Author: Alexander Max Bauer

Call: “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Ben Gaskin and Simon McGregor organize a special session of The 2026 Artificial Life Conference titled “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy,” which will take place in Waterloo, Canada, from August 17 to 21, 2026.

Papers can be submitted until March 30, 2026. The call reads:

ALife has always had a markedly philosophical character – a fact not unnoticed by some philosophers. Daniel Dennett, for instance, saw in ALife the creation of testable thought experiments – in simulating a thing, you render explicit your assumptions. Despite this clear affinity, however, the engagement he foresaw has not materialised.

This is not for ALife’s lack of interest in or relevance to traditionally philosophical content, but perhaps rather for its practicing an alternate philosophy in which the reflexive relationship between pragmatic and theoretical is constitutive. Here philosophy and science are united, with thought in turn structuring and being structured by experimental practice. In this respect, ALife may be closer to the original tradition of natural philosophy than philosophy in its more modern disciplinary forms.

This session invites broad reflection on the nature of this relationship between philosophy and artificial life. What role do computational experiments play in philosophical inquiry – and what role should they? How does ALife address questions that philosophy also claims – agency, autonomy, emergence, individuality – and how does its treatment differ? The conference theme itself poses one such question: what is life, and what does it mean to be life-like?

Call for Papers

We welcome both experimental work whose philosophical motivations or implications are brought to the fore, and philosophical or theoretical work that engages directly with ALife methods and results. We are as interested in what can be said in principle as in what your work specifically reveals – and especially in work that does not sit neatly in either of these.

Questions of Interest

Questions we are interested in include:

  • What are we doing when we simulate a thing?
  • Where is emergence when it happens in a machine – how do silicon and simulations reshape the question of emergence?
  • What is the relationship in simulations between form, function, parameters, and dynamics?
  • If the rules are made up, what do they teach us – how do we reconcile tunability with the language of findings?
  • What are the laws of motion of living matter, and how does ALife relate to theoretical biology?
  • Is life just physics, or is there something more – what can ALife tell us about the relationship between vitalism and mechanism?
  • What is ALife’s precedent, what does it inherit, and how does it differ – from the automata of Hero to the gavra of Rava to Jābir’s takwīn?
  • Could artificial life ever really be alive – and if so, what are the implications?
  • How does wet ALife relate to these questions – does it change what counts as artificial, as alive, or both?

These are examples, not boundaries – we welcome any work that engages with the philosophical dimensions of artificial life. Contributions from across ALife, philosophy, history and philosophy of science, and related fields are encouraged.

Submissions

Papers should be 3–8 pages in ALIFE format. We welcome experimental, theoretical, and position papers. Accepted papers will be published in the ALIFE 2026 proceedings (MIT Press). The conference is hybrid – presentations can be given in person or online. Please select the “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy” special session when submitting. For full formatting guidelines, see the ALIFE 2026 Call for Papers.

Conference: “Social Ontology and Empirical Inquiry”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From April 11 to 12, 2026, the conference “Social Ontology and Empirical Inquiry – Conflicts and Connections” will take place at the University of Pittsburgh. The conference page reads:

We are pleased to announce a two-day interdisciplinary workshop hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, focusing on the intersection of social metaphysics and empirical research in the social sciences.

The workshop aims to foster dialogue between philosophers and social scientists who are interested in the nature of social reality and in how conceptual and empirical approaches to understanding it can be fruitfully integrated.

Social scientists and philosophers have long sought to clarify what it means for entities such as races, genders, institutions, and social structures to exist and to act. Meanwhile, empirically-oriented social scientists have developed increasingly sophisticated methods for measuring, modeling, and explaining such phenomena. This workshop will bring these conversations together to explore the conflicts and connections between conceptual–theoretical frameworks and empirical–methodological practices in the study of the social world.

Organizing Committee

Confirmed Keynotes

The program will include keynote talks and panels by both philosophers and social scientists, including scholars such as:

Guiding Questions

  • What kinds of things are social entities – individuals, groups, institutions, norms, and categories such as race and gender?
  • How can such entities be both socially constructed and real?
  • What is the relationship between social ontology and social measurement?
  • How should metaphysical theories about the nature of the social world inform, or be informed by, empirical research designs?
  • Do social explanations involve forms of causation, mechanism, or structure that differ from those in the natural sciences?
  • How can philosophical analysis of social kinds enrich empirical debates about classification, comparability, and operationalization?

