Confirmed Speakers:

Ásta (Duke University), Eline Gerritsen (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf), Alex Horne (University of Vienna), Christopher Frugé (University of Oxford)

Schedule (see abstracts below)

Public Lecture (Department Colloquium)

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​​​Organizers: 

Dr. Lars Dänzer,
Dr. Sam Mason,
Prof. Dr. Neil Roughley,
Prof. Dr. Raphael van Riel 

Contact:

To register and receive the conference program, please contact Anne-Janine Naujoks-Sprengel (aj.naujoks-sprengel@uni-due.de) 
 

Date and Location:
Philosophy Department
University of Duisburg-Essen (Campus Essen)
Date: December 3, 2026 
Time: 9.15 - 16.45
Room: R11 T08 C01​​​​

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Ásta (Duke)

 A Dilemma for Conferralism?

I wanted to do two things. The first is to respond to a worry by Van Kammen and Rea that conferralism involves an infinite regress, as (they claim) the authority or standing needed for conferral needs to have been conferred prior (etc). Secondly, and more importantly, I wanted to use the occasion to explore the source and nature of social normativity more generally on the conferralist picture, and various details regarding how the conferral takes place (relates to the worry about circularity you mention in your first email [If the attitudes that confer status are cognitive – taking it, believing, perceiving – they seem to presuppose the property they are supposed to be conferring]). If you give me a sense of the main preoccupation of the other participants it will help me to find more ways in which the various interests intersect.

Personal Website

Christopher Frugé (Oxford)

Conflict in Creation and Normativity.

Different creators shape what each other makes simply by attempting to make mutually relevant creations. Two communities who claim overlapping territory don't both make the same land exclusively their own but instead create smaller territories than they claimed. Two people who claim exclusive right to the same coconut don't both make a right to the whole thing but rather just to half. Artificers can thus influence another's artifact even where there is no collective attempt to make something together. Yet despite such shared creation certain creations are inviolable in that necessarily a creator is uninfluenced by others when making them. Therefore, I develop an account that captures the dynamic of shared creation with domains of inviolability. The principle of artifact construction is globalist in canvassing packages of potentially conflicting creative attempts and selecting the least arbitrary product to be created. Inviolability arises due to that principle privileging certain unified connections between certain artificers and certain artifacts. The focus throughout is on the creation of property rights, so the view offers a mind-dependent and social approach to normativity that nevertheless provides for a domain of indestructible normative power and protection.

Personal Website

Eline Gerritsen (Düsseldorf) 

A Metanormative Perspective on Social Oughts.

Do the social roles assigned to us provide us with genuine reasons? On Charlotte Witt's externalist theory of social normativity, the fact that we live under a social role directly explains why we ought to comply with the norms connected to it, even if we do not choose or endorse these. In this talk, I will apply insights from metanormative theory to Witt's account to show where it falls short: while social facts about roles and identities can explain why norms apply to us in a formal sense, they do not explain why these norms are normative for us in an authoritative sense. To bridge the gap, the externalist picture of social oughts can be supplemented with an internalist explanation of their authority. In particular, I will explore a constructivist take on how social roles become genuinely reason-giving.

Personal Website

Alex Horne (Vienna)

Prosocial Normativity.

This paper investigates the prospects for a constructivism premised on social agency. Prosocial norms are distinguished from both moral and social norms; and prosociality is distinguished from both moral motivation and group identification. The view sketched locates the relevant value in the conditions required for agency, rather than what’s constitutive of agency itself. The question therefore becomes whether, insofar as the agent values at all, they are committed to valuing that which is required to make their valuing possible.

Personal Website

Public Lecture: Ásta (Duke)

Social construction and injustice.

A lot of philosophical work in the last two decades has been at the intersection of theoretical and practical philosophy, especially concerning social aspects of epistemic, linguistic, or ontological phenomena. Although the literature on epistemic and discursive injustice is now quite extensive, it is only recently that philosophers have started to theorize forms of injustice that can be called "metaphysical" as they involve injustice in how a person is socially constructed. I sketch these projects and give a general characterization of them all as involving a *mismatch theory* of metaphysical injustice. I then introduce cases of metaphysical injustice, namely *interstitial* cases, that seem to pose a problem for the mismatch theory.