Category: Academia

Call: “Experimental Philosophy Society at the APA-E”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Experimental Philosophy Society will host a session at the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in New York, which takes place from January 8 to 11, 2025.

Papers or extended abstracts can be submitted until July 5. The call reads:

The Experimental Philosophy Society (XPS) will host a 3-hour session on the group program of the 2025 Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association, which will be held Jan. 8–11 at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel (811 7th Avenue 53rd Street, New York, NY 10019, USA), in midtown Manhattan.

The session will consist of three 55-minute slots (no commentators) in which researchers can present their latest work. Presentations on any topic in experimental philosophy are welcome. There is no specific theme for the session.

All presenters must register for the APA conference. Remote presentation or participation will not be possible.

Please submit your paper (preferred) or extended abstract (allowable) to James Beebe at jbeebe2@buffalo.edu by July 5, 2024.

Please do not submit a paper or abstract if you will not commit to participating, should your submission be accepted. In the past, the XPS has encountered difficulties when people see if their submission gets accepted, use the acceptance to apply for travel funding, and then decide whether they will attend only long after the deadline for making changes to the APA program.

Talk: “In Praise of Praise” (Pascale Willemsen)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Monday, June 10, from 18:00–20:00 (UTC+2), Pascale Willemsen will be talking about “In Praise of Praise” at the University of Oldenburg, Germany. Pascale writes:

Philosophers claim that an agent’s moral responsibility can come in two variations: A blameworthy agent deserves blame, and a praiseworthy agent deserves praise. It is also widely accepted that a central question in moral philosophy concerns the conditions under which an agent is or is appropriately held morally responsible for their behaviour. In contrast, a central topic in moral psychology concerns the conditions under which an agent is judged to be morally responsible for their behaviour and blamed for its negative consequences. While blame and praise are seen as two sides of the same coin, considerably more attention has been paid to blame. In general, moral responsibility researchers have mainly focused on understanding negatively-valenced moral phenomena. In contrast, the positive side of moral responsibility has only played a minor role in the research programmes of moral philosophers, psychologists, and experimental philosophers. As a result, we understand relatively little about what praise is, when it is ascribed, and how it is verbally expressed. This is surprising, as researchers strive to tell a story about human morality and moral responsibility as a whole, not merely half of it.

In this talk, I will do three things: First, I summarize the relatively scarce psychological literature which strongly suggests various asymmetries between blame and praise. Second, presenting a series of my own experiments, I demonstrate that blame and praise may differ in another important respect, namely in the way it is verbally expressed by negative and positive evaluative concepts. As a result of all this evidence, I conclude that praise is a unique moral judgment that deserves closer attention. Finally, taking a first stab at the linguistic dimension of praise, I show some pilot corpus studies which explore praise vocabulary.

Call (Extended): “2nd Meeting of the Society for Philosophy of Causation”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Society for Philosophy of Causation’s second meeting will be held at the University of Göttingen, Germany, from July 19 to 21. The society’s first meeting was held last year at Kyoto University, Japan, where the society was also founded.

While the initial deadline (April 23) has already passed, I was told that submissions will still be considered. The call reads:

Encouraged are submissions on philosophy, psychology, and computer science of causation, and effort will be made to balance these topics. That is, you shouldn’t be discouraged if your submission is more on the cognitive science or computer science side of causation, the name of the society notwithstanding.

The instructions haven’t changed much. Please submit an abstract of 300–1000 words to gosation@causation.science. Specifically, please send an email with your name, the title of your talk, and the abstract in the body of the email and submission as its title. If you have a (drafty or polished) paper, or your abstract can’t be easily pasted as text (e.g., it contains figures or symbols), please in addition attach a PDF of the paper or the abstract. Please mind that the more of the argument your abstract contains, the more likely it will be accepted.

For more information about the Society for Philosophy of Causation and their conference, visit https://causation.science.

Conference: “4th European Experimental Philosophy Conference”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 4th “European Experimental Philosophy Conference,” organized by Izabela Skoczeń, Tomasz Żuradzki, Piotr Bystranowski, Bartosz Janik, Maciej Próchnicki, and Vilius Dranseika, will take place from May 30 to July 2 at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland.

On May 30, there’s a pre-conference symposium on “LLMs for xPhi”. The conference program from May 31 to June 2, then, spans a total of 19 sessions and is complemented by three keynotes:

May 31, 9:30–10:45 (UTC+2)

  • Ivar Rodriguez Hannikainen (University of Granada): “Letter Versus Spirit – An Overview of Experimental General Jurisprudence”

June 1, 9:30–10:45 (UTC+2)

  • Katarzyna Paprzycka-Hausman and her team (University of Warsaw): “Reflecting on the Knobe Effect and the Epistemic Side-Effect Effect”

June 2, 13:00–14:15 (UTC+2)

  • Thomas Nadelhoffer (College of Charleston): “Measuring Free Will Beliefs – What Have We Learned?”

For more information about the conference, visit https://sites.google.com/view/xphi2024krakow/.

