The College of Arts and Sciences invites you to the 2016-2017 Full Professor Lecture Series.  The second lecture in the series, "The Social Determinants of Reference, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Metaphysics” will be given by Louis deRosset, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, on Wednesday, November 30, at 4:00 p.m. in the Waterman Memorial Lounge.

We metaphysicians often have very little idea what we are talking about.  We are in good company: Newton and Leibniz did not have any very good idea of what functions, fluxions, and differentials were, and Marco Polo introduced the island of Madagascar to Europeans without realizing it was an island.  How, though, do we manage to talk about some particular thing when we are radically mistaken about its nature?  The surprising answer, in brief, is that we get lucky.  We benefit from being in the right social position, even when we acquire that position as a result of future reactions to what we say now. This is what makes the world safe for metaphysicians, discoverers of calculus, and other clueless theorizers.
 
Louis deRosset started his career at UVM in 2005.  He is a philosopher working in metaphysics, philosophical logic, and philosophy of language.  He is especially interested in the metaphysics of reduction and explanation. He is the recipient of the 2013 Sanders Prize in Metaphysics and the author of many papers. He is now writing a book on grounding.
 
A recording of the lecture will be made available at the online media blog http://blog.uvm.edu/compute-cas-media/ and eventually at the College of Arts and Sciences website.  Information:  656-3166

The College of Arts and Sciences Full Professor Lecture Series was designed to give newly promoted faculty an opportunity to share with the university community a single piece of research or overview of research trajectory meant to capture the spark of intellectual excitement that has resulted in their achieving full professor rank.