Szymon Bogacz
Hey, my name is Szymon and I’m a PhD student in the ANU School of Philosophy. I did my MA in philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy, Jagiellonian University.
I work in Buddhist philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of logic. In my thesis I analyse what Dharmakīrti says about contradictions and I develop an epistemic approach to the liar paradox. I also work on the epistemology of disagreement and analyticity.
Contact me at: szymon.bogacz[at]anu.edu.au / Facebook / Twitter / PhilPeople / Academia.edu
You can read some of my research below:
(please send me a message if you are interested in reading any of my manuscripts)
Buddhist epistemology and the liar paradox (8 000 words), manuscript. Abstract: The liar paradox is still an open philosophical problem. Most contemporary solutions to the paradox target the theory of truth or the logical laws that underlie the argument from the liar sentence to the paradoxical conclusion that the liar sentence is both true and false. In contrast to these approaches, Buddhist epistemology offers philosophical resources to devise a distinctively epistemological approach to the liar paradox. In this paper, I mobilise these resources and argue that the liar sentence is what Buddhist epistemologists call a contradiction with one’s own words. I situate my argument in the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti and show how Buddhist epistemology answers the paradox.
Dwelling in epistemic hell (8 500 words), manuscript. Abstract: I argue that believing contradictions in situations of equal evidential support is permissible because it is logically and probabilistically harmless. I explain what contradictory beliefs are and how they cohere with logic and probability theory. Finally, I argue that believing contradictions is not only harmless, but that we should believe that p and not-p if our evidence supports p and not-p to the same degree.
A paradox is not a set, it is reasoning (6 000 words), manuscript. Abstract: I argue that a paradox is not a paradox set, i.e., a collectively implausible set of individually plausible principles. I present paradox sets that do not describe paradoxes and paradoxes that are not described by paradox sets. Next, I argue that a paradox is a seemingly acceptable piece of reasoning that produces a doubtful belief.
Analyticity and easy ontology (5 000 words), co-authored with Ross Pain, manuscript. Abstract: We present a way of constructing easy ontological arguments using formal-analytic sentences. We show that our view is immune to Timothy Williamson’s counter-examples to analyticity, and argue that formal-analyticity makes easy ontology more tolerant.
Epistemology in the Aṣṭasāhasrikāprajñāpāramitā and in Nāgārjuna’s middle way (10 pages, in Polish), 2015, Studia Humanistyczne AGH 3 (14): 7-16, download
A critical approach to the dialectical interpretation of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy (20 pages, in Polish), 2014, Diametros 42, 227-246, download
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