Conference: “Experimental Philosophy – Beyond Armchair Philosophy”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The 32nd “Philosophy Conference” of the University of Valladolid’s Department of Philosophy, organized by José V. Hernández-Conde, will take place from May 16 to 17 in Valladolid, Spain. This year’s instalment is all about experimental philosophy.

May 16, 9:00–18:30 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “No Luck for Moral Luck”
  • María Jiménez-Buedo (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia): “What do we Measure in the Dictator Game? Constructs, Validity and the Threat of Methodological Artifacts”
  • Mikel Asteinza (University of the Basque Country): “Epistemic Determinants of Scientific Disclosure and Their Impact on the Legal Audience – The Case of De-Extinction”
  • Andrei Moldovan and Obdulia Torres (University of Salamanca): “Expertisia as a Contextual Property”
  • Fernando Aguiar (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Would You Hire a Person With an Intellectual Disability? An Experimental Study on Action and Compassion”
  • Francisco Calvo (University of Murcia): “Of Seahorses and Plants – An Experimental Journey out of Ignorance”
  • Fernando Sanantonio (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona): “External Sanctions, Compliance and Avoidance in Vegetarianism as a Normative System”
  • Daniel Martín (University of Granada): “Attitudes Toward Moral Improvement Based on Virtual Assistance”

May 17, 9:15–14:00 (UTC+2)

  • Edouard Machery (University of Pittsburgh): “The Geography of Wisdom”
  • Ivar Hannikainen (University of Granada): “What is ‘Consenting’?”
  • Javier Anta (University of Salamanca): “An Experimental Approach to the Ordinary Meaning of ‘Information’”
  • Rodrigo Díaz (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas): “Describing (Erroneously) Recalcitrant Emotions”
  • David Rodríguez-Arias (University of Granada): “Contemporary End-of-Life Bioethics – Empirical and Experimental Contributions”

For more information about the conference, visit https://keama.uva.es/xxxii-philosophy-conference/.

Workshop: “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

Today, the “XPHI UK Work in Progress Workshop Series,” organized by James Andow and Eugen Fischer, starts. 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 worshop is held via Teams, the second Wednesday of each month, 16:00–18:00 UK time. The link to the Teams meetings is below.

February 14, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Renato Turco (University of Genoa): “An Experimental Approach to Empty Definite Descriptions”
  • Lucien Baumgartner (University of Zurich), Paul Rehren (Utrecht University), and Krzysztof Sękowski (University of Warsaw): “Measuring (Un)Intentional Conceptual Change in Philosophy – A Corpus Study”

March 13, 16:00–18:00 (UTC±0)

  • Isabelle Keßels (University of Düsseldorf), Paul Hasselkuß (University of Düsseldorf), and Daian Bica (University of Düsseldorf): “The Safety Dilemma Put to the Test”
  • José V. Hernández-Conde (University of Valladolid) and Agustín Vicente (University of the Basque Country; Ikerbasque): “A Comparative Analysis of the Knobe Effect – Assessing Moral, Aesthetic, and Alethic Reasoning in Autistic and Neurotypical Populations”

April 10, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Tingting Sui (Peking University), Sebastian Sunday (Peking University): “A Confucian Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles”
  • Ryan Doran (University of Barcelona; University of Cambridge): “True Beauty”

May 8, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • William Gopal (University of Glasgow): “Identifying & Rectifying the Instrumentalist Bias in Analytic Social Epistemology”
  • Giuseppe Ricciardi (Harvard University) and Kevin Reuter (University of Zurich): “Exploring the Agent-Relativity of Truth”

June 12, 16:00–18:00 (UTC+1)

  • Federico Burdman (Alberto Hurtado University), Gino Marttelo Carmona Díaz (University of the Andes), and María Fernanda Rangel Carrillo (University of the Andes): “Lay Perceptions of Control and Moral Responsibility in Addiction”
  • Phuc Nguyen (German Cancer Research Center), Andrea Quint (German Cancer Research Center), María Alejandra Petino Zappala (German Cancer Research Center), and Nora Heinzelmann (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg): “A Cross-Cultural Study on the Ethics and Moral Psychology of HPV Vaccination”

Sessions can be joined using Microsoft Teams via https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_NDdiNDRjNmQtMzI4Yi00MWM2LWFiYjMtYzE4YzE1ZTY2ODcz%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%22c152cb07-614e-4abb-818a-f035cfa91a77%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22680c6cfa-4e43-4962-9569-4828023e7f78%22%7d.

Talk: “Experimental Philosophy of Law – Biases in Mens Rea Attribution & How to Address Them” (Markus Kneer)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On Wednesday, April 10, from 16:00–18:00 (UTC-5), Markus Kneer will be talking about “Biases in Mens Rea Attribution & How to Address Them” at the University of the Andes (Hemiciclo 001) in Bogotá, Colombia. Markus writes:

In this talk I aim to do three things: First, I’ll briefly introduce the new subdiscipline of Experimental Philosophy of Law. Second, I will explore legal conceptions of certain inculpating mental states (mens rea), in particular intention and negligence. To do so, I’ll show how experimental philosophy of law can help elucidate bias in their attribution and potential mismatch between legal and folk conceptions thereof. Third, I will discuss how biases in mens rea attribution could be alleviated.