Category: Calls

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Call: “The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Lake Forest College’s philosophy department is hosting “The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop” (FAX5), which will take place from March 20 to 21, 2026.

Abstracts for posters can be submitted until October 10. The call reads:

The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop (FAX5) at Lake Forest College brings together philosophers who use formal and experimental methods to address a wide range of philosophical questions. Although these methods have developed largely in isolation, they share data-driven foundations, often aim to answer similar questions, and can greatly enrich one another when integrated. Over two days, leading scholars and emerging researchers will share advances, explore collaborations, and develop new ways to combine empirical and formal methods. By fostering cross-methodological dialogue and building learning networks, FAX5 aims to strengthen, expand, and integrate these methods across the discipline.

Call for Poster Abstracts: The Fifth Annual Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop (FAX5) at Lake Forest College invites poster abstracts on topics in formal or experimental philosophy. Submissions (max 500 words) should be emailed as a single PDF and include: a title; an abstract; a full author list with the presenting author(s) in bold; and institutional affiliations. Please name your file “FAX5_Poster_LastName.pdf” (the first presenter’s last name) and use the subject line “FAX5 Poster Abstract Submission.” Send submissions to phenne [at] lakeforest [dot] edu. Posters will be selected for clarity, originality, and relevance to integrating or advancing formal or experimental methods in philosophy.

Call: “Valence Asymmetries”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Valence Asymmetries project, led by Isidora Stojanovic at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, is looking for expressions of interest from people who would like to join. The call reads:

We are interested in including new team members in our project. Before opening a new position, we are inviting those interested in joining us to express their interest.

The new team member(s) should have research interests that align directly with the objectives of the project, broadly understood. They will already have a very solid publication track, will cherish interdisciplinary research, and will want to combine theoretical and empirical methodology.

We are particularly interested in the following research profiles:

  • Decision theory, philosophy of rationality & framing effects
  • Formal value theory & formal semantics
  • Philosophy of emotions & social and/or moral psychology
  • Moral cognition & philosophy of well-being

Additionally, any other research profile that offers a novel perspective on the project’s objectives is potentially welcome.

The duration of the contract will depend on the range of project tasks that the new team member will be hired to work on, and in any case cannot exceed the duration of the project (i.e. July 2029).

In addition to prospective candidates who would like to join us for a longer duration, we are also inviting tenured faculty who have a demonstrably heavy teaching load to consider joining us for a one year period (assuming that they can get a leave of absence from their home institution) that they can devote to research.

The expected gross salary is approx. 31.000 gross per year (negotiable for senior and/or already tenured faculty).

NB: The project’s team members must live in Barcelona (region), they regularly meet in person, attend seminars and conduct in-person research. The position is incompatible with living and/or spending considerable periods of time elsewhere.

If you are interested in joining the project, please send an email to Isidora Stojanovic (PI), explaining your motivation and interests, together with a complete CV.