Category: Academia

Hackathon: “Data-Driven Methods in Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Gregor Bös and Max Noichl organize a hackathon on “Data-Driven Methods in Philosophy,” which will take place in Utrech from October 16 to 18. Before and after, hybrid meetings will also take place.

Their announcement reads:

Computational methods have transformed academic research, including in the humanities. Philosophers have been comparatively slow to adopt them, but as contemporary language modelling techniques now enable much more sophisticated analyses, they are seeing increasing interest. We want to explore techniques from the digital humanities, linguistics and AI research (Betz 2022) that can support the study of philosophical and scientific corpora, with applications for philosophy of science (Lean, Rivelli & Pence 2021; Noichl 2023. See also the contributions to Pence & Rivelli 2022), the history of philosophy (Petrovich, Verhaegh, Bös et al. 2024; Verhaegh, Petrovich & Bös forthcoming), and metaphilosophy (Petrovich, 2022).

This activity is built around a “hackathon” – an extended period of collaborative programming and discussion. During the three-day in-person event, the participants develop their own projects, either individually or in small groups. The first two days start with keynote lectures that present state-of-the-art research. In the lead-up to the event, we organize two hybrid seminars, in which participants present recent research to each other, to get an idea of what’s possible in this space. During the seminars, participants brainstorm research ideas and discuss with seminar leaders how to apply digital methods, identify appropriate data sources, and determine which digital skills to develop. During the event, our keynote speakers Charles Pence and Gregor Betz contribute their expertise in argument representation, LLMs, digital methods for history and philosophy of science. They will also be available during the event to discuss research ideas, share practical knowledge, and support the seminar participants.

As an additional help for participants without programming experience or who have not yet used data-driven methods in their research, the organizers prepare coding templates and assist in using LLMs for writing code. More experienced participants can focus on exchanging ideas and developing their own projects. A few weeks after the hackathon, we reconvene in a hybrid event to discuss the results of the projects and avenues for further work.

The aim of the course is to offer an introduction to data-driven methods for philosophy and focuses on participant-designed research projects. At the end of the course, participants:

a) Know examples of state-of-the-art data-driven research methods in philosophy and are in a
good position to apply them.
b) Have gained experience in starting their own computational philosophy project
In the best case, the hackathon can be the starting point for a research project in the participants’
domain of expertise.

Workshop: “Data-Driven Methods for Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Gregor Bös and Max Noichl organize the Satellite workshop “Data-Driven Methods for Philosophy” at this year’s conference of the Gesellschaft für Analytische Philosophie (GAP). The workshop will take place at the University of Düsseldorf from September 12 to 13.

Their announcement reads:

Computational methods have revolutionized most fields of academic research, including the humanities. More recently, they have also been put to use in the philosophy of science, history of philosophy, and metaphilosophy. In this satellite workshop, we discuss techniques from the digital humanities, network science, and artificial intelligence that can support the study of philosophical corpora.

The workshop comprises keynote lectures by Prof. Catherine Herfeld and Prof. Adrian Wüthrich that showcase computational methods in philosophical research. After these showcases, Gregor Bös and Max Noichl will assist the participants in developing their own initial research questions that make use of digital methods and explore first implementations. The organizers have prepared templates to support participants without programming experience or who have not yet used computational methods in their research. More experienced participants can use the sessions to exchange ideas and develop their own projects, presenting the state of their progress in the concluding session.

If participants already have project ideas when signing up, we encourage them to get in contact with the organizers to discuss potential data sources and methods. Participants are also very welcome to sign up to continue working on existing digital projects and to contribute to the exchange of approaches.

Call: “Laws Many Users”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Alex Davies and Nikolai Shurakov organize a conference on “Law’s Many Users – Legal Interpretation Within and Beyond Legal Institutions,” which will take place at the University of Tartu from November 12 to 14.

Abstracts for presentations can be submitted until August 12. The call reads:

Law is interpreted and implemented by many hands. Some of them belong to judges, legislators, or lawyers – but many belong to nurses, teachers, municipal officials, or department heads: professionals who encounter law not in courtrooms or casebooks, but in institutional documents, contracts, checklists, and internal protocols. These actors do not interpret law as legal theorists or as abstract “laypeople,” but as role-bound individuals embedded in specific organizational contexts. Their understanding of legal norms is shaped by institutional incentives, bureaucratic hierarchies, resource constraints, inherited routines, and pressures to defer to internal authorities. They are interpreters, but also implementers – conduits through which law acquires practical meaning.

While experimental jurisprudence has deepened our understanding of how legal concepts like causation, intention, or rights are grasped by legal experts and ordinary citizens, it has rarely focused on this middle terrain: how individuals interpret legal rules as part of their job, within the constraints and affordances of organizational life.

This conference is an occasion for exploring that terrain.

Call for Abstracts (submission deadline: August 12, 2025)

We invite submissions from scholars across disciplines interested in how laws and regulations are interpreted, implemented, and transformed in real-world institutional settings.

