Archive for September, 2012

Workshop Series ‘Self-Consciousness & Kinds of Self’

8 months ago
by Thomas Jacobi in

WORKSHOP II – 5 & 6 November
———————————————-

(see also Workshop I: 8 — 9 Oct , and Workshop III: 3 — 4 December)

Organised by: Department of Philosophy, University of Fribourg, Avenue de l’Europe 20, Switzerland

http://lettres.unifr.ch/fr/philosophie/philosophie/offredtudes.html

Co-Sponsored by: Olaf Blanke, Laboratory of Neuroscience, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland

SPEAKERS
The Affective Self

  • Jan Slaby, Dept. of Philosophy, Free University Berlin, Berlin, Germany
  • John Lambie, Dept. of Psychology, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK

Personal Identity

  • Eric Olson, Dept. of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK

The Dualistic Self

  • Martine Nida-Rümelin, Dept. of Philosophy, Fribourg University, Switzerland

Self-Knowledge in Agency

  • Lucy O’Brien, Dept. of Philosophy, University College London, London, UK

Everyone welcome | No Registration fee

All enquiries to: thomas.jacobi@unifr.ch

-> For a detailed schedule and the workshop poster, please see:
http://www.philosophie.ch/events/single.php?action=date&eventid=923&month=11&year=2012

VENUE

Salon des Professeurs, Room 2113, Misericorde, Avenue de l’Europe 20, Fribourg, Switzerland

(half-way between first & second floor, by the staircase, same level as cafeteria) http://www.unifr.ch/map/de/misericorde.php

INTRODUCTION

‘Considered as a unitary object, the self is full of apparent contradictions. It is simultaneously physical and mental, public and private, directly perceived and incorrectly imagined, universal and culture-specific’ (p. 35). ‘[These different aspects or selves] are all experienced, though perhaps not all with the same quality of consciousness. And they are all valued (…)’.

Neisser, U. (1988) Five kinds of Self-Knowledge, Phil. Psychol. 1, 35 – 59 (p. 36)

The question of what self-consciousness, and, more specifically, the sense of self might amount to has been at the very centre of inquiries into the human condition across different ages, cultures and academic disciplines. The answers that have emerged in the past not only revealed different theoretical and practical approaches towards the self, depending on what was assumed that we are aware of in self-consciousness, but also importantly indicated that, in being self-conscious, we take ourselves to be aware of sometimes radically different aspects of the self or indeed of altogether distinct selves.

In these interdisciplinary workshops that draw on sources from philosophy, psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience, we want to explore how self-consciousness, understood broadly, intimates to us these different aspects of the particular self or kind of self we seemingly are and how these diverse self-related elements (or ‘selves’) not only form a unified whole, if they do, but also how the related conceptions of the self integrate with our general theories and assumptions about the world.

To this end, we will be discussing, inter alia, the phenomenology of self-experience; the (dis)unity of the self; self and agency; biological & evolutionary roots of the self; the emotional/affective self; the idea of a minimal self; the self and the brain; the conceptual versus non-conceptual content of self-consciousness; the embodied self; the first-person versus third-person perspective; the psychopathology of the self; the dualistic nature of the self; the problem of self-knowledge; multi-sensory integration and body awareness; the persistence of the self through time; and prospects for a unified theory of self-consciousness and the self.

Participants in the workshops will have an opportunity to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the diverse aspects surrounding the problem of self-consciousness and the self. Being able to discuss core issues with leading experts in philosophy, psychology and neuroscience will alert participants to the challenges and opportunities in this line of research and will, furthermore, demonstrate to them theoretical and practical strategies of how successful theories of self-consciousness and the self can be formulated.

The organisers wish to acknowledge the kind support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF 101115-140203 / 1)

Essay Prize at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology

1 year ago
by Mark Sprevak in

University of Antwerp

Topic:

The multimodality of perception. More precisely: How recent findings about the multimodality of perception change some of the classic debates in the philosophy of perception.

