Tag: Agency

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

James Andow and Eugen Fischer have announced the first talks for this season’s “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series.” Talks will be held on Microsoft Teams. Anyone interested in joining can email james.andow@manchester.ac.uk.

November 26, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Qianyi Qin (CUNY Graduate Centre): “Imaginative Tendencies and Virtuality Tolerance – Re-Examining the Experience Machine”
  • Jumbly Grindrod (University of Reading): “Word Meanings in Transformer Language Models”

December 10, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Juan-Pablo Bermúdez (University of Southampton) and Gino Carmona (Universidad Externado de Colombia): “Goals and Plans in the Wild – The Effects of Poverty on Planning Agency”
  • Miklós Kürthy (University of Graz): “Care for Consistency”

January 14, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Monika Jovanović and Andrija Šoć (University of Belgrade): “A Matter of Taste? Toward Deliberative Experimental Aesthetics”
  • Markus Werning (Ruhr-Universität Bochum): t.b.a.

Call: “ESPP 2025”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 2025 conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology will take place in Warsaw, Poland, from September 2 to 5, hosted by the Polish Academy of Sciences. As keynote speakers, Emma Borg, Cameron Buckner, Nora Newcombe, and Petra Schumacher are confirmed.

Abstracts for papers, posters, and symposia can be submitted until March 3. The call reads:

The Society invites the submission of papers, posters and symposia. Submissions are refereed and selected on the basis of quality and relevance to psychologists, philosophers and linguists. If you have any questions, contact us by writing an email to espp2025@gmail.com.

Travel scholarships for PhD Students

Thanks to support from IFiS/GSSR, via the NAWA grant PROM Short-term academic exchange (in Polish, PROM Krótkookresowa wymiana akademicka; BPI/PRO/2024/1/00020/DEC/1), we can award up to 10 travel grants for PhD students at universities outside Poland to attend the conference and present a talk or poster. Please see the Call for Applications for these scholarships, which promotes equal opportunity for people with disabilities, and adequate gender representation. Successful applications will be selected on the basis of: (i) quality of the proposed talk or poster, as judged by the ESPP expert reviewers’ report on the anonymised abstract you submit when applying to present at the conference; (ii) NAWA PROM’s eligibility rules (see the Call for Applications).

Submission instructions for papers, posters and symposia

The deadline for all submissions is 3rd March 2025. Submissions should be made online via EasyChair.

Papers should be designed to be presentable within 20 minutes (for a total 30 minutes session). Submissions should consist of a long abstract of up to 1000 words (excluding bibliography). If required, an additional page of tables and/or graphs may be included. A submission for a poster presentation should consist of a 500-word abstract.

When submitting your paper or poster online, please first indicate the primary discipline of your paper (philosophy, psychology, or linguistics) and whether your submission is intended as a paper or a poster. Submitted papers may also be considered for presentation as a poster if space constraints prevent acceptance as a paper or if the submission is thought more suitable for presentation as a poster. All paper and poster submissions (whether abstracts or full papers) should be in DOC or PDF format and should be properly anonymized in order to allow for blind refereeing.

Each person may present only one paper during the conference’s parallel sessions, though you may be a co-author of more than one paper. If you submit multiple single-authored papers only one will be accepted. This includes contributions to submitted symposia.

Symposia are allocated a two-hour slot and consist of a set of four linked papers on a common theme or three linked papers with an introduction. Symposia should include perspectives from at least two of the three disciplines represented in the society (philosophy, psychology and linguistics). Submissions should be made by symposium organizers (not speakers).

When submitting a symposium proposal online, your submissions should include the following three elements in a single PDF:

  1. A list of 3 or 4 speakers which indicates representation of at least two disciplines (individual speakers may also represent multiple disciplines).
  2. A general abstract of up to 500 words, laying out the topics to be addressed and indicating connections among the talks.
  3. Individual abstracts of up to 500 words and provisional titles for each talk. Please do not submit more than one PDF file per symposium.

