Workshop on Imperative Aspects of Perceptual Experience

Time and place:

Aug 28, 2013 09:00 AM - Aug 29, 2013 05:00 PM, 

University of Oslo

Are there imperatival aspects to perceptual experience? Do any experiences have intrinsic motivational powers? If so, is this at odds with their being correct or incorrect? If not, what are they correct or incorrect about? One way to approach them is by comparing perceptual experiences to speech acts. If perceptual experiences were modeled by speech acts, would the best models be assertions, imperatives, or neither? If in some ways, or on some occasions, experiences are more like imperatives than assertions are these imperatival aspects of experience reflected in any way in their accuracy conditions? Are they at odds with their having accuracy conditions at all? Are they at odds with representationalism? In this workshop we explore these and related questions.

Schedule

Wednesday August 28

9:30 Welcome and Introduction (Sebastian Watzl and Susanna Siegel)

10:00-11:30 John Bengson (University of Wisconsin-Madison): “Practical Perception”
Commentator: Avery Archer (University of Tennessee, Knoxville)

11:45-13:15 Susanna Siegel (Harvard University, CSMN): “Affordances and the Contents of Perception”
​Commentator: Anna Bergqvist (Manchester Metropolitan University)

14:15-15:45 Sebastian Watzl (University of Oslo, CSMN): “Perceptual Guidance”
Commentator: Dagfinn Føllesdal (Stanford University, University of Oslo)

16:00-17:30 Gabriel Greenberg (UCLA): “The Representation of Space in Visual Sequences”
Commentator: Farid Masrour (Harvard University)

Thursday August 29

9:30-11:00 Hilla Jacobson (Ben-Gurion University): “Not only a Messenger: From a Purely Representational to a Hybrid Account of the Phenomenal Character of Pain”
Commentator: Maja Spener (University of Birmingham)

11:15-12:30 Ole Koksvik (University of Bergen): “Pushiness”

13:30-15:00 Manolo Martínez (University of Barcelona): “Imperativism about Perceptual Experience – The Case of Disgust”
Commentator: Michael Brady (University of Glasgow)

15:15-16:45 Tim Bayne (University of Manchester): “Phenomenal Attitudes”
Commentator: Anders Nes (University of Oslo, CSMN)

14th Annual Rocky Mountain Philosophy Conference

University of Colorado at Boulder

April 20 and 21, 2012

KEYNOTE PRESENTATIONS:

Keynote 1: Jerry Fodor

Rutgers University

“From the Darwin Wars”

Friday, April 20, at 6:15 PM

Benson Earth Sciences Room 180

Abstract: This talk will argue that, despite what his followers have often claimed, Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection does not (in fact, couldn’t) provide a viable account of the mechanism of the evolution of species-phenotypes. The argument is logical/philosophical; it requires empirical premises, but none of them are in dispute. No religious or theological theses will be presented or presupposed.

Keynote 2: Russ Shafer-Landau

University of Wisconsin, Madison

“The Darwinian Argument”

Saturday, April 21, at 11:15 AM

Humanities Room 150

Abstract: I reconstruct a master argument that tries to reveal the essential commitments of those who would argue that moral knowledge is impossible, once we become aware of the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs. At the heart of the debunking strategies is a common claim: given the influence of selective pressures on our moral faculties, it would be a massive coincidence were they reliable. I explore a variety of ways in which this sort of coincidence can be understood, and argue that none of these ways supports moral skepticism.

Keynote 3: Kit Fine

New York University

“Truthmaker Semantics”

Saturday, April 21, at 4:45 PM

Humanities Room 150

Abstract: This talk will outline an alternative to possible worlds semantics.

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:

Friday, 20 April

Keynote 1: Jerry Fodor

6:15 PM - 7:45 PM — Benson Room 180

Saturday, 21 April

Session A: 9:00 AM - 9:50 AM

A1. Matthew Leonard, Univ. California, Davis

“Mirror Realism”

Commenter: Ben Rohrs

Humanities Room 135

A2. Alexander Stathopoulos, U. of St. Andrews

“A Deflationary View of Peer Disagreement”

Commenter: Dan Lowe

Humanities Room 150

Session B: 10:00 AM - 10:50 AM

B1. Avery Archer, Columbia University

“Competing Aims: Vellman vs. The Guise of the Good”

Commenter: Benjamin Kultgen,

Humanities Room 135

B2. Julia Neufeld, Northern Illinois University

“Conditionals of Freedom, Truth and Grounding, Necessity”

Commenter: Jason Hanschmann,

Humanities Room, 150

Keynote 2: Russ Shafer-Landau

11:15 AM - 12:45 AM — Humanities Room 150

Lunch: 12:45 PM - 2:30 PM

Session C 2:30 PM - 3:20 PM

C1. Matthew Lee, University of Notre Dame

“Are Credences Reducible to Probabilistic Beliefs?”

