Graduate students at KCL Philosophy are organising an interdisciplinary conference on Infinity taking place next Friday and Saturday (12th – 13th May). The conference features keynote addresses from Adrian Moore (Oxford) and Øystein Linnebo (Oslo). Here is the description from the organisers, Amedeo Robiolio and Pablo Dopico:

To study infinity is to study things which have no limit, no ends, or no bounds. Consequently, it touches the areas of study of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians in a remarkable number of ways, and often causing interesting difficulties in doing so, some of which, such as Zeno’s paradoxes of Hilbert’s hotel, have achieved great popularity. Infinity is philosophically relevant in Mathematics, with issues such as the different sizes of infinity, the topic of infinitesimals, and the problems of infinity in probabilistic mathematics.

But infinity encompasses a much wider range of philosophical issues than those present in the philosophy of mathematics. In metaphysics and the philosophy of physics, the issues both of infinite extension and infinite divisibility of space and of time have troubled thinkers for millennia. In the Philosophy of Religion, the infinity of God is a vast and ancient area of investigation. Indeed, the history of the philosophy of infinity, engaging with the long and complex evolution of this topic is itself an important area of research.

The conference aims to bring together researches working on all of these different perspectives on Infinity and more, hoping that this encounter will mutually benefit the advancements of these areas.  

Please click here to go to the conference website for more information on accommodation, registration and locations, and see below for the schedule. A book of abstracts can be found here. You can get in contact with the organisers here.

Conference Schedule

Day 1: Friday 12th May
9:50 Welcome
10:00 – 10:40 Bas Kortenbach (SNS Pisa): Transfinite Level Inference and Global Validity
10:45 – 11:25 Amit Pinsker (Connecticut): Potential Infinity and Decision-Theoretic Paradox
11:30 – 12:10 Julie Lauvsland (Oslo): Mathematical pluralism and the nature of the continuum
12:10 – 14:00 Lunch Break (off-site, not included)
14:00 – 14:40 Guillaume Massas (UC Berkeley): Possibility semantics and Galileo’s paradox
14:45 – 15:25 Osvaldo Ottaviani (Technion): Infinity and Monadology: What Kind of Infinity Does
Leibniz Ascribe to Individual Substances?
15:30 – 16:10 Davide Sutto (Oslo): Potentialist Set Theory: New Paths and Open Questions
16:15 – 17:45 Keynote Address, Professor Adrian Moore (Oxford): Wittgenstein and Infinity
18:15 Dinner offered to the speakers
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Day 2: Saturday 13th May
10:00 – 11:30 Keynote Address, Professor Øystein Linnebo (Oslo): Potentialism in the Philosophy and Foundations of Mathematics
11:30 – 12:30 Break
12:30 – 13:10 Markel Kortabarria (Barcelona): Grounding the Infinite Descent
13:15 – 13:55 Laura Molinaro (USI Lugano): Failure of Multilocational Endurantism in a Gunky
Spacetime
14:00 – 14:40 Chen Yang (Purdue): Hegel on Mathematical Infinity
14:40 Goodbyes