FW: Fw: Elise Crull Colloquium April 3, 2026

[Duke Philosophy]

A reminder of our Duke Philosophy upcoming colloquium.

---

From: Duke Philosophy <philo...@duke.edu>
Sent: Monday, March 9, 2026 1:47 PM
To: Nancy Pfeiffer <nancy.p...@duke.edu>
Subject: Elise Crull Colloquium April 3, 2026

 

Our next colloquium will be on Friday, April 3, 2026. The speaker is Elise Crull, Associate Professor of Philosophy, CUNY: City College & the Graduate Center . Her title and abstract follows:

We All Live in a Jello Submarine: Existence Monism from Quantum Physics

 

Abstract:  While a number of metaphysicians working in fundamental ontology agree that the ultimate grounds of physical objects must be some sort of quantum soup, they mostly avoid endorsing existence monism for the obvious reason that it incurs the prohibitive onus of reconstructing the world of everyday objects from scant material.  How could a maximally sparse ontology possibly yield rich enough structure to support manifest reality? 

 

In their 2008 book Austere Realism, Horgan and Potrč argue provocatively – but I think persuasively – for a version of existence monism they call “blobjectivism”. Though their arguments are driven primarily by semantics and logic, they do address the above-mentioned objection concerning physical structure because it is so frequently raised.  Their first-pass response, which they admit requires scientific building-out, is to imagine a world made entirely of Jello, emphasizing that one can nevertheless identify a variety of relations and structures (e.g. color, density, etc.) within it.

 

In this talk I try to provide a scientific building-out of this response. In particular, I argue that recent experimental work in quantum physics utilizing Page-Wootters devices to model a static universe successfully demonstrates the emergence of complex dynamical structure from a composite system with no dynamics of its own.  Therefore let us embrace Jello world, for it is indeed capable of supporting interesting objects… like submarines. 

The colloquium schedule is as follows:

12:30 pm           Grad Student Lunch with Speaker, Erwin Conference Room

2:45-3:20 pm        Colloquium Set-Up

3:20-5:20 pm        Colloquium, Friedl Building Room 107

5:20-6:20 pm        Reception Friedl Building 115 - Jameson Gallery

We look forward to seeing you there!

Duke Philosophy Department