Commenter: Rebecca Chan

Humanities Room 135

C2. Tyler Paytas, Washington Univ. St. Louis

“You Really Ought to Use a Cleaver to Kill Jones: The Under-Specification of Practical Oughts”

Commenter: Spencer Case

Humanities Room 150

Session D 3:30 PM - 4:20 PM

D1. Andy Yu, University of Oxford

“The Truth about the Necessity and existence of Williamson’s Necessary Existents”

Commenter: Noel Saenz

Humanities Room 135

D2. Samuel Taylor, University of Iowa

“What Seemings Seem to Be”

Commenter: Jon Spelman

Humanities Room 150

Keynote 3: Kit Fine

4:45 PM - 6:15 PM — Humanities Room 150

The 2012 Princeton-Rutgers Philosophy Grad Conference

Hosted on March 31 and April 01, 2012,

by Princeton and Rutgers Philosophy Departments.

Keynote Speakers:

Adam Elga

Dean Zimmermann

Saturday March 31 (Princeton)

9:30am Breakfast

10:00am Keynote by Adam Elga (Princeton), How to Make Things Riskier by Trying to Make Them Safer

11:30am Coffee Break

11:50am Uwe Peters (King’s College London): How We Don’t Know Our Own Thoughts: Self-Knowledge and Cognitive Phenomenology

Commentator: Patrick Kelly-Decker (Princeton)

1:10pm Lunch

2:10pm Ryan Perkins (Oxford), Of Grounding and Explanation

Commentator: Michaela McSweeney (Princeton)

3:30pm Coffee Break

3:50pm Avery Archer (Columbia), Competing Aims: Velleman vs. The Guise of the Good Theory of Desire
Commentator: Stephanie Leary (Rutgers)

5:10pm Reception

7:30pm Dinner (for speakers, commentators and organizers)

Sunday April 1 (New Brunswick)

11:00 Breakfast

11:30 Justin Khoo (Yale), On Stalnaker’s Unified Theory of Conditionals

Commentator: Carlotta Pavese (Rutgers)

12:40 Lunch Break

1:40 Harjit Bhogal (NYU), The Chancy Past

Commentator: Heather Demarest (Rutgers)

2:50 Break 3:00 Saif Ansari (NYU), The Threshold Account of the Badness of Death Commentator: Daniel Wodak (Princeton)

4:10 Break

4:30 Keynote by Dean Zimmermann (Rutgers): TBD

6:00 Dinner

For abstracts and copies of some of the papers, see here.

CFP: Indiana Philosophical Association Spring 2012 Meeting

Call for Papers and Panels
Indiana Philosophical Association
Spring Meeting, 20-21 April 2012
DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana

Keynote Speaker:
Margaret Urban Walker
Marquette University

Papers. Papers in any area of philosophy are welcome. Submitted papers should be limited to 14 double-spaced pages and prepared for blind review. They should also be accompanied by a separate page that includes a title, an abstract (limited to 150 words), and author information (name, affiliation, and contact information). Materials should be submitted as either RTF or PDF files to Jared Bates at bates@hanover.edu. Submission deadline is 29 February 2012.

Graduate Paper Prize. The IPA will present an award to the best paper submitted by a graduate student. The award will be accompanied by a cash prize of $100. Graduate student papers submitted for the competition should be identified as such on the title sheet.

Panels. We also invite submissions of panel discussions in any area of philosophy. Panels should be limited to three speakers. Submitted panels should comprise abstracts of all authors’ papers, each limited to 500 words and prepared for blind review. They should also be accompanied by a separate page that includes a panel title, a brief general abstract (limited to 150 words) and author information (names, affiliations, and contact information). Materials should be submitted as indicated for papers above. Authors may submit both a paper and a panel, though at most one of these may be placed on the program.

Suggestions for commentators and sessions chairs (including self-nominations) are welcome. Information about local arrangements will be announced closer to the meeting. See the IPA homepage for information on the undergraduate paper prize.

Deadline for Submissions: 29 February 2012
Deadline for Notifications: 15 March 2012

Dissertation Summary

The following is my most recent attempt to summarise my dissertation in a couple pages. I am only just approaching the half-way mark, so expect several revised versions of this summary in the near future.

My dissertation attempts to make sense of the idea that desires may be correct or incorrect by articulating and defending a version of the claim that desires aim at the good.