Format

The workshop will include:

  • 30-minute contributed presentations (20 minutes presentation + 10 minutes Q&A)
  • Keynote lectures by invited speakers
  • A roundtable discussion on future directions in social ontology and empirical research

Talk: “I wasn’t thinking about that!” (Franz Berto and Aybüke Özgün)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On April 15, 16:00–18:00 UTC (18:00–20:00 CEST), Franz Berto and Aybüke Özgün will give a talk titled “I wasn’t thinking about that!” as part of the PhiLang Seminars on Linguistics and Philosophy of Language at the University of Lodz. The session can be accessed via Teams after registration via the online form. The abstract reads:

Framing effects occur when someone believes only one of two necessarily equivalent propositions, P and Q. Framing is well known and widely studied in economics, the social sciences, cognitive psychology, etc. We want a logic of framing.

Of course, we often find ourselves framed because of the guise under which propositional contents are presented to us. But if one has a hyperintensional conception of propositions – one according to which P can sometimes differ from Q even if they are true in the same possible worlds – then one can think that sometimes we are framed because of a difference in content.

In this paper we argue that this kind of framing is structural and pervasive. It depends on the distinction between working memory and long-term memory – a structural one, accepted in psychology for decades. The basic idea: sometimes we believe P without believing a necessarily equivalent Q because, whereas P concerns a topic we have activated in working memory, Q concerns something else: a topic that we have left dormant in long-term memory.

We then introduce a simple propositional modal language with belief operators, a class of possible-worlds models supplemented with topics, and a sound and complete axiomatization with respect to this class, in order to represent reasoners who can be framed in the way described above.

Call: “Measuring the Mind”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Daniela Nica and Sandra Branzaru organize a hybrid workshop on “Measuring the Mind – Conceptual Issues in Psychology, Psychiatry and Cognitive Science” that will take place at the University of Bucharest from May 29 to 30, 2026.

Submissions for contributions can be submitted until April 15, 2026. The call reads:

Psychology, psychiatry, and cognitive science increasingly rely on sophisticated measurement technologies while remaining tied to inherited assumptions about what is being measured. Many constructs – emotion, memory, attention, intelligence, disorder – are still treated as if they were stable, homogeneous, mind‑independent natural kinds with latent quantitative essences, even as empirical work reveals pervasive heterogeneity, context‑sensitivity, and replication failure across domains such as affective neuroscience, psychopathology, and social cognition. At the same time, related debates in the philosophy of biology, metaphysics, and cognitive ontology emphasize conceptual relativity and the need to re‑engineer scientific categories in light of concept‑laden evidence.

This conference asks what follows for measurement and classification if psychological and psychiatric categories are better understood as populations of variable, situated instances or relational patterns in high‑dimensional spaces, rather than as tokens of fixed types. How should we think about constructs, latent variables, and diagnostic entities if variation is ontologically primary and averages are statistical abstractions? When do our instruments partially constitute the phenomena they purport to detect? To what extent do replication “failures” reveal construct instability or ontological mismatch rather than methodological error?

We invite contributions from philosophy of psychology and psychiatry, philosophy of cognitive science, philosophy of biology, metaphysics and metametaphysics, as well as empirically oriented work in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience that engages these conceptual issues. Topics include, but are not limited to: cognitive and psychiatric ontology; natural kinds, homeostatic property clusters and relational or internal realism; measurement theory, psychometrics and the “quantitative imperative”; classification and re‑classification in psychiatry and cognitive science (e.g., RDoC, HiTOP); construct instability and the replication crisis; predictive processing and constructionist theories of mind and emotion; and the concept‑ladenness of evidence and data‑driven ontology re‑engineering.

Our aim is to articulate and critically assess conceptual frameworks that could underpin a “variation‑first” science of mind, in which explanation, generalization, and measurement are explicitly aligned with the heterogeneous, context‑bound phenomena they target.

The conference is organized by the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, and is open to MA and PhD students, early PhDs and postdocs, as well as established researchers in philosophy of psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, philosophy of biology, and related empirical fields.

