The team of the MetPhil project (Croatian Science Foundation IP-2022-10-2550) is pleased to announce a visiting lecture by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schurz from Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany.
The Visiting Lecture will be held on Thursday, February 27th at 18.00 CET over the Zoom platform.
The topic of this workshop will be a lecture given by Prof. Dr. Gerhard Schurz who is a Senior Professor at the Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf, Germany. The title of the lecture is “Inductive Metaphysics and its Abductive Methodology”.
The work that will be presented by Prof. Schurz is situated within the context of the overall research unit of Inductive Metaphysics (https://indmet.weebly.com/). As is stated in the project description of Inductive Metaphysics, “The overall purpose of the research unit is to articulate and elaborate a new understanding of the nature and methodology of metaphysics. Borrowing a term from late 19th century philosophy, the resulting conception of metaphysics is called Inductive Metaphysics. We argue that, in general, metaphysical beliefs should not and cannot be adequately justified solely on a conceptual and a priori basis. Empirical sources and inductive or abductive forms of inference should and in fact do play a much more prominent role in metaphysics than is typically acknowledged. An important share of metaphysical beliefs should be justified a posteriori, based on inductive or abductive inferences from empirical data, embedded in a methodology that resembles that of science, except that metaphysical concepts and theories are transdisciplinary and more general than concepts and theories in science” (taken from: https://indmet.weebly.com/).
The abstract of the talk is the following.
“In this talk the methodology of inductive metaphysics (IM) is explained, as understood in the DFG research group FOR2495, including a discussion of IM’s relation to a priori metaphysics. The methodological principles of IM consist of (1) the employment of inductive and in particular abductive methods and (2) making use of empirical sources. Important philosophical challenges for the methodology of IM stem from the highly theoretical and transdisciplinary nature of metaphysical principles and the corresponding difficulty of justifying abductive inferences from empirical knowledge to these principles. Two rationality criteria proposed for these abductive inferences are (a) the unification of many mutually independent empirical facts or laws and (b) the independently testability of metaphysical theories by entailing use-novel empirical consequences. At hand of two case studies it is shown how abduction to metaphysical theories can satisfy these two conditions: (i) the abductive justification of perceptual realism and (ii) the abductive justification of causality.”
After the talk there will be a Q&A session where the audience will have the opportunity to present the lecturer with questions and comments regarding his talk.
Those interested to participate in this workshop can send their request to the email address matija.rajter@gmail.com and they will receive the Zoom link (please introduce yourself while writing the request).