There is a widely held intuition that some desires are infelicitous, bad, or perverse. For example: there is something infelicitous about the desire to drink a can of oil in order to quench one’s thirst; there is something bad about the desire to take the life a known innocent; and there is something perverse about the desire to stick a sharpened pencil in one’s eye even though one believes no good could come from doing so and one recognizes that it would be extremely unpleasant. The first desire seems infelicitous on instrumental grounds; drinking oil is a poor way to quench one’s thirst. The second desire seems bad on ethical grounds; taking the life of a known innocent is morally wrong. The third desire seems perverse on hedonistic grounds; all things being equal, we would expect an agent to avoid unpleasant experiences. One way to capture the idea that a desire may be infelicitous, bad, or perverse—a theoretical proposal that is tied to a longstanding philosophical tradition—is to say that desires aim at the good, and that a desire is inappropriate, bad, or perverse just in case it fails to realise its aim. On this view, the good is the most abstract characterisation of aim of desire. Let us call this proposal the guise of the good theory of desires (henceforth, GG theory).

I wish to articulate and defend a plausible version of GG theory. There are three influential strategies for making sense of GG theory currently found in the literature: the Desire-as-Belief Thesis, the claim that the desire to φ is equivalent to the belief that φ is good; the Desire-plus-Belief Thesis; the claim that the desire to φ is always accompanied by the belief that φ is good; and the Desire-as-Perception Thesis, the claim that the desire to φ is equivalent to perceiving that φ is good. I argue that all three proposals are unacceptable as ways of making sense of GG theory. Instead, I argue that a desire plays the same role in our deliberation as being the recipient of a (self-issued) command, order or request. Let us refer to this proposal as the Desire-as-Imperative Thesis.

Significantly, the notion of an imperative implicated in the Desire-as-Imperative Thesis should not be confused with the Kantian notion of an imperative (i.e., a dictate of pure reason). Rather, the word ‘imperative’ is meant to pick out the category of non-assertoric speech-acts that is typically expressed using the imperative mood of English grammar; a category that includes orders, requests, commands, and entreaties. I hold that desires are like the class of speech-acts that are typically expressed by the imperative mood in at least three respects. First, like speech-acts in the imperative mood, desires are not truth-evaluable. For example, both the desire to close the front door and the request to close the front door is neither true nor false. Second, like speech-acts in the imperative mood, an agent assents to a desire, not by forming a belief, but by forming an intention. For example, one assents to the desire to close the front door or the request to close the front door by forming the intention to close the front door. Third, like speech-acts in the imperative mood, desires are governed by norms that determine if it would be correct or incorrect to assent to them. For example, both the desire to close the front door and request to close the front door are correct just in case it is good to close the front door. On this view, when we say desire aims at the good, we mean that the desire to φ is correct just in case it would be good to φ.

11th Annual NYU-Columbia Graduate Student Philosophy Conference

Schedule:

9:30 AM Breakfast and Coffee

10:15 AM Shifts of Attention and the Content of Perception
Adrienne Prettyman (University of Toronto)

11:30 AM Against Epistemic Akrasia
Sophie Horowitz (MIT)

12:45 PM Lunch

2:00 PM A Two-Pronged Strategy for Solving the Platonistʼs Access Problem
Sharon Elizabeth Berry (Harvard)

3:15 PM Itʼs All too Hard! (The Demandingness of Rationality & Morality)
Aness Webster (University of Southern
California)

4:30 PM Coffee Break

5:00 PM Knowing about Things
Stephen Yablo (MIT)

9:30 PM Party (at 510 E 20th St, Apt 1H)
Saturday, April 9th 2011

5 Washington Place, New York

Important: to access the building, non-NYU students should register ahead of time by sending an email to gradconf@philcolumbia.com.

For further information, visit our website at www.philcolumbia.com/gradconf or email us at

gradconf@philcolumbia.com.

2011 Intermountain West Graduate Philosophy Conference

Thursday, April 7 – Saturday, April 9
University of Utah

Conference Schedule


Thurs, April 7: All Sessions in the Philosophy Department (CTIHB)

2:00-6:00 Registration (CTIHB-Philosophy Department)

2:00-2:50 “Representationalism and the Phenomenology of Attention” (LNCO 2100)
Speaker: Brian Cutter (University of Texas, Austin)
Commentator: Manuel Cabrera (UCLA)

3:00-3:50 “Naturalism without Physicalism” (LNCO 2100)
Speaker: Manuel Cabrera (UCLA)
Commentator: Matt Mosdell (U. of Utah)

4:00-4:50 “Unpacking the Guise of the Good Theory” (LNCO 2100)
Speaker: Avery Archer (Columbia University)
Commentator: Matt Berk (U. of Utah)

5:15-7:00 Plenary Address: “Divine Hiddenness and Theistic Responses” (Tanner Philosophy Library)
Justin McBrayer (Fort Lewis College)


Friday, April 8: All Sessions in the Philosophy Department (CTIHB)

9:30-10:20

A. “A Dilemma for Quine’s Epistemology” (459)
Speaker: Matthew Baddorf (Rochester)
Commentator: Blake Vernon (U. of Utah)