Eligibility:

The Essay Prize is open to those who received their PhD after May 2006 or who are PhD students.

Length: 3000 words. Single spaced!

Deadline: July 15, 2012.

Essays should be sent to nanay@berkeley.edu

Prize money: 2,500 Euros.

The author of the winning essay will be invited to give a presentation at a major workshop to be organized some time in 2013 on the multimodality of perception at the University of Antwerp.

More info: http://webh01.ua.ac.be/bence.nanay/paw.htm

Mind Network: 5th Meeting, IP London

1 year ago
by Mark Sprevak in ,

Friday 11 May – Saturday 12 May
Institute of Philosophy, London

The 5th Mind Network workshop will take place at the Institute of Philosophy in London. The theme of the meeting is The Personal and Subpersonal.

The local organiser is Barry Smith. If you have queries, please contact philosophy@sas.ac.uk.

The speakers are:

Day 1 will take place in The Senate Room (Senate House, First Floor). Day 2 will take place in Court Room (Senate House).

Registration

To register please email your name with “Personal-Subpersonal May2012” as the subject header to philosophy@sas.ac.uk.

In the message, please state your fees category (staff and students should indicate their department and/or course). Fees will be taken at the venue and you will only be contacted in advance if there is a query with your registration.

Fees (including tea/coffee):

  • None: Members of Institute of Philosophy
  • £10: Other UK Department staff and students
  • £30: Standard

Papers related to Gf – request

1 year ago
by Boleslaw Czarnecki in

Hello Everyone,

My name is Bos, and I am a PhD student at the Jagiellonian University (Krakow, Poland). Recently, I’ve been trying to write something on the notion of fluid intelligence (Gf). I’ve managed to get hold of the latest publications on the topic, but I now feel I could also benefit from reading some of the ‘classical’ papers which I can’t access. I thought perhaps someone here might be able to help me.

The papers that would be really useful are:

1) Horn, J. L. & Cattell, R. B. (1966). “Refinement and test of the theory of fluid and crystallized intelligence.” Journal of Educational Psychology, 57(5), 253-270

2) Miles R. T. (1957) “On Defining Intelligence.” British Journal of Educational Psychology, 27, 153-165 

My e-mail address is b [dot] czarnecki [at] gmail [dot] com. Many thanks in advance.

Turing’s 100th Birthday Party at King’s College, Cambridge — ACE2012

1 year ago
by Mark Sprevak in

15th & 16th June 2012
King’s College, Cambridge

Turing’s 100th Birthday Party celebrating his life and work will be held at King’s College, Cambridge—Turing’s beloved intellectual home.

Speakers include leading broadcasters and experts on Turing, as well as members of the Turing family and others who knew him personally—pioneers of computing who worked alongside him, building and programming the first computers as well as investigating his mathematical theory of how living matter grows.

Codebreaker Jerry Roberts, one of Turing’s last surviving wartime colleagues from Station X, will give the King’s College Turing Centenary Lecture followed by a movie about the Bletchley Park codebreakers.

There will be lectures on Turing’s contributions to: the Second World War, the development of our technological society, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Life, the theory and practice of computing, and the understanding of the human mind.

Turing’s 100th Birthday Party coincides with the major Turing Centenary congress in Cambridge, allowing guests to attend both events if they wish.

For more information about the event, please go to: http://sites.google.com/site/turingace2012/

Speakers

  • Sir John Dermot Turing
  • Jon Agar
  • Margaret Boden, OBE
  • Martin Campbell-Kelly
  • Brian Carpenter
  • Jack Copeland
  • Daniel Dennett
  • Robert Doran
  • William Newman
  • Teresa Numerico
  • Brian Oakley
  • Brian Randell
  • Bernard Richards
  • Jerry Roberts
  • Simon Singh
  • Doron Swade
  • Stephen Wolfram
  • Michael Woodger

Registration

Please register early, places are limited. To register, please visit: http://sites.google.com/site/turingace2012/registration

Transport and accommodation

For information about how to arrive in King’s College, and places to stay, please visit: http://sites.google.com/site/turingace2012/hotels

Organisers

Turing 100th Birthday Party is being organised by Jack Copeland (jack.copeland@canterbury.ac.nz) and Mark Sprevak (mark.sprevak@ed.ac.uk).

