It’s the last day of the year; time for a little recap of the blog. After the “New Experimental Philosophy Blog” by Justin Sytsma, Joe Ulatowski, and Dan Weijers sadly went offline around the end of 2023 or the beginning of 2024, this blog stepped in, starting with a repost of The Revolver Case Revisited…
Month: December 2024
Call: “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit 2025”
Organized by the University of Basel’s Institute for Biomedical Ethics, the University of Oxford’s Uehiro Oxford Institute, and the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Biomedical Ethics, next year’s “Experimental Philosophical Bioethics Summit” will take place in Basel from June 25 to 27. Confirmed keynote speakers are Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh) and Edmond Awad…
Call: “New – Experimental – Perspectives on Valence in Language”
Anouch Bourmayan, Pascal Ludwig, and Morgan Moyer are organizing a “Valence in Language” workshop at Sorbonne Université on June 13, 2025. Invited speakers are Diana Mazzarella (Université de Neuchâtel), Joshua Knobe (Yale University), and Nicole Gotzner (University of Osnabrück). Abstracts for talks can be submitted before February 28, 2025. The call reads: It is widely…
In What Sense are Generics Normative?
Suppose you see a teacher speaking to a student in an insulting or degrading way. You might go up to the teacher and say: “What are you doing? That’s not what a teacher does when students are having trouble.” And then you might say: Here you are using a special type of sentence called a…
Second-Order Desires Are Not What Matters
Here’s a classic philosophical thought experiment: Sandra is struggling with an addiction to heroin. She desperately wants another hit, but she wishes she didn’t. She wishes that she could stop craving heroin and that she could start living a very different life. Faced with this thought experiment, many people have the intuition that Sandra’s desire…
The Power of Norms
In many communities, there is a shared sense that if someone disses you, it is pretty normal to react by punching them. But academia is not like that. In academia, if someone disses your research, it would be considered wildly abnormal to react by punching them. This shared understanding then has a very large impact…
Changing Explanatory Theories vs. Changing Norms
Suppose you want to do something to decrease the amount of sexist behavior in the world. One thing you might do is try to change people’s explanatory theories. Perhaps you think that sexism is caused in part by people seeing certain outcomes as the result of a biological essence. You might then try an intervention…
Call: “Experimental Argument Analysis”
Immediately before the next “European X-Phi Conference,” a satellite workshop on “Experimental Argument Analysis – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Verbal Reasoning,” organized by Eugen Fischer, Paul Engelhardt, and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga, will be held from July 9 to 10, 2025, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. It aims to “bring together researchers from experimental…
Talk: “The Invocational Impact of Slurs” (Elin McCready and Christopher Davis)
On Monday, November 9, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Elin McCready and Christopher Davis’ talk “The Invocational Impact of Slurs” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads: Rappaport (2019) articulates three distinct components that together constitute the meaning profile of slur terms: 1. descriptive: Slurs…
Call: “5th European Experimental Philosophy Conference”
The next “European X-Phi Conference” is coming! Experimental philosophers from all over Europe (and the world) will meet from July 10 to 12, 2025, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. Emma Borg (University of London), Susan Gelman (University of Michigan), Nat Hansen (University of Reading), and Joshua Knobe (Yale University) have been…