Submission of abstracts up to 300 words is welcome via email: measuringthemind@gmail.com

  • Email subject line: “abstract submission”
  • Anonymity: Please include identifying information (name, affiliation, contact email) in the body of the email and submit an anonymized abstract as attachment.
  • Deadline for submissions: 15 April 2026
  • Notification of acceptance: on or before 10 May 2026

Date: May 29–30

Format: mixed (in‑person and online)

Contact email: measuringthemind@gmail.com

Organizers:

  • Drd. Daniela Nica
  • Drd. Sandra Branzaru

Talk: “Philosophical Thought Experiments Elicit Conflicting Intuitions” (Joshua Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

As part of the Experimental Philosophy Talk Series, Joshua Knobe and Ivar Hannikainen will give a talk titled “Philosophical Thought Experiments Elicit Conflicting Intuitions” on April 2 from 14:00–16:00 UTC (16:00–18:00 CEST). The session can be accessed via Zoom (Meeting ID: 680 676 8837, Code: xphi123). The abstract reads:

Existing research on intuitions about philosophical thought experiments typically finds that different participants give different answers. Some people say that the correct answer is A while others say it is B. One possible explanation of this finding is that individual participants actually have conflicting intuitions. That is, many of the participants who ultimately select option B may have an intuition drawing them toward option A, and vice versa. Two studies explored the possibility that people have such conflicting intuitions using self-report (Study 1) and mouse-tracking (Study 2) methods. Both studies found evidence for conflicting intuitions, and yet they also uncovered systematic variation: Across fifteen different thought experiments, the popularity of the answer one does not give predicts one’s tendency to feel conflicted. That is, the more common a particular answer, the more likely participants are to feel drawn to it intuitively – even if they ultimately decide it is incorrect.

Talk: “Autonomous Systems, Moral Responsibility and Control Architectures” (Markus Kneer)

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On March 20, from 16:00–18:00 (UTC), the Permanent Seminar in Analytic Philosophy (PSAP) of Università Roma Tre will host a talk by Markus Kneer about “Autonomous Systems, Moral Responsibility and Control Architectures.” The hybrid session can be accessed via Teams. The abstract reads:

Matthias (2004) and Sparrow (2007) have argued that the use of self-learning systems can engender “responsibility gaps” – situations in which nobody is morally responsible for a potential harm. In this talk, I will present empirical evidence as to whether laypeople are sensitive to such alleged “responsibility gaps” or whether their retributive dispositions might get in the way (see Danaher, 2016). I will also present new data concerning the question whether we can avoid such situations by imposing tight control architectures to ensure meaningful human control (see e.g. “human-in-the-loop v. on-the-loop,” Docherty, 2012; “tracking & tracing,” Santoni de Sio & van den Hoven, 2018).

Talk: “Cognitive Foundations of Geometry” (Véronique Izard)

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As part of the IHPST’s Séminaire PhilSciCog at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, Véronique Izard will talk about “Cognitive Foundations of Geometry” on March 26, 2026, from 02:00–03:30 (UTC). The hybrid session can be accessed via Zoom (Meeting ID: 950 6108 6376, Code: 535047). The abstract reads:

From the first months of life, young children can perceive numeric quantities and perform additive or multiplicative operations on quantities. These abilities support the acquisition of number concepts later in life, and have been proposed to enable humans’ arithmetic cognition. What about geometry, another major branch of mathematics? In this talk, I will present two recent studies assessing the scope and the limits of human geometric intuition. The first study focused on Euclidean geometry, and found that children and adults encode a rich repertoire of geometric properties, at several levels of abstraction. The second study probed intuitions for non-Euclidean geometry and revealed the existence of a pervasive Euclidean bias in adults, identifying limits to the flexibility of human geometric intuition.

Call: “Toronto Workshop on Moral Psychology and Moral Theory”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Organized by Andrew Sepielli, the “Toronto Workshop on Moral Psychology and Moral Theory” will take place at the University of Toronto from November 7 to 8, 2026.

Submissions for contributions can be submitted until July 1, 2026. The call reads:

The workshop aims to bring together philosophers, psychologists, and legal scholars working on questions about the relationship between empirical research on moral cognition and the foundations of moral theory. The goal is to foster interdisciplinary discussion about how empirical work in fields such as psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory bears on moral judgment and the evaluation of moral beliefs.

