How does change work? If a thing moves from one state to another, when does it exactly start being in its new state, and when does it cease being in its former one? Should one consider that there is an instant at which change takes place? And if one does, in what state should the thing be at that moment: the former one, the new one, neither, both? The first two options seem arbitrary; the third goes against the law of excluded middle; the forth against that of contradiction. And if one doesn’t, if there is no moment of change, how can there be change?
What is sometimes called the “limit decision problem” has its roots in Aristotle and has been intensely debated by late medieval philosophers, who explored the four options. It became popular again in the second half of the twentieth-century when, once more, each option was considered – as well as the possibility that there is no such thing as a moment of change.
The workshop will provide the occasion of a dialogue between medieval and contemporary perspectives and shall result in a volume on the instant of change in medieval and contemporary philosophy.

Program

20.11.2015
09:00 - 09:15
Welcome
09:15 - 10:00
Is the concept of the continuum too fine-grained to be applicable?
Niko Strobach
10:00 - 10:45
Walter Burley on the Incipit and Desinit of the present instant
Cecilia Trifogli
10:45 - 11:15
Coffee Break
11:15 - 12:00
The instant of change, non-coinciding temporal limits, and four-dimensionalism
Damiano Costa
12:00 - 12:45
Processes and the instant of change
Philipp Blum
12:45 - 14:00
Lunch Break
14:00 - 14:45
Ockham on the Instant of Change
Magali Roques
14:45 - 15:30
Limit decision problems and the Oxford Calculators, especially Walter Burley
Edith Sylla
15:30 - 16:00
Coffee Break
16:00 - 16:45
Durandus of St. Pourçain’s Critique of the Principle “Instans Semper est Posterioris Passionis”, and Durandellus’s Defense
Can Loewe
16:45 - 17:30
Nicholas of Autrecourt's Quaestio revisited: the schola auxoniensis and Parisian masters on limit-decision problems
Gustavo Fernández Walker
21.11.2015
09:00 - 09:45
Real Contradiction in Limit Decision Procedure: Some Medieval and Contemporary Views
Simo Knuuttila
09:45 - 10:30
Quasi-Aristotelians, Semi-Averroists, and Proto-Scotists in the Fourteenth Century
William Duba
10:30 - 11:00
Coffee Break
11:00 - 11:45
Contradiction and the Instant of Change Revisited
Graham Priest
11:30 - 12:30
Contradictory change
Greg Littmann
12:30 - 14:00
Lunch
14:00 - 14:45
Case intensional first order logic and the problem of change
Florian Fischer
14:45 - 15:30
Marsilius of Inghen on Inferences de incipit and de desinit
Graziana Ciola
15:30 - 16:00
Coffee Break
16:00 - 16:45
Criteria for Identity, Or, When are Two Incipit / Desinit Sophismata the Same
Sara Uckelman
16:45 - 17:45
Round Table