CEFISES @ UCLouvain

CEFISES Seminar: Jana De Kockere, "Nature’s 17th century decay: A history of the controversy between Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill"
2025-11-07 14:00 - 16:00 (Europe/Brussels) | Salle Ladrière, Place du Cardinal Mercier 14 (bâtiment Socrate, a.124), Louvain-la-Neuve, 1348, Belgium
Livestream https://youtu.be/UcDEwJSMj9c
Series: HPS
Speaker: Jana De Kockere (UGent)
Title: « Nature’s 17th century decay: A history of the controversy between Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill »
Abstract
In this talk I will sketch parts of my thesis (in process) on the 17th century controversy on nature’s decay between Godfrey Goodman and George Hakewill. In The Fall of Man, or the Corruption of Nature (1616), Goodman expressed a belief that is supposed to have been very common and popular at the end of the 16th and beginning of the 17th century in Western Europe: that nature was old, ill, dying, and that her end was near. And the signs were clear: failed harvests, floods, pests, other diseases, ice-cold winters. Think of the famous Breughel winter landscapes: the sun was really diminishing.
Eleven years later, in 1627, George Hakewill published An Apologie for the Power and Providence of God in the Government of the World. He proposed it as an “examination and censor of the common error touching natures perpetuall and universall decay”. Goodman reacted to the Apologie in letters sent to Hakewill, to which Hakewill responded, and this correspondence was included as an extra fifth book to the republication of Hakewill’s Apologie in 1635.
That fifth book constitutes what came to be known as the ‘controversy’ between Goodman and Hakewill on nature’s decay. There’s a fact about that controversy that makes its case stranger than it otherwise would be, and that is its own marginality, or peripherality. The controversy between Goodman and Hakewill seems in different ways to have been rather insignificant. It is moreover curious how little disagreement there has been on the correct interpretation of Goodman and Hakewill’s works while they are supposed to be epitomizing a very popular belief and its successful rebuttal, given also the fact that already during the second half of the 17th century but especially during the 20th century, their controversy came to be inscribed in the history of that otherwise very contested epistemic object, ‘the Scientific Revolution’.
As the seeming relevance of the case is growing, since Goodman’s apocalyptic lament over nature’s illness and corruption caused by human arrogance strangely echoes our current ecological crisis, I will follow a thread of 20th century references to the Goodman-Hakewill controversy to understand, historically, how that controversy came to be ‘known’ to us today. This meta-perspective offers a possibility to try and understand some of the truths at stake in the controversy itself that have remained inaccessible up until now.

CEFISES Seminar: Victoria Van Gheem, "Formalizing Medical Reasoning: Can Fuzzy Logic Account for Normativity?"
2025-11-14 14:00 - 16:00
Livestream https://youtu.be/JVPmbqriNVs
Series: Work-in-Progress
Speaker: Victoria Van Gheem (UCLouvain)
Title: « Formalizing Medical Reasoning: Can Fuzzy Logic Account for Normativity? »
Abstract
In his Handbook of Analytic Philosophy of Medicine, Kazem Sadegh-Zadeh (2015) defends that fuzzy logic is the most appropriate logic for formalizing medical reasoning. His argument is based on the view that medicine is intrinsically uncertain, and that many of its concepts are vague. If we accept that medicine is indeed uncertain and conceptually vague, fuzzy logic — designed precisely as a solution to the vagueness problem— appears as a suitable logical tool for medical reasoning.
In this explorative talk, I will advance 2 hypotheses.
First, I will attempt to clarify the notions of uncertainty and vagueness in medicine. The vagueness of medical concepts is neither accidental, nor a problem to be overcome; it is an intrinsic and significant property of the discipline, rooted in its deontic status.
Second, I will attempt to extend Sadegh-Zadeh’s work by addressing the normative dimension of medicine. Medicine is vague, and its vagueness can be accounted for by fuzzy logic. But medicine is also normative. Thus, can normativity be accounted for by fuzzy logic? What properties of normativity must be preserved to provide a faithful model of medical reasoning? Can fuzzy logic be an adequate logical framework for formalizing norms?
Using fuzzy logic as a case study, the goal of this talk is to clarify the nature of normativity in medicine and to provide an initial account of what should be expected from a formalisation of medical reasoning that includes the normative part of medicine.

CEFISES Seminar: Kristine Grigoryan, "The concept of knowability: historical approaches"
2025-11-21 14:00 - 16:00
Series: OLOFOS
Speaker: Kristine Grigoryan (KU Leuven)
Title: « The concept of knowability: historical approaches »
Abstract
This dissertation explores the historical foundations of the knowability thesis and situates contemporary debates on the knowability paradox within a broader philosophical context. While recent discussions often approach Fitch’s paradox as a technical issue in epistemic logic, this study demonstrates that questions concerning the relationship between truth and knowability have deep roots in philosophical thought.
Focusing on four major figures, such as Berkeley, Kant, Peirce, and the logical positivists, it reconstructs their positions as distinct interpretations of the knowability principle. Berkeley’s metaphysical idealism links truth to perception; Kant’s transcendental idealism anchors it in the limits of experience; Peirce’s pragmatism associates it with the outcome of inquiry; and logical positivism embeds it in principles of verification and confirmability.
The analysis reveals that Berkeley’s and Kant’s accounts, despite their historical significance, ultimately fail to uphold a coherent knowability principle without collapsing into paradox or implying omniscience. Peirce’s view faces similar challenges, whereas Carnap’s confirmability criterion, as developed within logical positivism, uniquely avoids Church-Fitch-style reasoning.
By tracing these historical developments, the dissertation enriches current discussions, showing that the knowability paradox is not merely a formal puzzle, but part of a longstanding philosophical investigation into the interplay of truth, cognition and possibility.

CEFISES Seminar: Harald Wiltsche, "Phenomenology and Wave Function realism"
2025-11-28 14:00 - 16:00
Livestream https://youtu.be/qqcfUHrLXPA
Series: MEPHISTO (MEtaphysics and PHIlosophy of Science: Transcendental Orientations)
Speaker: Harald Wiltsche (Linköping University)
Title: « Phenomenology and Wave Function realism »
Abstract
This talk reexamines wave function realism (WFR) through the lens of phenomenology. We begin by situating WFR within the broader debate about the ontology of the quantum state and the temptation to « read off » metaphysics from mathematical formalism. Against this background, we turn to the London–Bauer interpretation (LBI), the most explicit attempt to interpret quantum mechanics through phenomenological categories. On this view, the measurement transition is not a physical discontinuity but a reflective articulation of objectivity, and the wave function formally encodes the horizonal structure of world-givenness. We develop this idea by reconfiguring the notion of realism itself: not as objectivist, but as correlational and transcendental. The resulting picture suggests that quantum mechanics, rather than depicting a world « minus observers, » mathematically articulates the very correlation through which a world becomes manifest at all.