General Aim

The aim of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology is to promote interaction between philosophers and psychologists on issues of common concern. Psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, computer scientists and biologists are encouraged to report experimental, theoretical and clinical work that they judge to have philosophical significance; and philosophers are encouraged to engage with the fundamental issues addressed by and arising out of such work. In recent years ESPP sessions have covered such topics as theory of mind, attention, reference, problems of consciousness, introspection and self-report, emotion, perception, early numerical cognition, spatial concepts, infants’ understanding of intentionality, memory and time, motor imagery, counterfactuals, the semantics/pragmatics distinction, comparative cognition, minimalism in linguistic theory, reasoning, vagueness, mental causation, action and agency, thought without language, externalism, hypnosis, and the interpretation of neuropsychological results.

Hot Off The Press: “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Edited by Paul Henne and Samuel Murray, “Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action,” a new entry into Bloomsbury’s “Advances in Experimental Philosophy” series, has recently been published. See below for the table of contents.

  • Justin Sytsma and Melissa Snater: “Consciousness, Phenomenal Consciousness, and Free Will”
  • Myrto Mylopoulos: “Skilled Action and Metacognitive Control”
  • Samuel Murray: “Bringing Self-Control into the Future”
  • Walter Sinnott-Armstrong: “Who is Responsible? Split Brains, Dissociative Identity Disorder, and Implicit Attitudes”
  • Paul Noordhof and Ema Sullivan-Bissett: “The Everyday Irrationality of Monothematic Delusion”
  • John Turri: “Truth, Perspective, and Norms of Assertion – New Findings and Theoretical Advances”
  • Joanna Korman: “The Distinct Functions of Belief and Desire in Intentional Action Explanation”
  • Cory J. Clark, Heather M. Maranges, Brian B. Boutwell, and Roy F. Baumeister: “Free Enough – Human Cognition (and Cultural Interests) Warrant Responsibility”
  • Edouard Machery, Markus Kneer, Pascale Willemsen, and Albert Newen: “Beyond the Courtroom – Agency and the Perception of Free Will”
  • Katrina L. Sifferd: “Do Rape Cases Sit in a Moral Blindspot? The Dual Process Theory of Moral Judgment and Rape”
  • Shane Timmons and Ruth M. J. Byrne: “How People Think About Moral Excellence – The Role of Counterfactual Thoughts in Reasoning about Morally Good Actions”
  • Caroline T. Arruda and Daniel J. Povinelli Index: “Why Idealized Agency Gets Animal (and Human) Agency Wrong”

Literature

Henne, Paul, and Samuel Murray (eds.) (2024): Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Action, London, New York, and Dublin: Bloomsbury. (Link)

Job: “PhD Scholarships in Neurophilosophy” (Munich, Germany)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Graduate School of Systemic Neuroscience (GSN) at the University of Munich offers PhD scholarships in neurophilosophy.

Applications are possible until November 25. The job announcement reads:

PhD scholarship at GSN

You can apply for a neurophilosophy PhD scholarship in an annually recurring call for scholarships (application period from early December to mid-February). The GSN offers a structured doctoral program with an independent PhD (GSN Doctoral Program), in which you can choose from a wide range of interdisciplinary courses together with your TAC (Thesis Advisory Board) to put together an interdisciplinary study program tailored to your individual research interests. This gives you a sound neuroscientific insight into the (natural) scientific contexts that are important for your neurophilosophical doctoral project. In addition, there is an extensive range of “soft skills” and an attractive social program.

Call for PhD scholarships in Neurophilosophy

The application round for 2024/25 is now open and will close on 17 February 2025 (12:00 noon CET).

The Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences (GSN) at LMU Munich invites applications for several PhD scholarships in Neurophilosophy. The GSN is the teaching entity for the Munich Center of Neurosciences – Brain & Mind (MCN). By creating an interdisciplinary network of research, the GSN provides a stimulating environment for students and faculty to produce novel formulations of current concepts and theories. Successful applicants will be affiliated with the Research Center for Neurophilosophy and Ethics of Neurosciences at the GSN.