B. “Morality without Demands: A Critique of Scalar Consequentialism” (406)
Speaker: Spencer Case (University of Colorado)
Commentator: Steve Tensmeyer (BYU)

10:30-11:20

A. “Interpreting Probability in Statistical Mechanics” (459)
Speaker: Joshua Hershey (Princeton University)
Commentator: Christopher Lean (U. of Utah)

B. “Defending Universalism from Relativistic Outlaws” (406)
Speaker: Matthew Gorski (University of Notre Dame)
Commentator: TBD

11:30-12:20

A. “On the Value of Uncertainty” (459)
Speaker: Lucas Matthews (University of Utah)
Commentator: Stephanie Shiver (U. of Utah)

B. “The Prototype Structure of Moral Concepts” (406)
Speaker: John J. Park (Duke University)
Commentator: Spencer Case (University of Colorado)

12:30-1:30 Lunch (on your own)

1.30-2.20

A. “Introducing Substantive Metaphysics Epistemically” (MBH 112)
Speaker: Lucas Halpin (UC-Davis)
Commentator: TBD

B. “Moral Skepticism: An Innocent Companion” (MBH 302)
Speaker: Matthew Lutz (University of Southern California)
Commentator: Matthew Lee (University of Notre Dame)

2:30-3:00: reception with tea and hors d’oeuvres (philosophy dept. lounge)

3:00-5:00: Keynote address – “You and I” (CTIHB 406 - Tanner Philosophy Library)
Michael Thompson (University of Pittsburgh)

6:00-8:00: Faculty-hosted dinner (Leslie Francis): catered by Sugar House BBQ

Saturday, April 9: All Sessions in the Philosophy Department

9:30-10:20

A. “Charitable Neo-Logicism” (459)
Speaker: Sebastian Petzolt (Oxford University)
Commentator: Matthew Barney (U. of Utah)

B. “Wrongs without Rights” (406)
Speaker: Nicolas Cornell (Harvard University)
Commentator: Matt Berk (U. of Utah)

10:30-11:20

A. “Against Old Facts Under New Modes” (459)
Speaker: Gabriel Rabin (UCLA)
Commentator: Landon McBrayer (U. of Utah)

B. “On Answerability in the Realm of Criminal Responsibility” (406)
Speaker: Nicholas Sars (Bowling Green University)
Commentator: Steve Capone (U. of Utah)

11:30-12:20 “Saving ‘Stability for the Right Reasons’ from Rawls: Why We Should Drop the Idea of Overlapping Consensus” (406)
Speaker: Gregg Strauss (University of Illinois-Urbana)
Commentator: Kai Kaululaau (Cal. State, LA)


12:30 Lunch, closing.

2011 Waterloo PGSA Conference

The University of Waterloo Philosophy Graduate Student Conference - 2011

Conference Schedule:

Friday, April 1

Session 1
Hagey Hall 373

10:00 AM Ivan Kasa Stockholm/MIT
“Neo-Fregean Abstractionism and Mathematical Truth”

This paper aims to restore a more balanced view on how Bob Hale and Crispin Wright’s Neo-Fregean theory of abstractionism relates to questions raised in Benacerraf’s classic Mathematical Truth. I claim that, contrary to received opinion, the prevalent strands of thought in Mathematical Truth cannot be taken to support abstractionism as a response to epistemological worries surrounding a homogenous Tarskian semantics.

11:00 AM Yuna Won Yonsei University, South Korea
“Modified Acceptability Condition of Indicative Conditionals”

This paper will deal with conditionals having a true antecedent and consequent – I will call them idle conditionals. Most of theories of conditionals have regarded them as true but uninteresting conditionals. However, most idle conditionals are rarely used in our daily lives and even seem to be unacceptable. Most theories of conditionals have ignored this issue and thought that philosophical theories do not need to reflect all mundane intuitions. It means those theories cannot explain why we are not willing to assert and accept idle conditionals. I will suggest Modified Acceptability Condition (MAC) to explain the phenomenon and show that MAC can be generally accepted by existing theories. Furthermore, MAC will solve some puzzling cases neglected in most of theories of conditionals. Finally, I will show that it will bring some benefits to the existing theories.

12:00 PM Avery Archer Columbia University
“Unpacking the Guise of the Good Theory of Desires”

According to the Guise of the Good Theory of Desires, desires are associated with the good in a sense roughly analogous to how beliefs are associated with the true. In this paper, I consider the three most common strategies for unpacking Guise of the Good Theory of Desires — namely, The Desire-as-Belief Thesis, The Desire-plus-Belief Thesis, and The Desire-as-Perception Thesis. I argue that all three approaches are unacceptable. I conclude by laying the foundation for a fourth way of unpacking the Guise of the Good Theory; namely, The Desire-as-Imperative Thesis. According to the Desire-as-Imperative Thesis, desiring to φ is equivalent to being the recipient of an imperative to φ. I argue that the Desire-as-Imperative Thesis offers us a way to unpack the Guise of the Good Theory of Desires that avoids the difficulties confronting the other three approaches.

