Upcoming Conferences II

Thought-Experiments and the Apriori, Conference at the University of Fortaleza, Brazil (Aug 11-14, 2009)

Preliminary Schedule

Tuesday, 8/11/09

9.15-9.30 Opening

9.30-10.50 Albert Casullo: "Intuition, Thought Experiments and the Apriori"

11.00-12.20 Jonathan Ichikawa: "Is imagination a priori?"

14.00-15.20 Joao Branquinho: "On the Revisability of A Priori Truths"

15.30-16.50 Anna-Sara Malmgren: "The Justification of Intuitive Judgments"

17.10-18.30 Hilary Kornblith: "Is There Room for Armchair Theorizing in Epistemology?"

Wednesday 8/12/09

9.30-10.50 Ernest Sosa: "On the Nature and Scope of Rational Intuitions"

11.00-12.20 Anand Vaidya: "Apriori Warrant Enabled"

14.00-15.20 Konrad Utz: "The Indeterminacy of Apriori Concepts"

15.30-16.50 Desiderio Murcho: "Metaphysical Necessity, Contradiction and Apriori"

17.10-18.30 Marco Ruffino: "Indexicality and A Priori Knowledge"

Thursday 8/13/09

9.30-10.50 Thomas Grundmann & Joachim Horvath: "On the Logic and Structure of Thought Experiments"

11.00-12.20 Brendan Balcerak Jackson: "Thought Experiments and Counterfactuals”

14.00-15.20 Magdalena Balcerak Jackson: "Thought Experiments and Model-Based Philosophy"

15.30-16.50 Frank Hofmann: "Intuition and Imagination in Thought Experiments"

17.10-18.30 Christopher Hill: "Thought Experiments, Quine’s Revisablity Thesis, and the Individuation of Concepts"

Friday 8/14/09

9.30-10.50 Paulo Faria: "Kripke on Apriori Knowledge"

11.00-12.20 Guido Imaguire: "On Putnam’s Thought Experiment: How Direct can be a Reference?"

14.00-15.20 Dirk Greimann: "Does Jackson’s Mary Thought Experiment Involve a Confusion of Two Conceptions of Facts?"

15.30-16.50 Jens Kipper: "Is semantic externalism supported by thought experiments?"

17.10-18.30 Oswaldo Chateubriand: "The Indeterminacy of Translation as a Thought Experiment"

Upcoming Conferences I

Emmy Noether Armchair Lab: Issues in Philosophical Methodology

28-29 July

University of Cologne

The first in our series of Emmy Noether Armchair Labs will be a workshop on issues in philosophical methodology, with featured speakers Tamar Szabó Gendler and Zoltán Gendler Szabó of the Yale University philosophy department. Here is the schedule:

Tuesday, 28 July: Meta-Ontology

13:00-15:00 Zoltán Gendler Szabó (Yale)

The Ontological Attitude

15:30-16:30 Benjamin Schnieder (Humboldt Uni Berlin)

The Logic of ‘Because’

16:45-17:45 Brendan Balcerak Jackson (Köln)

Are Ontological Debates Merely Verbal Disputes?

Wednesday, 29 July: Thought Experiments

10:00-12:00 Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale)

Philosophical Methodology from an Empirical Point of View

13:30-14:30 Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (Köln)

Thought Experiments and Model-Based Philosophy

14:45-15:45 Christian Nimtz (Erlangen)

Thought Experiments, Counterfactual Thinking, and the Limits of Empiricism

Argue with Horvath and Grundmann!

Over at the Experimental Philosophy blog you can argue with me about my presentation at the "Armchair in Flames?" workshop (entitled "Experimental Philosophy and Meta-Epistemology"), and with Thomas about his presentation (entitled "Some hope for intuitions. A reply to Weinberg")!

Nadelhoffer on "Armchair in Flames?"

Here is Thomas Nadelhoffer with some first reflections on the recent workshop "Armchair in Flames? - Experimental Philosophy and Its Critics" at the Universität zu Köln, which I have organized together with Thomas Grundmann.

Philosophy Feeds + Content Sharing = Netvibes Universe!

Inspired by Mark Eli Kalderon's recent posts about RSS feeds of philosophy journals and the idea of sharing one's electronic bibliographies, I just put 1 and 1 together and had the idea of sharing one's compilations of philosophy feeds online. A nice and convenient way to to this is with the net-based feed reader Netvibes, where you can publish your own feed pages with only two mouse clicks. If you want to see how this works out, then just click on the tabs of my public Netvibes universe.

Workshop on Experimental Philosophy in Cologne

We, the organizers Thomas Grundmann and Joachim Horvath, are happy to announce the following workshop:

ARMCHAIR IN FLAMES? – EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHY AND ITS CRITICS

University of Cologne (Germany)
September 22-24, 2008

Recent empirical findings from experimental philosophy suggest that philosophical intuitions are much more sensitive to all kinds of background factors than traditional philosophers have thought. This relativity of intuitions seems to present a severe challenge to the standard procedure in philosophy, namely clarifying philosophical phenomena just by relying on intuitions.

Our workshop will focus on the following questions:
• To what extent are intuitions relative in different areas of philosophy?
• What are the determining background factors? (theory, cultural and socio-economic factors, priming effects etc.)?
• Are intuitions relative across the board and under all conditions? Are folk intuitions, conceptual intuitions as well as rational intuitions equally affected? Does relativity even hold for sufficiently reflected intuitions?
• Can we explain away the experimentally observed relativity by reinterpreting the data or criticizing the methodology of experimental philosophy?
• What bearing do these findings have on the status of intuitions as evidence?

There will be participants from both camps: experimental philosophers as well as more traditionally minded philosophers. Here is a list of confirmed speakers and preliminary titles:

Thomas Grundmann (University of Cologne, Germany): "Some hope for intuitions. A reply to Weinberg"
Frank Hofmann (University of Tübingen, Germany): "Intuitions, dispositions, and the apriori"
Joachim Horvath (University of Cologne, Germany): "Experimental Philosophy and Meta-Epistemology"
Jens Kipper (University of Cologne, Germany): "Philosophers and Grammarians"
Kirk Ludwig (University of Florida, USA): "Intuition and Relativity"
Thomas Nadelhoffer (Dickinson College, USA): "The Psychology of Philosophy"
Christian Nimtz (University of Hamburg, Germany): "What Intuitions are not"
Joseph Shieber (Lafayette College, USA): "On the Very Idea of Experimental Philosophy."
Ernest Sosa (Rutgers University, USA): "Intuitions and X-Phi"
Anand Vaidya (San José State University, USA): "On the Central Theoretical Posit of Experimental Philosophy"
Jonathan Weinberg (Indiana University, USA): "Are Philosophers Experts?"

The workshop is sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie (GAP) and the Universität zu Köln.

Attendance of the workshop is free, but please check our website for registration and further information:
http://www.armchairinflames.uni-koeln.de/

Fodor über das "harte Problem" des Bewusstseins

Gewohnt glänzende Unterhaltung bietet Fodor in seiner Rezension "Headaches have themselves" zum neuen Band mit Galen Strawsons Verteidigung des Panpsychismus. Ideal für den kleinen Hunger zwischendurch!

Looking back at the CUNY Graduate Conference

Below you can see a picture of me, after my talk, with my commentator Tudor Protopopescu on the left.

Presentation at CUNY Graduate Conference

Next Saturday, April 28, I will be presenting a paper on the modal argument for a priori justification at the Tenth Annual CUNY Graduate Student Philosophy Conference. You can find the schedule and an abstract of all papers here.