We are pleased to announce that on Tuesday, April 15 at 5.30pm (CET), Carlo Nicolai
(King's College London) will give the talk On Non-Wellfounded Instantiation
as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso, FTL Building (USI West Campus)
and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to
events.isfi@usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Concerns about the expressive limitations of type-theoretic approaches to properties may lead philosophers to favour type-free options, typically formulated in a first-order language. Given the success of standard set theory and the iterative conception, there
have been attempts to formulate theories of properties based on ZFC, justified by an iterative picture. Such approaches, although prima facie type-free, ban any form of self-predication/instantiation, which is in some cases desirable for properties, if not
for sets. An obvious alternative is to explore theories of properties based on non-wellfounded set theories and the conceptions on which they are based. In the talk I will discuss and develop this alternative.