Friday, April 1

Session 2
Hagey Hall 373

2:30 PM Matt LaVine University at Buffalo
“Truth and Fictional Discourse”

One of the most intuitive positions with respect to giving an account of truth-in- fiction is that determining what is true in a particular story begins and ends with determining what the storyteller says. Unfortunately, when this is understood as identifying truths in fiction with those things directly stated or implied (in a strictly logical sense) by the storyteller, problems seem to arise. Lewis famously demonstrated some of these. He then replaced the intuitive picture with one in which the storyteller’s claims are supplemented by collective belief worlds of the intended audience as truth-in-fiction truth-makers. Interestingly enough, in doing so, Lewis focused on coming up with truth-conditions for sentences of the form, ‘in fiction, p’, much more so than answering the question, ‘in virtue of what do these truth-conditions hold?’ In this paper we investigate problems that arise from Lewis neglecting this latter question and try to give our own tentative answer. This answer will come from a tweaking of Searle’s horizontal conventions posited in his paper, “The Logical Status of Fictional Discourse.” Finally, this answer, which brings us back rather closely to the intuitive position, will be used to meet the difficulties that Lewis’s picture ran into.

3:30 PM Rhys McKinnon University of Waterloo
“Responding to Prompts and Challenges”

In this paper I propose a principle of interpretation for the content of challenges and prompts to assertions based on the criterion of what constitutes wholly adequate responses. I suggest that this is a unifying principle for the linguistic data, inasmuch as wholly adequate responses generally consist in giving one’s reasons for an assertion. I argue that the linguistic data is best explained by a reason-based norm such as Jennifer Lackey’s Reasonable to Believe Norm of Assertion (RTBNA). Consequently, I argue against John Turri’s claim that the data is best explained by the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA).

4:30 PM Andrew Parker Wilfrid Laurier University

“Hacker’s Davidson: On Incommensurability”

In my paper I examine P.M.S Hacker’s arguments for relativism, conceptual schemes and un-translatability between languages. Hacker’s strategy to save “incommensurable conceptual schemes” is to argue- contra Davidson- that there can be “untranslatable languages”. I will argue that Hacker’s road to “different conceptual schemes” is paved with “different languages” not “different concepts”. Although Hacker rejects Davidson’s “salient point”- that nothing can force us to decide if a disagreement between interlocutors lies in their beliefs rather than their concepts- I argue Hacker begs the question by postulating a non-empirical “conceptual scheme” in his account of “incommensurability”. I argue- contra Hacker- that rather than postulating “incommensurable conceptual schemes” we are left with the fact that humans have many different ways of talking about one and the same world.

Saturday, April 2

Session 1
Hagey Hall 373

10:00 AM Steven James University of Texas at Austin
“De Re Hallucination: A Distinctive Kind of Object Dependence”

Veridical perceptions and their subsequent perceptual beliefs give rise to object-dependent mental states. Hallucinatory phenomena force us to account for merely putatively object-dependent mental states and one familiar attempt to do so appeals to subjects’ related object-independent mental states. This fails to properly account for a particular class of hallucination; namely, de re hallucination. I identify what is needed in light of this result and make a suggestion for how theoretical progress can be made.

11:00 AM Yang Liu Columbia University
“The Sorites Paradox and Fuzzy Logic”

This paper studies degree theoretic approach to vagueness. The aim is to provide an explanation for the Sorites paradox from degree theorists' perspective. The paper includes a discussion of degrees and tolerance, both of which are taken to be fundamental features of language governing the use of vague predicates. A de- fense of degree theory is inserted in its due place. The analysis will then lead to the introduction of a basic propositional fuzzy logic which will serve as a conceptual framework within which the Sorites are treated. The paper shows that there is way of treating tolerance within degree theory by introducing a fuzzy notion of validity.

12:00 PM Justin Donhauser University at Buffalo
“Whales Are(n’t) Fish”

Contra the possibility of complete reduction of all domain-specific taxonomies to that of a unitary “final science,” several philosophers defend the view John Dupré dubs “promiscuous realism” and others variously call “pluralistic realism,” “semirealism,” and “perspectival realism.”1 In Dupré’s words ‘promiscuous realism’ [henceforth, PR] is the view that, “there are countless legitimate, objectively grounded ways of classifying objects in the world. And these may often cross-classify one another in indefinitely complex ways” (1993, 18). This essay is a critical discussion and defense of PR, which clarifies what the view should and should not entail. It is shown that PR is not a species of realism if it is compatible with a remark Dupré (1999; 2002) makes implying that a subset of the members of a biological kind can cease to be members of that kind without a change in the properties of those members. Toward that end, I provide an explicatory gloss of PR [§1], endorse Dupré’s original defense of the claim that whales are fish [§2], and show that PR is incompatible with Dupré’s follow-up claim that they are not and identify his error [§3]. Subsequently, inspired by some remarks of Diana Raffman and adopting positions advanced by Anjan Chakravartty, I offer a theory of how terminological vagueness and processes of abstraction in theory construction generate the legitimately crosscutting taxonomies espoused by PR [§4]. In closing, I briefly recapitulate the beneficial features of PR that bar errors like Dupré’s and evaluate the benefits of having equally unprivileged crosscutting taxonomies [§5].

