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Philosophy Colloquium: Thurs, Nov. 12th

October 28, 2009

Dr. Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir, will be presenting a talk on "Human Kinds as Conferred Kinds" on Thursday, November 12th, 4:00-6:00pm in the Cowell College Conference Room.

Ásta Kristjana Sveinsdóttir works in metaphysics and feminist theory. She is the author of "Essentiality Conferred" (Philosophical Studies, 2008), "Siding with Euthyphro" (European Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming 2009), and "The Metaphysics of Sex and Gender" (in Feminist Metaphysics, ed. by Charlotte Witt, forthcoming 2010). She has a BA in math and philosophy from Brandeis, an AM in philosophy from Harvard, and a PhD in philosophy from MIT. Ásta is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University.

Please find the abstract for Dr. Sveinsdóttir's upcoming colloquium below:

Abstract

The recent debate over whether human kinds are social constructs evokes earlier debates in the history of philosophy over the dependency of objects, properties, and kinds on human thought and practices: realism/idealism on the one hand, and realism/conceptualism/nominalism on the other. I offer a framework for making sense of this debate which I call 'conferralist', where the key notion is that of a conferred property - a property something has in virtue of some attitude of subjects or a group of subjects. Given this reframing, the realist insists that human kinds are not conferred, and the various kinds of social constructionists give various forms of conferralist accounts of human kinds. The account I offer of human kinds is decidedly conferralist, but can nevertheless do justice to the realist intuition as well in cases where the conferral of the socially significant property in question is meant to be tracking some other, perhaps physical or legal, property. To see the conferralist framework in action, I then offer an account of sex and gender as conferred.