180016 PS Properties (2025S)

AIMS: This seminar aims to introduce students to one of the most exciting philosophical topics. They will become familiar with important historical and contemporary questions and debates about properties and be able to relate them to other areas of philosophy.

A second aim of this seminar is to acquire and "soft skills": research literature on specific topics; how to approach literature; write work plans and essay plans, practise working on philosophical texts alone or in a team.

CONTENT: Properties play an essential role in many areas of philosophy. Metaethics, for example, deals with the question of whether moral properties exist independently of human conventions, judgements or emotions. The philosophy of science, for instance, investigates whether properties are theory-dependent or theory-independent. The philosophy of mathematics discusses whether abstract objects, properties or structures should be taken as primary in its explanations. Epistemology discusses properties in connection with the objects of knowledge. Logic deals with modal properties, and in the philosophy of language, properties can serve as the truth-makers of predicates. But what exactly are properties and what sorts of properties are there?

In this seminar we will first look at the ontology of properties. Is a property itself a kind of object or does it only exist in other objects? Do properties exist individuated in the things that possess them, are they objective similarities between things, or are they ontologically dependent on observers, concepts or judgements? Are they maybe simply attributions we make? What does it mean, ontologically speaking, to say that several things possess the same property: do they actually share it, do they have a commonality, or do they have similar abilities or powers?

Then we will jointly select further topics in which properties play a leading role and with which we will deal for the rest of the semester. For instance, we might look at various distinctions made in philosophy regarding properties. Thus, we distinguish between essential and accidental, sortal and characterising, intrinsic and extrinsic, primary and secondary, sparse and abundant, determinable and determinate, dispositional and categorical, one-, two- and multi-place properties. We also look for properties in various other areas of philosophy and will discuss their purposes, and the merits and disadvantages of different approaches to them.

METHOD: We will focus on 3-4 jointly selected topics. On each topic, students will research literature, prepare one text each in small groups, summarize it, and then present it in the seminar. There will be texts with divergent viewpoints for each of the topics, which we will compare in the seminar and discuss their pros and cons. Students will also prepare essay plans for these topics.