The research project aims to bring together and integrate the various debates in epistemology, in meta-ethics and, to some extent, also in aesthetics that are concerned with the rational motivation and justification of mental attitudes (belief, intention, evaluation, etc.), as well as with the normative connections between values, reasons and norms. Two particular views that we would like to defend are that justification is a matter both of the facts and of our awareness of them (thus combining externalist and…

The main motivation for the present Doctoral Program, where different research projects are united in one collaborative scheme, is the integration of the topics presented in the different Research Modules. Those topics present a variety of common lines of interest and inquiry. Here are some. One of the aims of the project Causal properties and laws of nature (M2) is to inquire into the difference between Humean and causal theory of properties and on the consequences of these views with…

This project – which is part of the SNF-ProDoc ‘Mind and Reality’ – aims at the development of a general empirically informed philosophical theory of agency which covers the realm of bodily as well as mental action. The analysis of how we experience ourselves in our bodily and mental behaviour will play a central role in this project. Human agency is a long-established subject of interest among philosophers, but it is only recently that analytical philosophers have seriously taken into…

The aim of our project (co-hosted with the University of Neuchatel) is to explore significant connections between the imagination, emotion, and experiences and judgements of value. The focus will be on moral and aesthetic values, but we intend the scope of our investigation to have implications for values in general, including how we ‘apprehend’ them, their metaphysical status, and the norms governing our judgements about them. A distinctive feature of our project is that it contains an historical dimension, namely…

The project has two subparts, A and B. The starting questions of subproject A are metaphysical: how should time be thought of, what is the relation between change and time and what does it mean for an object to persist in time. Different, opposing views have recently been formulated on these issues. The main question for the project would now be to understand how our experience of time, and of object extended in time, is related to and impinges on…