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Sebastián Briceño Domínguez
Seminar Leader and Research Student, Faculty of Arts
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Research Summary
Main philosophical interests: metaphysics, history of philosophy (British idealism, early analytical philosophy), and process philosophy (A. N. Whitehead).
In my thesis I try to make sense of the distinction between internal and external relations as it was used during the birth of the analytic tradition and as it is used in contemporary metaphysics. While clarifying the distinction, I also attempt to provide a foundationist account of causal and spatiotemporal relations, which are often regarded as the most paradigmatic cases of external relations. The result is a worldview that tries to overcome fragmentation in various senses and presents the world as unified and changing (like a 'sea of processes'), in close agreement with ideas of Bradley, Whitehead and Bohm.
Supervisors: Stephen Mumford and Philip Percival
Past Research
- Causation. Transference (Salmon, Dowe) vs. counterfactual (Lewis) theories of causation. The problem of negative causation (omission and prevention).
- Laws of Nature. Regularity theories (Mill, Ramsey, Lewis), Nomic Realism (Armstrong, Dretske, Tooley), and Essentialism (Ellis, Bird, Swoyer). These conceptions are blinded by the problems of necessity and universality. I favor a different account of Laws of Nature, one that feels perfectly comfortable with indeterminism and local laws. It's an evolutionary perspective that looks at them as the 'habits of nature'. It can be traced in the work of A. N. Whitehead and C. S. Peirce.