Month: January 2026

Talk: “Normality and Norms” (Josh Knobe)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Center for Philosophy and the Health Sciences at Aarhus University is hosting a lecture by Joshua Knobe. It will take place on Thursday, January 29, 15:15–16:45 (UTC+1) via Zoom. The abstract reads:

The notion of normality plays a role in the way people understand many different scientifically important concepts. For example, normality figures in people’s understanding of what it is for a trait to be innate, what it is for one event to cause another, and what it is for the state to count as a disease. I will be presenting a theory about ordinary attributions of normality and then exploring the application of this theory to all three of these types of judgments. The theory is that ordinary attributions of normality involve a mixture of statistical judgments (how frequent something is) and evaluative judgments (how good something is). Thus, the key claim is that both statistical and evaluative judgments play a role in people’s ordinary understanding of innateness, causation and disease.

Call: “Theory and Practice After the Practice Turn”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On April 17, 2026, the Research Center Normative Orders at Goethe University Frankfurt will host an online workshop titled “Theory and Practice After the Practice Turn – Where Social Theory and Empirical Philosophy Meet.”

Proposals for contributions can be submitted until February 14. The call reads:

Sociology and philosophy have always shared a close relationship. Critical Theory famously tied the two disciplines together to unravel societal phenomena, and feminist philosophers regularly borrow sociological concepts to understand domination and power asymmetries. Similarly, sociologists often draw on philosophical concepts to sharpen their analyses. In recent years, this dialogue has gained new momentum through the so-called “practice turn” in epistemology and philosophy of science. Contemporary philosophy of science and applied epistemology increasingly incorporate empirical methods originally developed within the social sciences such as interviews and ethnographic studies. But while empirical approaches from sociology are frequently adopted, social-theoretical concepts remain rarely integrated within epistemology and philosophy of science.

It is the goal of this workshop to explore the potential of social theory for empirical approaches in philosophy of science and epistemology. What are instances of fruitful applications of social theory to philosophy of science and epistemological scholarship? How does social theory transform when it is resituated in a different disciplinary setting? What are caveats and best practices when using social theory as a philosopher of science/epistemologist?

We are looking for workshop contributions that are focused on but not limited to:

  • Examples of using social theory along with empirical methods in philosophy of science and
    epistemology.
  • Reflections on methodological and conceptual challenges when transferring social-theoretical
    concepts into philosophical work.

Workshop contributions will also be considered for publication in a special issue (target journal: Synthese) on social theory in empirical philosophy of science & epistemology.

Send submissions to: sophie.juliane.veigl@univie.ac.at; riegler@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Hot Off The Press: “Health and Disease”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

With “Health and Disease,” Somogy Varga, Andrew James Latham, and Edouard Machery deliver a deep dive into Experimental Philosophy of Medicine. The summary reads:

The concepts of health and disease are fundamental to medical research, healthcare, and public health, and philosophers have long sought to clarify their meaning and implications. Increasingly, it is suggested that progress in this area could be advanced by integrating empirical methods with philosophical reflection. This Element explores the emerging field of experimental philosophy of medicine (XPhiMed), which takes this approach by applying empirical methods to longstanding philosophical debates. It begins with an overview of the philosophical debates and their methodological challenges, followed by an exploration of experimental findings on health, disease, and disorder, along with their implications for philosophy and other fields.

Hot Off The Press: “The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

In “The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts,” Matt Lindauer argues for a strong connection between philosophical theory and its real-world applicability, also drawing on moral psychology and adjacent fields. The book’s summary reads:

Can philosophical concepts do real work in improving our world? Should we, when evaluating competing understandings of concepts like “justice,” “empowerment,” and “solidarity,” take into account whether these different understandings can actually help us to fight injustice, empower the oppressed, and promote solidarity between people? The Fruitfulness of Normative Concepts is the first book-length attempt to argue that the answer to both of these questions is an emphatic “yes.” In doing so, it provides a bold new defense of a tight relationship between philosophical theory and practice. The book advances the view that moral and political philosophers should be interested in the “fruitfulness” of normative concepts – how well they help us to solve practical problems that we inevitably face as human beings interacting with one another. This view has broad implications for a number of important contemporary philosophical debates that the book examines, including debates over the nature of moral motivation, the duties of the global affluent to the global poor, the nature of justice in diverse multicultural societies, ideal versus non-ideal theory in political philosophy, and conceptual engineering. Drawing on cutting-edge research in moral psychology and adjacent fields, the book also demonstrates that we now have the scientific tools to concretely evaluate the practical value of moral and political concepts. It issues an important call to continue developing the use of these tools and methods to produce more philosophically and scientifically significant work on the distinctive value of normative thought and practice.

Hot Off The Press: “Indirect Freedom”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Andrew James Latham published a book on indirect compatibilism, a new compatibilist account of free will that also takes into account experimental philosophy and cognitive neuroscience. The summary reads:

This book advances a new kind of compatibilist account of free will: indirect compatibilism. It is the first sustained philosophical analysis of the idea that the ordinary concept of free will is a conditional one.

Indirect compatibilism is the combination of two theses. The first is that the best understanding of our concept of free will is that it is a conditional concept – that indeterminism or libertarian powers are necessary if they are actual, but not if they are not. The second is indirection – that actions are free either when they are caused by standard conscious psychological processes, or else by sub-personal-level processes influenced in various ways by conscious psychological processes. The book combines traditional philosophical analysis with empirical work – in particular, experimental philosophy and cognitive neuroscience – to produce a detailed description and defence of indirect compatibilism. Indirect compatibilism resolves two important problems in the free will literature: that people as a matter of fact do not accept that free actions can exist in a deterministic universe, and that some simple actions are under the direct control of conscious psychological processes.

Indirect Freedom will appeal to researchers and graduate students interested in the metaphysics of free will, experimental philosophy, philosophy of mind, and cognitive neuroscience.