3:30 PM Keynote Address
Dr. Diana Raffman University of Toronto
“Psychological Hysteresis and the Dynamic Sorites Paradox”
Abstract TBA

7:00 PM Conference Dinner

Ennio’s Restaurant
384 King Street n., Waterloo

The 120th Philosopher's Carnival

is here.

Columbia/NYU Philosophy Graduate Conference

Call for Papers: 2011 COLUMBIA/NYU Graduate Conference in Philosophy to be held Saturday APRIL 9th, 2011 at NYU

Keynote Speaker: Stephen Yablo (MIT)

The graduate students and faculty of the Philosophy Departments of Columbia and New York Universities invite papers by all graduate students in any area of philosophy.

Deadline: January 20th, 2011

Papers must meet the following requirements:

1. All papers must be between 3,000 and 5,000 words in length and suitable for a presentation of 30-40 minutes.

2. Papers must be submitted with an abstract no longer than 300 words.

3. Papers must be submitted electronically in blind-review format to:

www.philcolumbia.com/gradconf


PLEASE note that NO submissions by mail or email will be accepted. For more information please visit our website at www.philcolumbia.com/gradconf or email us at: gradconf@philcolumbia.com

The 101st Philosopher's Carnival

is here.

The 100th Philosopher's Carnival

is here!

UW Graduate Student Conference

THE 5TH BIENNIAL UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON
GRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE IN PHILOSOPHY
November 13 & 14, 2009
Theme: Moral Psychology

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE:

Friday

3:30 PM KEYNOTE ADDRESS

“Responsibility and Mental Agency”
Pamela Heironymi (UCLA)
Savery Hall, Room 264

5:30 PM RECEPTION (Savery Hall Third Floor Philosophy Department Table)


Saturday (all sessions in Savery Hall Room 264)

9:00 – 9:30 LIGHT BREAKFAST PROVIDED (Savery Hall Room 264)

9:30 – 10:20 SESSION 1: “Responsibility and Affective Skills in the Psychopath”
Garrett Pendergraft (University of California, Riverside)
COMMENTS: Janice Moskalik (University of Washington)

10:30 – 11:20 SESSION 2: “Irresistible Motivation”
Todd Beattie (Princeton University)
COMMENTS: Jason Benchimol (University of Washington)

11:30 – 12:20 SESSION 3: “Hard Feelings and Forgiveness”
Grant Rozeboom (Stanford University)
COMMENTS: Patrick Smith (University of Washington)

12:20 – 1:30 LUNCH

1:30 – 2:20 SESSION 4: “Evaluation without Hyper-intellectualisation”
Avery Archer (Columbia University)
COMMENTS: Rachel Fredericks (University of Washington)

2:30 – 3:20 SESSION 5: “Liberal Universalism and How We Understand the Past”
George Tsai (University of California, Berkeley)
COMMENTS: Amy Reed (University of Washington)

3:30 – 4:20 SESSION 6: “Is Self-Binding Morally Wrong?”
Jeff Sebo (New York University)
COMMENTS: Fareed Awan (University of Washington)

4:30 – 5:20 SESSION 7: “Why So Serious? An Inquiry On Racist Jokes”
Luvell Anderson (Rutgers University)
COMMENTS: Elizabeth Scarbrough (University of Washington) &
Jonathan Rosenberg (University of Washington)

5:30 – 7:00 BANQUET (Savery Hall Third Floor Philosophy Department Table)

8:00 – ? PARTY (at the “Philosophy House”)

Philosophy Workshop Series - New School

Beginning this semester, the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research will be hosting an ongoing series of workshops on a range of themes inspired or influenced by the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The workshop, in continuation of the workshops organized by Alice Crary last Spring, aims to foster intellectual community and conversation in an informal setting among those working not only on Wittgenstein but also more generally on themes in analytic and European philosophy, including ethics, aesthetics, action, normativity, mind, and meaning.

This semester we have scheduled three events. Each will feature a presentation, followed by a careful and brief consideration by a commenter and then a general discussion.