Legal meaning is shaped not only in courts or legislatures, but in offices, classrooms, clinics, and council chambers – by actors whose interpretations are framed by professional roles, organizational logics, and institutional incentives. This conference invites reflection on the interpretive practices that emerge in such contexts, and how these practices affect what law becomes in use.

We welcome work from experimental jurisprudence, philosophy of language, linguistics, law & economics, public administration, and related fields. Contributions may be theoretical, empirical, or methodological.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

  • Studies of how non-lawyers interpret and apply legal or regulatory texts
  • Experimental investigations of interpretation in institutional settings
  • Pragmatic and semantic analysis of policy and legal communication
  • Incentive structures and role-based reasoning in interpretation
  • Legal meaning as mediated through contracts, guidelines, or protocols
  • Interpretive drift and discretion in organizational environments
  • Extensions or critiques of experimental jurisprudence beyond traditional contexts
  • Interdisciplinary methods for studying law “in the wild”

Abstracts are applications for either 30-minute slots (20 minute talk + 10 minute discussion) OR 1-hour slots (30–40 minute talk + 30–20 minute Q&A). Abstracts (max. 600 words – excluding a list of references) should: (a) make clear the line of argument for the conclusion defended; (b) make clear the relevance of the envisioned talk to the conference theme; (c) make clear whether your applying for a 30-minute or 60-minute slot; and (d) be prepared for anonymous review.

Submitting Abstracts: Abstracts should be submitted with a separate coversheet (author, email, institution) to laws.many.users@gmail.com.

Call: “Experimental Argument Analysis”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Eugen Fischer and Dimitra Lazaridou-Chatzigoga are preparing a special issue on “Experimental Argument Analysis – Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Verbal Reasoning” in Philosophical Psychology.

Manuscripts can be submitted until April 30, 2026. The call reads:

The Special Issue will bring together researchers from experimental philosophy, cognitive psychology, and experimental linguistics, to open up the experimental philosophy of verbal reasoning as a new interdisciplinary field of study.

To help develop interdisciplinary experimental argument analysis as a fruitful successor project to traditional conceptual analysis that benefits from advances in cognitive psychology and experimental linguistics, this SI will address questions about methods, cognitive mechanisms, and philosophical applications.

Methods:

  • How can empirical studies support the reconstruction or evaluation of verbal reasoning?
  • Which conceptual and empirical tools can be adapted for this purpose, and how? How can formal and experimental methods be combined to facilitate normative evaluation?

Mechanisms:

  • How do automatic comprehension and production inferences shape verbal reasoning?
  • What biases affect such inferences? Which factors affect specifically the contextualization of default inferences?
  • How are irregular polysemes processed? What norms do people rely on for specific arguments of interest? How much individual variation is there in this respect?

Applications:

  • How can insights into language processing, and specifically polysemy processing, support the assessment of philosophical arguments?
  • How effective are verbal arguments at changing people’s minds?
  • Which aspects of automatic language processing influence the persuasiveness of verbal arguments? To what extent do such arguments contribute to philosophical puzzles and paradoxes?
  • How can insight into automatic language processing support the improvement of our conceptual tools?

Submission Instructions

The Special Issue accepts theoretical, experimental, and review papers that address the questions set in the Call for Papers, or directly related questions.

  • Papers should be concisely written and tightly argued.
  • Papers should ideally be ca. 10,000 words long, but there is no formal word limit.
  • Authors should bear in mind the interdisciplinary readership of Philosophical Psychology.
  • When submitting papers to ScholarOne, please select “Experimental Argument Analysis” as the special issue title.
  • Inclusion in the special issue is conditional on the outcome of peer review. Peer review is initiated upon submission.
  • Accepted papers will be published online without delay prior to being included in the special issue.

We encourage submission well in advance of the submission deadline. Please email the guest editors if you have any further queries.

Call: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, continues. Anyone interested in presenting something can contact the organizers. They write:

We are delighted to announce the next series of our monthly online workshop devoted to discussion of work in progress in experimental philosophy. The workshop is usually held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. Full details of 2025/26 season TBC.

Anyone interested in presenting work in progress in 2025/26, please email the organizers by July 31, 2025: james.andow@manchester.ac.uk.

Conference: “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 2025 “Basel-Oxford-NUS BioXPhi Summit,” organized by Tenzin Wangmo, Brian D. Earp, Carme Isern, Christian Rodriguez Perez, Emilian Mihailov, Ivar Rodriguez Hannikainen, and Kathryn Francis, will take place from June 26 to 27 at the University of Basel, Switzerland.

The program consists of 15 talks and seven posters, framed by two keynotes.

