_video":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button_text":"","_tribe_events_virtual_linked_button":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_at":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_embed_to":[],"_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_event":"","_tribe_events_virtual_show_on_views":"","_tribe_events_virtual_url":"","footnotes":""},"tags":[],"tribe_events_cat":[25],"class_list":["post-12766","tribe_events","type-tribe_events","status-publish","hentry","tribe_events_cat-metaphysics-and-logic-group","cat_metaphysics-and-logic-group"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/12766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/tribe_events"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/12766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12773,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events\/12766\/revisions\/12773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12766"},{"taxonomy":"tribe_events_cat","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/philevents\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tribe_events_cat?post=12766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}