Author: Alexander Max Bauer

Call: “The Armchair on Trial”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From July 9 to 11, 2026, the Vienna Forum for Analytic Philosophy (WFAP) will host its 15th annual graduate conference, titled “The Armchair on Trial – A Graduate Conference on Philosophical Methodology.” Hilary Kornblith, Jennifer Nagel, and Christian Nimtz are confirmed as keynote speakers.

Proposals for presentations can be submitted until February 28, 2026. The call reads:

This year’s annual WFAP graduate conference is devoted to debates around philosophical methodology. It is centered around the question of whether philosophy is best done from the philosophical armchair or whether it can and should be done using empirical methods. The conference is focused on the extent to which the emergence of naturalistic approaches and of experimental philosophy (“X-Phi”) pose a problem to ‘traditional’ armchair methods (e.g. consulting intuitions, conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium, conceptual engineering). We are interested both in work that focuses on individual methods or on the relations between them (e.g. their compatibility).

We aim to bring together early career and advanced researchers in order to discuss questions such as:

  • What is the role of intuition in philosophy?
  • What is the role of a priori knowledge in philosophy?
  • What is the role of X-Phi in philosophy?
  • What is the role of conceptual analysis in philosophy?
  • What is the role of conceptual engineering in philosophy?
  • What is the role of linguistic and conceptual competence in philosophy?
  • What is the role of formal methods in philosophy?
  • Is philosophy importantly distinct from other sciences?
  • How can advocates of armchair methods best respond to the challenges raised by X-Phi?
  • Are armchair philosophy and X-Phi reconcilable?
  • Considering the methodological discussions listed above, are professional philosophers epistemically better positioned for answering philosophical questions than lay people? E.g. Do they have better conceptual competence? Are they expert intuiters?

We welcome submissions that apply these methodological issues to other philosophical debates as case studies.

Call: “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Linguistic Justice”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On September 8, 2026, the satellite workshop “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Linguistic Justice” will accompany the 6th European Experimental Philosophy Conference at the University of Cagliari, Italy.

Proposals for talks can be submitted until May 1, 2026. The call reads:

The Conference will be accompanied by a Satellite Workshop on “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Linguistic Justice” (IPLJ), to be held on 8 September 2026. The IPLJ Workshop will be held in collaboration with the Linguistic Justice Society (LJS). The IPLJ Workshop welcomes experimental and empirically informed contributions on linguistic justice broadly construed, to include linguistic diversity, accent bias and related topics. For the Workshop, we welcome only contributions in the form of talks. There will be no fees for those wishing to take part in the IPLJ Satellite Workshop, which will also be online-accessible.

Deadline: May 1st, 2026

https://openreview.net/group?id=EXPhi/2026/Conference/Workshop/IPLJ

Decisions expected by June 1st, 2026

Submitting authors will have or create a profile on OpenReview. Whereas new profiles with an institutional email will be activated automatically, new profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks. Abstracts for talks should be anonymized for review and not exceed 500 words. References and figure captions do not count towards the word limit. Please make sure all materials for review are anonymized.

Call: “6th European Experimental Philosophy Conference”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From September 9 to 11, 2026, the 6th European Experimental Philosophy Conference will take place at the University of Cagliari, Italy. Barbara Konat, Masaharu Mizumoto, Shaun Nichols, and Francesca Panzeri are confirmed as keynote speakers.

Note that there’s a separate call for a satellite workshop on “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Linguistic Justice,” that will be held on September 8.

Proposals for talks, posters, and symposia can be submitted until May 1, 2026. The call reads:

The conference welcomes contributions from all areas of experimental philosophy and of its study. We welcome three kinds of contributions: talks, posters, and symposia.

Talks will be allocated 40-minute slots and should leave 20 minutes for discussion.

Posters will be allocated dedicated poster exhibit times.

Symposia will be allocated 2 hours and consist of three talks and a panel discussion involving the three speakers and possibly up to two further discussants, all addressing one overarching question or topic from different perspectives.

Deadline: May 1st, 2026

https://openreview.net/group?id=EXPhi/2026/Conference

Decisions expected by June 1st, 2026

Submitting authors will have or create a profile on OpenReview. Whereas new profiles with an institutional email will be activated automatically, new profiles created without an institutional email will go through a moderation process that can take up to two weeks. Please make sure all materials for review are anonymised. Abstracts for talks and posters should be anonymized for review and not exceed 500 words. References and figure captions do not count towards the word limit. Please make sure all materials for review are anonymized.

Abstracts for symposia should name the symposiasts and consist of a 500-word introduction that sets out the questions and rationale of the symposium as well as 500-word abstracts for each talk. References and figure captions do not count towards the word limit. Please make sure all materials for review are anonymized.

Submitted symposia contributions will automatically be considered for inclusion as regular talks, if the symposium submission cannot be accepted. Submitted talks will be automatically considered for poster presentations, if they cannot be accepted as talks.

The number of submissions for talks is capped at one per corresponding author. For joint papers, the submitting/corresponding author should always be the first author. A corresponding author may be named as a co-author of joint papers submitted for talks by other corresponding authors. For accepted talks, the submitting/corresponding author should be the main presenter of the talk at the conference.

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.

Talk: “Expressivity Cross-Linguistically” (Xavier Villalba)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, December 15, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Xavier Villalba’s talk “Expressivity Cross-Linguistically – A Corpus Study of Expressive and Evaluative Adjectives in Romance and Germanic” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

In this presentation, I argue that pure expressive adjectives (such as English fucking and damn) represent the final stage in a process of intersubjectivization (Traugott 2010; Traugott & Dasher 2002). This process begins with a descriptive qualifying adjective, moves through a stage of subjectivization – typical of both evaluative adjectives (e.g., pathetic, horrible) and mixed expressive adjectives (bloody, shitty) – and culminates in the pure expressives. This pragmatic shift is linked to semantic bleaching as well as syntactic changes traceable in our corpora. These changes involve features like gradation, function (modifier vs. predicative), and position (postnominal vs. prenominal modification). To support this claim, I will present two corpus studies: 1. A synchronic study designed to identify the most useful features for distinguishing each adjective class in Germanic and Romance languages; 2. A diachronic study, focused on English and Catalan, to trace the historical emergence of these features. The results of these studies will provide a more accurate and comprehensive cross-linguistic understanding of expressive adjectives. Furthermore, they will offer insights into the patterns of change involved and how the speed of this evolution varies across different items and languages.

The talk can be joined using Zoom. Please write an email to stalnetwork@gmail.com for the invitation link.