The Turing Centenary Conference

1 year ago
by Mark Sprevak in , ,

June 22-25, 2012
Manchester, UK

Second announcement, call for submissions and call for participation.

Features:

  1. Ten Turing Award winners, a Templeton Award winner and Garry Kasparov as invited speakers
  2. GBP 20,000 worth best paper award program, including GBP 5,000 best paper award
  3. Two panels and two public lectures
  4. Turing Fellowship award ceremony
  5. Computer chess programme
  6. Competition of programs proving theorems
  7. and many more …

For more details please check http://www.turing100.manchester.ac.uk/

Note that the registration is now open.

Speakers

Confirmed invited speakers:

  • Fred Brooks (University of North Carolina)
  • Rodney Brooks (MIT)
  • Vint Cerf (Google)
  • Ed Clarke (Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Jack Copeland (University of Canterbury, New Zealand)
  • George Francis Rayner Ellis (University of Cape Town)
  • David Ferrucci (IBM)
  • Tony Hoare (Microsoft Research)
  • Garry Kasparov (Kasparov Chess Foundation)
  • Samuel Klein (Wikipedia)
  • Don Knuth (Stanford University)
  • Yuri Matiyasevich (Institute of Mathematics, St. Petersburg)
  • Hans Meinhardt (Max-Planck Institute for Developmental Biology)
  • Roger Penrose (University of Oxford)
  • Adi Shamir (Weizmann Institute of Science)
  • Michael Rabin (Harvard University)
  • Leslie Valiant (Harvard University)
  • Manuela M. Veloso (Carnegie Mellon University)
  • Andrew Yao (Tsinghua University)

Confirmed panel speakers:

  • Ron Brachman (Yahoo Labs)
  • Steve Furber (The University of Manchester)
  • Carole Goble (The University of Manchester)
  • Pat Hayes (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Pensacola)
  • Bertrand Meyer (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology)
  • Moshe Vardi (Rice University)

Submissions:

The Turing Centenary Conference will include invited talks and a poster session. Submissions are sought in several areas of computer science, mathematics and biology.

Submissions of two kinds are welcome:

  • Regular papers
  • Research reports

All submitted papers must be in the PDF format and between 3 and 15 pages long. All submissions will be evaluated by the programme committee. Submission is through the EasyChair system, https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=turing100.

Regular papers must include original work not submitted before or during the Turing-100 reviewing period to any other event with published proceedings or a journal. All submitted regular papers will be considered eligible for the best paper awards.

Research reports can contain work in progress and/or be based on previously submitted work. They will not be eligible for the best paper awards.

Submissions are welcome in all areas of computer science, mathematics
and biology listed below:

  • computation theory
  • logic in computation
  • artificial intelligence
  • social aspects of computation
  • models of computation
  • program analysis
  • mathematics of evolution and emergence
  • knowledge processing
  • natural language processing
  • cryptography
  • machine learning
  • cognitive science
  • mathematical biology

The submission deadline is April 16. All submissions will be evaluated by the programme committee. Authors will be notified by acceptance or rejection on or before May 1st. At least one author of every accepted paper must register for the conference, attend it and present the paper at the poster session. All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and available at the conference. The instructions on preparing final versions for the proceedings will appear on the Turing-100 Web site.

A subset of accepted regular papers will be selected by the programme committee for the second round of reviewing. The authors of the selected papers will be invited to submit revised versions of their papers by May 16. The programme committee will make decisions on best paper awards by June 14. All papers receiving the award will be published in a book dedicated to the conference and published after the conference. This book will also contain some papers by invited and panel speakers.

