The 2010 EPISTEME conference will be held in Edinburgh. The theme – Cognitive Ecology. Conference page and call for papers here. A stellar line up has already begun to take shape.
The Metaphysics of Mind
This past weekend I attended the Timothy Sprigge Memorial Conference (see link to obituary by Jane O’Grady who was in attendence). I met Sprigge in 1997 at the Bradley conference at Harris-Manchester College Oxford, a time when I was very interested in the idealists. Funny how philosophical changes come and go – Sprigge, ever the outsider, is now of interest to current philosophy of mind. Anyway, this conference brought together a very diverse group of theorists in the most congenial of environments and I was able to meet a few of my intellectual heroes.
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Leemon McHenry (California State University, Northridge)
Sprigge’s Ontology of Consciousness
Pierfrancesco Basile (University of Bern)
It must be true—but how can it be? Some Remarks on Panpsychism and Mental Composition
Alastair Hannay (University of Oslo)
The Space We Share: Phenomenology and Metaphysics
Jason Brown (New York University Medical Center)
What is a Mental State?
Galen Strawson (University of Reading)
Fundamental Singleness: How to Turn the 2nd Paralogism into a Valid Argument
Jaegwon Kim (Brown University)
Explaining Consciousness: From Emergentism to A Priori Physicalism
William Seager (University of Toronto)
Concessionary Dualism and Physicalism
Brian P. McLaughlin (Rutgers University)
Consciousness, Identity, and Explanation
Fred Adams (University of Delaware)
Consciousness: Why and Where?
Geoffrey Madell (University of Edinburgh)
Substance Dualism: You Know it Makes Sense
Ken Aizawa (Centenary College of Louisiana)
How Consciousness Can Safely Emerge
David Cockburn (University of East Anglia)
Doubts About “Consciousness”
Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh)
Locating the Conscious Mind
Howard Robinson (Central European University, Budapest)
Quality, Thought and Consciousness
Stephen Clark (University of Liverpool)
How to Become Unconscious
Eduard Marbach (University of Bern)
Is there a Metaphysics of Consciousness without a Phenomenology of Consciousness? Some thoughts derived from Husserl’s Philosophical Phenomenology
Brenda Almond (University of Hull)
Religious Consciousness: Revisiting the God of the Philosophers
Julian Kiverstein (University of Edinburgh)
The Metaphysics of Time Consciousness
James Giles (University of Guam)
The Metaphysics of Awareness in Taoist philosophy
Tim Crane (University College London)
Consciousness as Predicated of Human Beings
Barry Dainton (University of Liverpool)
Phenomenal Holism
Peter Simons (Trinity College Dublin)
Consciousness for Four-Dimensionalists
Computer Simulations in Social Epistemology
The latest issue of EPISTEME is now available – the theme is computer simulations – an topic that is seeing a great deal of growth.
The Extended Mind and Religious Thought
Complexity 101
Here are some nice distinctions drawn about complexity theory by someone coming to the subject with a fresh and curious mind.
The A.I. Report
Forbes features a symposium on A.I: it’s past, present and future.
The editor writes:
Can machines think? In 1950, Alan Turing, considered by some to be the father of modern computing, published a paper in which he proposed that, “If, during text-based conversation, a machine is indistinguishable from a human, then it could be said to be ‘thinking’ and, therefore, could be attributed with intelligence.” He predicted that a computer would pass this “Turing Test” by the end of the century. That hasn’t happened–yet. But the question continues to provoke and inspire. AI might be just around the corner, or it might be centuries away.
To this I might add, maybe never.
EPISTEME ’09
A quick reminder about the upcoming EPISTEME conference.
Being Heidegger
Simon Critchley has the first of an eight-part series of blog postings on Heidegger’s Being and Time. Will he discuss the influence Heidegger has had on non-Cartesian cognitive science? We will see. Unlikely as it sounds, Gilbert Ryle’s critical notice (Mind XXXVIII 1929, 355-370) warmly welcomed Sein und Zeit despite the inherent difficulties of the work (usually misappropriated or vulgarized in contexts where there is no philosophical culture):
As Critchley puts it: “Reading Being and Time can sometimes feel like wading through a conceptual mud of baroque and unfamiliar concepts.” Check out the BBC documentary on Heidegger.
Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology
Call for papers
Hayek in Mind: Hayek’s Philosophical Psychology
Leslie Marsh, Volume Editor
Advances in Austrian Economics
Hayek’s philosophical psychology as set out in his The Sensory Order (1952) has, for the most part, been a neglected work. Social theory, Hayek’s traditional disciplinary constituency, has recently begun to take note and examine its place in the complete Hayek corpus. Despite being lauded by computer scientist grandee Frank Rosenblatt and more recently by neuroscientists Gerald Edelman and Joaquin Fuster, cognitive science (with few exceptions) has yet to discover Hayek’s philosophical psychology. This volume seeks to redress this lacuna by soliciting critical assessments on some aspect(s) of Hayek’s philosophical psychology. Proposals that offer a suggestive deployment of Hayek’s philosophical psychology are also welcome. What makes this volume distinctive is that the editors are seeking submissions that examine Hayek from the perspective of recent philosophy of mind.
Suggested topics include (but is not exhaustive):
Mind-body problem; connectionism; externalism; intentionality; knowing how-knowing that; the frame problem; enactivism; Hayek’s non-Cartesianism; cognitive closure; qualia; the hard vs. the easy problems; Hayek’s Kantianism; functionalism; individuation of mental states; cognitive science as a multi-disciplinary enterprise.
Accepted articles will form chapters in the hardcover book series Advances in Austrian Economics. All articles are subject to double blind review: further details about this series can be found on the publisher’s webpage.
Proposals not exceeding 500 words should be sent to Leslie Marsh by December 15, 2009.
The Bounds of Cognition
Once again I want to bring your attention to the superb Critical Notice by Justin Fisher in the latest issue of The Journal of Mind and Behavior on Adams’ and Aizawa’s The Bounds of Cognition.