June 26, 8:30–17:30 (UTC+2)

  • Matti Wilks (University of Edinburgh): “Who Has an Expansive Moral Circle? Understanding Variability in Ascriptions of Moral Concern”
  • Eliana Hadjiandreou (University of Texas at Austin): “The Stringent Moral Circle – Self-Other Discrepancies in the Perceived Expansion of Moral Concern”
  • Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Mapping the Moral Circle with Choice and Reaction Time Data”
  • Neele Engelmann (Max Planck Institute for Human Development): “Understanding and Preventing Unethical Behavior in Delegation to AI”
  • Yuxin Liu (University of Edinburgh): “An Alternative Path to Moral Bioenhancement? AI Moral Enhancement Gains Approval but Undermines Moral Responsibility”
  • Faisal Feroz (National University of Singapore): “Outsourcing Authorship – How LLM-Assisted Writing Shapes Perceived Credit”
  • Jonathan Lewis (National University of Singapore): “How Should We Refer to Brain Organoids and Human Embryo Models? A Study of the Effects of Terminology on Moral Permissibility Judgments”
  • Sabine Salloch (Hannover Medical School): “Digital Bioethics – Theory, Methods and Research Practice”
  • Markus Kneer (University of Graz): “Partial Aggregation in Complex Moral Trade-Offs”

June 27, 8:30–16:30 (UTC+2)

  • Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University) and Maria Fernanda Rangel (University of California, Riverside): “Not in Control but Still Responsible – Lay Views on Control and Moral Responsibility in the Context of Addiction”
  • Vilius Dranseika (Jagiellonian University): “Gender and Research Topic Choice in Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine”
  • Jodie Russell (University of Birmingham): “Sartre and Psychosis – Doing Intersectional, Phenomenological Interviews with People with Experience of Mental Disorder”
  • Aníbal M. Astobiza (University of Granada): “Spanish Healthcare Professionals’ Trust in AI – A BioXPhi Study”
  • Nick Byrd (Geisinger College of Health Science): “Reducing Existential Risk by Reducing the Allure of Unwarranted Antibiotics – Two Low-Cost Interventions”
  • Rana Qarooni (University of Edinburgh; University of York): “Prevalence of Omnicidal Tendencies”
  • Lydia Tsiakiri (Aarhus University): “Responsibility-Sensitive Healthcare Allocation – Neutrally or Wrongfully Discriminatory?”
  • Edmond Awad (University of Exeter; University of Oxford): “Online Serious Games as a Tool to Study Value Disagreement”

For more information about the conference, visit https://ibmb.unibas.ch/en/public-outreach/projects-to-the-public/basel-oxford-nus-bioxphi-summit-2025/.

Talk: “Creativity in Taboo Terms in Sign Languages” (Donna Jo Napoli)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, May 26, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Donna Jo Napoli’s talk “Creativity in Taboo Terms in Sign Languages” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

Deaf signing communities share many of the same language taboos that hearing speakers observe. Still, there are areas that are sticky in sign that are not in speech and vice versa. We will take a peek at how signers create taboo signs, looking at ASL and DGS (the sign language of Germany) and perhaps a couple of other languages, noting primarily morphological creativity but also syntactic creativity.

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

Call: “Cognitive Tools in Action”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Valentina Cuccio and Francesco Parisi will organize the conference “Cognitive Tools in Action” in Messina, Italy, from May 28 to 30. Marianna Bolognesi, Anna Ciaunica, Elena Cuffari, Lambros Malafouris, Erik Myin, Gerard Steen, Vittorio Gallese, and Michele Cometa have been confirmed as keynote speakers.

Abstracts can be submitted until March 30. The call reads:

The conference “Cognitive Tools in Action” aims to explore the diverse ways in which cognition is both shaped by tools and manifests itself as a dynamic interplay of strategies and embodied actions.

The term “cognitive tools” encompasses both external instruments (e.g., artworks, technologies, artifacts, and media) that modulate cognitive processes, and internal strategies (e.g., metaphor) employed in cognitive processing. By emphasizing “in action,” we seek to foreground the deeply embodied, sensorimotor, and interactive nature of cognition.

This conference invites scholars from a range of disciplines (including but not limited to anthropology, arts, literature, neuroscience, performance studies, philosophy, psychology), to reflect on the reciprocal relationship between cognitive tools and the environments, bodies, and contexts in which they operate.

Talk: “Derogatory Speech – Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners” (Claire Horisk)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, March 10, from 14:30–16:00 (UTC+1), the “Slurring Terms Across Languages” (STAL) network will present Claire Horisk’s talk “Derogatory Speech – Conversations, Hearers, and Listeners” as part of the STAL seminar series. The abstract reads:

In discussions of how to mitigate political and cultural polarization, we are often told that we should listen to our opponents. But should we listen regardless of what they say – even to derogatory speech? From the standpoint of philosophy, the prescription to listen lacks subtlety, and we cannot reach greater subtlety without a philosophical account of listening itself. In my recent work, I distinguish between listening and hearing and argue that listening to derogatory speech in the context of a conversation is sometimes morally wrong. In this talk, I expand my account, particularly with respect to how power dynamics affect who counts as a conversational participant.

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

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.