Thursday October 29th, 11-1pm, Rm. 802 at 80 Fifth Avenue
Speaker: James Dow, CUNY, "Shoegenstein on Self-Ascription and Immunity to Error"Commentator: Adam Gies, NSSR

Thursday November 19th, 11-1pm, Rm. 802 at 80 Fifth Avenue
Speaker: Will Small, University of Chicago, "Intention, Belief, and the Future"Commentator: Felix Koch, Columbia University

Thursday December 17th, 11-1pm, Rm. 802 at 80 Fifth Avenue
Speaker: Alex Madva, Columbia University, "Wittgenstein, the Psychology of Unconscious Bias, and the Publicity of Moral Experience"Commentator: TBA

As the dates approach we will send out a reminder email and an a bstractof the presentation. If you come, please come with your coffee and bagels and in a frame of mind conducive to collegial conversation! All are welcome.

We aim to make available the paper a week before each meeting. If you wish to receive the paper beforehand or have any question about theevents please send an email to Mark Theunissen (theunm57@newschool.edu)

USC/UCLA Graduate Student Conference

Saturday, February 27th, 2010

At the University of Southern California, Los Angeles

The graduate students of the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles, invite graduate students to submit papers in all areas of contemporary philosophy to be considered for presentation at the fifth annual USC/UCLA graduate student conference.

Submission Guidelines:

The deadline for submitting papers is November 1, 2009. Papers should be suitable for a 25-30 minute presentation (less than 4,500 words). Submissions should be suitable for blind review and include a cover letter and one-paragraph abstract. Please email papers as .doc or .pdf attachments to: uclausc.conference@gmail.com

For more information, please contact Alida Liberman at aliberma@usc.edu.

Notice of acceptance will be sent by December 20, 2009.

If electronic submission is impossible,please mail submissions to:

USC Mudd Hall of Philosophy
c/o A. Liberman
3709 Trousdale Parkway
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Philosophical & Psychological Issues Conference

This weekend James Dow (of Selbsttatigkeit) and I will be taking part in the 2nd annual Interdisciplinary Approach to Philosophical & Psychological Issues Conference at the University of South Alabama. Below is a copy of the conference schedule with links to the abstracts of the various papers.

Friday	Speaker	Topic and Abstract
8:30-9:10	Michael S. Gordon	On the Division of the Senses
9:15-9:55	Jack Shelley-Tremblay	Event-related Potentials Index Aspects of Attention: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective
10:00-10:45	David Bunch, Jonathan D. Walker & Alen Hajnal	Lateralization of sequence learning and transfer in a tactuo-spatial task
10:40-11:20	Kenneth Aizawa	Noe‘s Strong and Weak Enactivism
11:25-12:25	John Bickle	From Psychological Generalizations to Neuromolecular Mechanisms: Explanations ‘in a Single Bound'
Lunch at facility
1:30-2:10	James Beebe	Surprising Connections Between Knowledge and Intentional Action: The Robustness of the Epistemic Side-Effect Effect
2:15-3:05	Daniel A. Weiskopf	The Architecture of the Embodied Mind
3:10-4:00	Andrea Scarantino	Unconscious Emotions: Respectable, Useful, and Probably Necessary
Saturday
9:30 - 10:10	Avery Archer	Desires as Sub-agential Evaluations of the Good
10:15 - 10:55	Elise Labbé-Coldsmith	Mindfulness: Defining and Measuring from a Biopsychosocial Perspective
11:00-11:40	Richard Hine	Attention as Phenomenal Consciousness: For Richer, For Poorer
11:45-12:25	James Dow	Against Cognitive Descriptivism: Self-Ascription, Identification, and the Subject Principle

For more information, see the conference website here.

Williamson Interview

I came across this interview of Timothy Williamson by 3:AM Magazine (via Nothing of Consequence). Here are two questions from the interview, both of a meta-philosophical nature, that I found particularly interesting:

3:AM: In your last book you again insinuate yourself into contemporary philosophical thought and say that not only has it made errors but it has actually taken a disastrous wrong turn. You call this the ‘linguistic turn’, which develops into ‘the conceptual turn’. This is radicalism without a hat. Could you briefly outline the main argument that philosophy that thinks that its sole job is to analyse language/concepts is wrong and why this is such an important point?