Projects in the research center fall in the following areas:

  • philosophy of cognitive neuroscience (explanation, reduction)
  • philosophy and cognitive science of agency (mental causation, free will, moral psychology, abilities)
  • philosophy and cognitive science of reasoning (e.g. deductive and non-deductive reasoning, logic and neural networks, decision making)
  • ethics of neuroscience (research ethics, enhancement)
  • philosophy of perception
  • philosophy and social cognition

In the new application round we encourage applications in smaller focus areas in order to build research groups. In the 2024/25 round the focus areas are:

  • human agency (esp. mental causation, complex action, multi-tasking, attention, reductive and non-reductive explanation of agency)
  • metacognition (esp. metacognition in perception, self-evaluation and sense of self)
  • group cognition (group epistemology, collective decisions and group responsibility)

However, single exceptional and independent projects in one of the other areas are also encouraged.

Applicants should have advanced training in philosophy (typically a Master’s degree in philosophy) and a genuine interest in the neurosciences. This includes the willingness to acquire substantial knowledge of empirical work relevant to their philosophical project. Cooperative projects with empirical scientists in the network of the MCN are strongly encouraged.

The application period will open on 1 December 2024 and will close on 17 February 2025 (12:00 noon CET). Please check our website and the GSN website for details concerning the application procedure. The application includes an outline of your proposed research project, a CV, an official transcript of your academic work (list of attended courses; grades), diplomas and two separate academic reference letters. Please also name two potential supervisors (possibly including one non-philosopher) from the core or affiliated neurophilosophy faculty of the GSN.

How to apply for a GSN PhD scholarship

Please follow the standard application process for GSN PhD applications:

In addition to the application form, please submit a short exposé (max. 3000 words) that

  • gives an outline of your main project
  • explains how your project fits with the focus topic or one of the other topics listed in the call for applications
  • names two or three potential supervisors (at least two in the GSN faculty)
  • sketches an interdisciplinary cooperation project (an empirical study that relates to your theoretical work)

Call: “Agency and Intentions in Language”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The fifth instalment of “Agency and Intentions in Language” (AIL) is coming. Hosted by the University of Göttingen, it will take place online from January 29 to 31, 2025.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until December 18, 2025. The call reads:

Call for Papers

On the linguistic side, we welcome submissions examining any grammatical phenomena sensitive to the degree of agency or interpretation of an action as intentional versus accidental, such as controller choice, subjunctive obviation, licensing of polarity items, aspect choice in Slavic, case marking in ergative split languages and ‘out-of-control’ morphology. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: ways in which natural languages manifest different degrees of agency or the distinction between intentional and accidental actions (morphological marking, syntactic structures, semantic denotations of verbs and adverbials, pragmatic and contextual differences); connections between agency, intentions, and event structure; relations between agency, intentions, and causation.

On the side of philosophy, we welcome submissions addressing any aspect related to philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, the nature of agency, intentions, and acting intentionally. Both theoretical and empirical research are welcome as they contribute to debates on various theories of action, free will, moral responsibility, nature of reasons, and practical rationality.

On the side of psychology, we welcome submissions that deal with agency, intentions, moral responsibility, and other related topics, broadly construed. Topics of interest include, but are not restricted to, the following: issues in developmental psychology, psycholinguistics, clinical psychology (the sense of agency in individuals with schizophrenia, OCD, etc.), and adults’ perception of agency and responsibility.

Submissions

Anonymous abstracts, not exceeding 2 pages (including references and examples), with font no less than 11 Times New Roman, and 2 cm margins, should be uploaded on AIL5 OpenReview site.

If you are not registered on OpenReview, we recommend you use your institutional email for registration – in this case, your profile will be activated automatically. If you decide to use your non-institutional email, please allow two weeks for the profile to be activated.

We expect to notify authors of their acceptance in early January 2025. Presentations will be allotted 30 minute slots with 15 minutes for questions and discussion.