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…
Category: Philosophy of Mind
Experimenting With Guesses
A five-horse race is about to start. The probabilities that each horse will win are: Can you guess who will win? There are several reasonable guesses you could make. For example, “Ajax” is a good guess, but “Ajax or Benji or Cody” is fine too. But some guesses, like “Cody or Ember,” are terrible. What…
Priming Effects Are Fake, but Framing Effects Are Real
A few decades ago, it was pretty common to mush together priming effects and framing effects and see them as two closely connected parts of a single Bigger Truth about the human mind. Of course, everyone understood that the effects themselves were a bit different, but one common view was that they were providing evidence…
Do People Think That Free Will Is Incompatible with Determinism?
Imagine a universe in which everything that happens is completely caused by the things that happened before. Suppose, for example, that Mia has a bagel for breakfast. Her act of having a bagel for breakfast would be caused by the way things were right before that, which would be caused by the way things were…
Call: “ESPP 2025”
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….
Job: “PhD Scholarships in Neurophilosophy” (Munich, Germany)
The Graduate School of Systemic Neuroscience (GSN) at the University of Munich offers PhD scholarships in neurophilosophy. Applications are possible until February 17. The call reads:
Call: “Concept Formation”
The Italian journal Arkete – Rivista annuale di studi filosofici is planning a special issue on “Concept Formation,” also taking empirical perspectives into account. Abstracts for articles can be submitted until March 31. The call reads:
Call (Extended): “The Many Faces of Expertise”
This year’s “Jornadas Novatores” conference will take place at the University of Salamanca from February 27 to 28. This time, it will be all about expertise, and experimental philosophy will also be considered (see below). Invited speakers are Reiner Grundmann (University of Nottingham) and Michel Croce (University of Genoa). Abstracts for presentations can be submitted…
Second-Order Desires Are Not What Matters
Here’s a classic philosophical thought experiment: Sandra is struggling with an addiction to heroin. She desperately wants another hit, but she wishes she didn’t. She wishes that she could stop craving heroin and that she could start living a very different life. Faced with this thought experiment, many people have the intuition that Sandra’s desire…
Changing Explanatory Theories vs. Changing Norms
Suppose you want to do something to decrease the amount of sexist behavior in the world. One thing you might do is try to change people’s explanatory theories. Perhaps you think that sexism is caused in part by people seeing certain outcomes as the result of a biological essence. You might then try an intervention…