TW: The linguistic turn and the conceptual turn took many different forms. All of them were, in one way or another, responses to a methodological challenge to philosophy that the development of modern experimental science has made more and more urgent: how can philosophers expect to learn about the world without getting up out of their armchairs to see what it’s actually like? The idea was that whatever philosophers have to do, they can do on the basis of their understanding of their native language, or perhaps of some ideal formal language, or their grasp of the corresponding concepts, both of which they already have in the armchair. In some sense philosophical questions are linguistic or conceptual questions, either because they are about our own language or thought, or because they are the kind of questions that can be answered from principles that we implicitly accept simply in understanding the words or grasping the concepts. In reply, I argue that the attempts to rephrase philosophical questions as questions about words or concepts are unfaithful to what contemporary philosophers are actually interested in. For example, philosophers of time are interested in the underlying nature of time, not just the word ‘time’ or our concept of time. As for the principles that we implicitly accept simply in understanding words or grasping concepts, I argue that there aren’t any. A language is a forum for disagreement; contrary to what many philosophers have thought, it doesn’t impose an ideology. People who take wildly unorthodox views, even about logic, are not ‘breaking the rules of English’. Although the linguistic turn and the conceptual turn involve radical misconceptions of philosophy, in my view, I don’t regard them as avoidable accidents. Probably they were stages that philosophy had to go through; we can only determine their limitations if lots of able people are doing their utmost to defend them. But by now we can see their limitations. As an alternative, I show how we can answer the methodological challenge to armchair philosophy without taking the linguistic or conceptual turn. For example, thought experiments, which play a central role in contemporary philosophy, involve offline applications in the imagination of cognitive skills originally developed through online applications in perception. Those skills go well beyond the minimum required for understanding the words or grasping the concepts. Our ability to perform thought experiments is really just a by-product of our ability to answer non-philosophical questions of the form “What would happen if …?” Philosophy is much more like other forms of inquiry than philosophers have often pretended.

And the second question, which I'm sure will get a few people worked up:

3:AM: Many of my friends are Wittgensteinians, others phenomenologists. Should they stop?

TW: It would be unhealthy as well as boring for philosophy if everyone did it in the same way. We need a wide gene pool of ideas and methods. Nevertheless, some ideas and methods are better than others. When it comes to writing the history of twentieth century philosophy, the works of Wittgenstein, Husserl and Heidegger will presumably remain major texts, given their originality and vast influence. But from a historical point of view, it also seems clear that in recent decades the Wittgensteinian and phenomenological traditions have not adequately renewed themselves. Although books continue to be published in both traditions, they are recycling old ideas rather than engaging with new ones. Part of the attraction of such a tradition for its adherents is that it constitutes an intellectual comfort zone in which they are given pseudo-justifications for not bothering to learn new ways of thinking. At their best, the Wittgensteinian and phenomenological traditions share the virtue of patient, accurate description of examples. In that respect the analytic tradition has learned from them, I hope permanently. But once the examples started giving results that didn’t suit them, Wittgensteinians retreated into their dogmatic theoretical preconceptions while pretending to do the opposite. As for phenomenology, if a phenomenological description of experience is one that mentions only facts the subject knows at the time, fine. But it shouldn’t be confused with a description of facts about appearances, since one often knows facts that go beyond them. You can know that you are seeing a computer screen, not just that you seem to be seeing a computer screen. I argue in Knowledge and its Limits that the privileging of appearances results from the fallacy of assuming that we must have a cognitive home.

The 93rd Philosopher's Carnival

is here.

The 91st Philosopher's Carnival

is here.

Toronto Graduate Student Conference

Action, Agency and Explanation
May 8-9, 2009
Keynote: John McDowell, University of Pittsburgh

Friday, May 8, 2009

8:00-9:00:

Breakfast

9:00-10:00:

“A Plea for Practices”,
Octavian A. Busuioc (Queen’s)
Commentary by Alexander Shoumarov

10:15-11:15:

“Naturalism and Moral Skepticism”,
Brian Ballard (UC, Santa Cruz)
Commentary by Kyle Menken

11:15-12:45:

Lunch

12:45-1:45:

“A Dilemma for Setiya’s Virtue Theory of Reasons”,
Benjamin Mitchell-Yellin (UC, Riverside)
Commentary by Mark Schranz

2:00-3:00:

“Agency, Self-Knowledge and Functionalism”,
Ariel Zylberman (Toronto)
Commentary by G. Anthony Bruno

3:15-5:00:

Keynote: “What is the Content of an Intention in Action?”,
John McDowell (Pittsburgh)

5:30-7:30:

Reception at the Faculty Club

Saturday, May 9, 2009

8:00-9:00:

Breakfast

9:00-10:00:

“Thomson’s Turn, Dual Process Theories of Moral Judgment and the Epistemic Status of Ethical Intuitions”,
Mark S. Makin (Yale)
Commentary by Steven Zylstra

10:15-11:15:

“Dewey on Thinking and Acting”,
Christopher Collins (Virginia)
Commentary by Diana Heney

11:30-12:30:

“The Epistemology of Embodied Action”,
Andreas Elpidorou (Boston)
Commentary by Kenneth Boyd

12:30-2:00:

Lunch

2:00-3:00:

“Desires as Sub-Agential Evaluations of the Good”,
Avery Archer (Columbia)
Commentary by Chris Langston

6:30:

Conference Dinner

See conference website here.