In the case of doubts about the relevance of your paper to the conference and for all other queries please contact programme chair Andrei Voronkov at andrei@voronkov.com.

See http://www.turing100.manchester.ac.uk/index.php/submission for more details.

Best Paper Awards:

A subset of poster session submissions will be selected as candidates for best paper awards:

  • The best paper award of GBP 5,000
  • The best young researcher best paper award of GBP 3,000
  • The second best paper award of GBP 2,500
  • The second best young researcher best paper award of GBP 1,500
  • Sixteen (16) awards of GBP 500 each

See http://www.turing100.manchester.ac.uk/index.php/submission/bestpaper for more details.

Registration:

The number of participants is limited. Register early to avoid disappointment! To register, access https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=turing100 and click on “Registration”.

Registration fees

All fees are in Pound Sterling.

early (on or before May 3):

  • Student £280
  • Regular £380

late (May 4 or later):

  • Student £330
  • Regular £450

To qualify for a student registration you must be a full-time student on June 23, 2012.

The registration fees include

  • Attendance of sessions
  • Conference reception
  • Conference dinner
  • Coffee breaks and lunches
  • Poster session proceedings

There will be a travel support programme for students and attendees from countries where getting funding for travel is hardly possible.

For more details about registration check http://www.turing100.manchester.ac.uk/index.php/registration

Dates:

  • April 16: Poster session submission deadline
  • May 1: Poster session notification and selection of
  • candidates for awards
  • May 15: Final versions of poster session papers
  • May 16: Submission of full versions of papers selected for awards
  • June 14: Best paper award decisions
  • June 22-25: Conference
  • July 15: Final versions of papers selected for awards

Chairs:

Honorary Chairs:

  • Rodney Brooks (MIT)
  • Roger Penrose (Oxford)

Conference Chairs:

  • Matthias Baaz (Vienna University of Technology)
  • Andrei Voronkov (The University of Manchester)

Turing Fellowships Chair:

  • Barry Cooper (University of Leeds)

Theorem Proving Competition Chair:

  • Geoff Sutcliffe (University of Miami)

Programme Chair:

  • Andrei Voronkov (The University of Manchester)

Perceptual Ephemera

1 year ago
by Clare Mac Cumhaill in , ,

Conference Announcement and Call for Papers

Perceptual Ephemera

University of Geneva

24th/25th September 2012

Call for Papers:

When considering the objects of perception, many philosophers have been tempted to place their theoretical focus primarily, if not exclusively, on opaque, material objects, what J.L. Austin once described as “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods” – tables, chairs, pens and so on. Call such objects ‘canonical’ objects of perception. Yet, as Austin also noted, it hardly meshes with our naïve take on our perceptual lives to suppose that this is all we perceive. “Does the ordinary man believe that what he perceives is (always) something like furniture?” Of course not. Rather we take ourselves to perceive, in addition, and for example: flames, soap-bubbles, glimmers, highlights, reflections, echoes, shivers, atmospheric phenomena like rainbows and mirages, shadows, after-images, voices, constellations, and arguably too affordances and values. Call such entities non-canonical objects of perception. This conference aims to open discussion on such less canonical objects and, in particular, those objects the mereological, topological, material and temporal profile of which marks them out as, loosely speaking, ‘ephemeral’.

Unlike material objects, ‘ephemeral’ objects are those whose autonomous existence in the world has, for various reasons, seemed more difficult to vouchsafe, perhaps because they are ontologically dependent in some way (as shadows are on their casters), typically short-lived (soap-bubbles, flames), or more critically, because they appear in someway mind-dependent (as constellations do, or in a somewhat different way mirages, reflections and echoes). The goal of the conference is to isolate peculiar challenges that such objects hold for standard philosophical theories of perception.