Invited speakers include:

  • Paul Bloom (Psychology, University of Toronto / Yale University)
  • Joshua Knobe (Philosophy and Psychology, Yale University)
  • Liane Young (Psychology, Boston College)
  • Roseanna Sommers (Law and Psychology, University of Michigan)
  • Brendan de Kenessey (Philosophy, University of Toronto)

We invite submissions addressing topics at the intersection of empirical research and moral theory. Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

  • experimental philosophy
  • the psychology of moral cognition
  • causal cognition and moral judgment
  • the neuroscience of moral judgment
  • evolutionary approaches to morality
  • empirical work bearing on normative ethics or metaethics
  • methodological questions about the role of empirical research in moral theory
  • debunking arguments and related challenges to moral belief

Five contributed papers will be selected. Contributed talks will consist of a 45-minute presentation followed by 45 minutes of discussion. The workshop is designed to be discussion-focused, with substantial time devoted to questions and conversation about each paper.

We welcome submissions from scholars in philosophy, psychology, law, and related disciplines. Submissions from early-career scholars are especially encouraged.

Submission Guidelines:

Please submit an abstract of 750–1000 words, along with a brief CV, to: torontomoralpsych@gmail.com 

Submissions should not be anonymized.

Important Dates:

Submission deadline: July 1, 2026

Notification of decisions: August 1, 2026

Limited support for travel and accommodation may be available.

Questions about the workshop may be directed to the conference organizer, Andrew Sepielli (Philosophy, University of Toronto), at: torontomoralpsych@gmail.com

Call: “Folk Epistemology and Science Skepticism”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

From August 10 to 14, 2026, the Cologne Summer School will take place at the University of Cologne. This year’s topic will be “Folk Epistemology and Science Skepticism,” with special guest Mikkel Gerken.

Proposals for brief presentations on Gerken’s work can be submitted until April 15, 2026. The call reads:

The Cologne Summer School is an annual, week-long, event at which leading epistemologists present their current work in a series of lectures, defend their views against critical comments, and discuss their work with participants. The Summer School mainly aims at professional philosophers and graduate students, but anyone is welcome to apply. In 2026 our special guest will be Mikkel Gerken (University of Southern Denmark).

Gerken works in epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind. In Epistemic Reasoning and the Mental (Palgrave 2013), Gerken considers how externalism in philosophy of mind bears on the nature of the epistemology of inference. In On Folk Epistemology (OUP 2017), he argues that folk epistemological heuristics explain patterns of intuitive judgments that have mistakenly been taken to motivate epistemic contextualism, pragmatic encroachment, and knowledge-first epistemology. Doing so involves engagement with cognitive psychology as well as methodological considerations about the relationship between folk epistemological intuitions and epistemological theorizing. In Scientific Testimony (OUP 2022), Gerken argues that testimony is a vital part of science and articulates epistemic norms governing it. Furthermore, he considers scientific testimony to the lay public and empirically informed science communication strategies for addressing science skepticism. In addition to the monographs, Gerken has published on epistemic injustice, epistemic norms of action and assertion, transcendental arguments, the necessary a posteriori, philosophical skepticism, philosophical methodology etc.

Cologne Summer School Themes: The 2026 Summer School will address a range of issues from foundational to applied social epistemology. Many of the discussions will revolve around an important real-life problem – namely, science skepticism. For example, we will examine how science skepticism is related to varieties of philosophical skepticism. Furthermore, we will consider how folk epistemological heuristics and conversational norms may fuel public skepticism about science. We will also consider ways in which epistemologists and philosophers of science may play a role in combating science skepticism. Thus, some of the discussions overlap with issues in philosophy of science. Throughout, there will be an emphasis on philosophical methodology and epistemology’s relationship to empirical research in the social and cognitive sciences.

Topics will include

  • Philosophical skepticism and real-life (science) skepticism
  • Folk epistemology and its relation to epistemology
  • Epistemic norms of assertion and science communication
  • Internalism and externalism in epistemology and mind
  • Intuitive judgments and philosophical methodology
  • The epistemic roles of science in society

The Summer School is free but limited to 50 participants. Online application is possible through April 15. Please supply a short letter that sketches your academic background and main motivation for participating in the Summer School. If you are interested in giving a brief presentation (approx. 20 minutes) related to Gerken’s work, please also send an abstract of no more than 1,000 words.

Apply via email to:
summerschoolphilosophy@uni-koeln.de

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.