Dartmouth Events

Friday, January 31, 2025

Nina Emery, Mount Holyoke

Talk title: "Explanation As a Guide to What There Is and What It’s Like"
Description: "There is a long tradition in philosophy of using principles of explanatory inference to determine what there is and what it’s like. Prominent examples include Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason (PSR) and contemporary philosophers' use of inference to the best explanation (IBE). The goal of this talk is to argue for a principle of explanatory inference that is more limited than the PSR and IBE but also more powerful. The strength of this alternative principle is its justification by way of naturalistic commitments that are widespread (though not always widely appreciated) throughout contemporary philosophy."

3:30pm
103 Thornton (tentative)

Funded by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy, which is an endowment established in 1996 to help support the study of philosophy at Dartmouth College. For more information on Philosophy's Sapientia Lecture Series, please visit this link.