Papers that treat any one (or family) of such phenomena are welcomed. As a guideline, the following philosophical questions might also be considered:

How should we individuate non-canonical and ephemeral objects of perception? Are some such objects intensionally individuated – that is, do they depend, for their individuation, on the presence, in the subject, of some mental attitude or state? If so, must a theorist advocating a thin view of perceptual content (for example) rule out certain putatively non-canonical or ephemeral objects as admissible objects of perception?  Must a theorist advancing a relational theory of perception likewise rule out as admissible any intensionally individuated non-canonical object? Do non-canonical and ephemeral objects have particularity? Are they particulars in a Strawsonian sense?  How does a representational theory of perception reconcile the inefficaciousness of certain perceptual ephemera with the possibility of their being perceived? How can a subject be perceptually related to an ephemeral object? How do empirical treatments of non-perceptual objects of perception mesh with such philosophical accounts?

Papers are also welcomed on the ephemeral in art, as well as in the history of ideas.

Keynote

  • Roy Sorensen (Washington University)

Invited Speakers and Discussants

  • István Aranyosi (Bilkent University)
  • Roberto Casati (Institut Jean Nicod)
  • Thomas Crowther (Heythrop College)
  • Martine Nida-Rümelin (University of Fribourg)
  • Matthew Nudds (University of Edinburgh)

Submission Details

  • Extended abstracts of no more than 1000 words should be prepared for blind review – specify on a separate page name, affiliation and e-mail address.
  • Submit as a .pdf, .doc or .rtf attachment to clare.maccumhaill@unige.ch by 1st June, 2012. Please put ‘Conference Paper Submission’ as the subject of your email.
  • An acknowledgment of reception will be sent.
  • Each speaker will be allowed a maximum of 45 minutes for presentation and 45 minutes for discussion.
  • Successful applicants will be notified by 20st June, 2012.
  • A maximum of eight papers will be accepted.
  • Speaker accommodation costs will be covered.
  • It is envisaged that the proceedings of the conference will be published in an edited volume. Authors should thereby be aware that, if selected, their manuscript should not be under consideration for publication elsewhere.

The organisers kindly wish to acknowledge the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF (CRSI11_127488)).

From fMRI to Philosophy of Mind

1 year ago
by Nick Shea in

Workshop

April 21, 2012            
St. Catherine’s College, Oxford

John-Dylan Haynes (Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Berlin)
Brain Reading” with MRI: Decoding Mental States from Human Brain Activity

Michael Anderson (Franklin & Marshall)
What Psychology tells us about the Brain, and Vice-Versa: Two Approaches to Interpreting Neuroimaging Data

Adina Roskies (Dartmouth College)
From Brainreading to Mindreading: Desiderata, Prospects, and Problems

Martin Davies (University of Oxford)
TBA

Attendance is free but you must register in advance of the workshop by emailing: <tim.bayne@gmail.com>. A £5 sandwich lunch will be provided for those who request it when registering (please indicate if you prefer vegetarian food).

More information: http://bit.ly/ACKoRa

 

The Nature of Phenomenal Qualities

1 year ago
by Mark Sprevak in

March 29th – April 1st, 2012
University of Hertfordshire

The final conference in the AHRC supported project. The conference will focus on the ontological nature of phenomenal qualities, the role and location of phenomenal qualities in perceptual experience, the relation of phenomenal qualities to the representational aspects of experience, the connections between phenomenal qualities, bodily states and the sensible properties of the objects of perception, and other allied topics.

Speakers:

  • Ned Block
  • Dave Chalmers
  • Paul Coates
  • Sam Coleman
  • Ophelia Deroy
  • Tim Crane
  • Philip Goff
  • Jonathan Lowe
  • Fiona Macpherson
  • Tony Marcel
  • Mike Martin
  • Michelle Montague
  • David Papineau
  • Ron Rensink
  • Howard Robinson
  • Susanna Schellenberg
  • Paul Snowdon
  • Galen Strawson
  • Michael Tye

The conference will take place at the de Havilland Campus, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield.

There will be a special reduced registration fee for Postgraduate students.

Further details for delegates about registration and accommodation arrangements will follow.

Paul Coates, Sam Coleman
Co-Investigators, The Phenomenal Qualities Project

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