From May 27 to 28, 2026, the workshop “Praise – The Moral, The Prudential, The Overlooked” will take place as a hybrid event at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. The workshop can be joined via Zoom (Meeting ID: 635 3364 7504, Code: 481443).
Category: Philosophy of Mind
Workshop: “Incentivized Experiments on Normative Systems”
From May 25 to 26, 2026, the workshop “Incentivized Experiments on Normative Systems” will take place in Kraków, Poland.
More information is available on the workshop’s website.
Job: “Valence Asymmetries” (Barcelona, Spain)
The Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain, is hiring two postdocs to work on the research project “Valence Asymmetries.”
Applications are possible until May 29, 2026. The job announcement reads:
There is an open call for applications, with a deadline set at 29 May 2026, for two postdoctoral researchers.
The successful candidates will conduct tasks that are transversal to the different work packages of the project. Their research will seek to understand how emotion and affect impact and underlie cognitive processes such as belief formation, decision making, conceptual representation, as well as language production and interpretation. They will work in very close collaboration with Prof. Isidora Stojanovic (project PI) and the entire team.
This is a full-time research position, without any teaching requirements, with a gross annual salary of 31.196,40 €, in a dynamic interdisciplinary team, funded by Prof. Stojanovic’s ERC Advanced grant VALENCE ASYMMETRIES GA N. 101142133.
For further details and in order to apply, consult this offer through Interfolio. The official call, specifying all legal requirement, in Catalan, can be consulted at the Deparment’s website.
Workshop: “Mental Interpretation & Mental Diversity”
From May 25 to 26, 2026, the workshop “Mental Interpretation & Mental Diversity” will take place at the University of Granada, Spain.
The announcement reads:
There is a marked tendency in the philosophy of mind to characterize mental interpretation – the understanding of each other and ourselves in terms of mental concepts, folk or sciency – in broadly universalist terms. Whether described as the exercise of psychological capacities whose basic structure is universally shared across the species (a Theory of Mind, described in functionalist-representationalist terms), or as a predictive practice based on fundamental norms of rationality, the underlying commitment remains the same: the downtown of mental interpretation is a set of universal rules, functional or rational, that set fixed boundaries to what can plausibly count as a (healthily) minded creature.
This assumption has been challenged from a number of directions. On the one hand, empirical evidence from fields like anthropology and cultural psychology points to a rich intercultural diversity in the meaning and function of mental concepts. This evidence partly converges with experimental studies on attributions of mental states like belief or intention, which reveal a marked context-dependence in the way mental attributions are used and assessed. In parallel, civil right movements like the Neurodiversity or Mad Pride movements have increasingly demanded greater recognition for intracultural cognitive diversity. This includes both subpersonal differences in sensory and executive processing, for which neurodiversity-informed research provides accumulating evidence, as well as person-level differences in how such differences are interpreted and policed in interpersonal practices.
In sum, this points to the need for a philosophy of mind better suited to accounting for this rich diversity in minds and in the ways we talk and think about them. The present workshop aims to move in this direction by bringing together cutting-edge research on mental interpretation, mental diversity, and the connections between them. The contributions address various important topics in this line of inquiry, including the analysis of consequences of different philosophical theories of mental interpretation for our understanding of mental diversity; the link between mental (self-)interpretation and the constitution of mind and mental health; inter- and intra-cultural variability in mental interpretation; mental diversity and counternormative (e.g., mad, neurodivergent) interpretation practices; epistemic and discursive injustices related to mental interpretation; or the interplay of first-, second-, and third-personal perspectives in self-interpretation.
Call: “New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts”
From September 15 to 16, 2026, the conference “New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts – Meaning Beyond Linguistic Signs” will take place at the Cité de la Mode et du Design, Paris.
Abstracts can be submitted until May 25, 2026, 12:00 CEST. The call reads:
Conference details
Our organizing committee, with the support of the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE–Paris Sciences Lettres) and the Institut Français de la Mode (IFM), invites submissions to the New Methods in Semantics of Artefacts: Meaning beyond linguistic signs conference, to be held on 15–16 September 2026 at the Cité de la Mode et du Design in Paris.
We are delighted to announce our invited speakers:
Philosophy: Enrico Terrone (University of Genova), Nicola Di Stefano (CNR Italy); Cognitive psychology: Charles Spence (University of Oxford); Linguistics: Philippe Schlenker (École Normale Supérieure / NYU), Pritty Patel-Grosz (University of Oslo); Musicology: Ben Curry (University of Birmingham).
Topic of the conference
Objects such as perfumes, works of art, and creations in design, gastronomy, or entertainment often give rise to mental representations that go beyond the objects themselves. Through perception and interaction, individuals attribute meanings, associations, and symbolic values to such objects, even when these meanings are not explicitly expressed in language. Understanding how such meanings emerge is a shared challenge for philosophy, linguistics, and the cognitive sciences, and this conference aims to put these complementary approaches into dialogue.
The philosophical tradition has long sought to ground what one would ordinarily call the meaning of objects in a general theory of signs – an approach exemplified, within contemporary naturalized philosophy, by Millikan’s work (Beyond concepts, 2017), as well as by more targeted theories addressing the meanings of particular kinds of objects. Pursuing the formalization of such a general theory of signs, the super-linguistics program (Schlenker, Patel-Grosz, among others) holds that formal linguistic theory can be productively extended across various domains of non-linguistic signs, drawing on notions such as the constituency (or grouping) principle central to syntax, the use of logical variables for object tracking, and the variety of inference types investigated in semantics and pragmatics. Finally, several theoretical frameworks in psychology may help address the origins of artefact meaning: in addition to the cognitive foundations of such meaning – cross-modal associations, conceptual representations, affordances, technical reasoning, and intention-based accounts – psychology can illuminate the transmission and cultural learning of the meanings that objects come to bear.
We aim to take stock of the experimental methods and conceptual tools used to study the semantics of objects, and to foster epistemological transfers from the semantics of one domain to another – music, design objects, fragrances, images, food, dance, and so forth – with particular attention to the plurality of sensory modalities through which these objects are perceived.
Submission guidelines
Each selected contributor will be invited to give a 45-minute presentation, including Q&A.
We welcome contributions that place particular emphasis on:
- the choice and clarification of the semantic concepts employed; and/or
- attempts at formalization; and/or
- the originality of the empirical methods applied.
Contributions will be selected from submitted abstracts. Abstracts should be between 400 and 500 words in length, including footnotes but excluding references, and must be suitable for blind review.
The submission deadline is 25 May 2026, 12:00 noon (Paris time).
All abstracts should be submitted to: semanticsofartefacts.conference@gmail.com.
Authors will be notified of acceptance by 18 June 2026.
If your abstract is accepted for presentation, we will cover coffee breaks and lunches during the two-day conference. At present, our funding does not allow us to reimburse travel and accommodation expenses.
Call: “Artificial Life as Experimental Philosophy”
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”
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)
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 16:00–18:00 (UTC+2). 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.
Call: “Toronto Workshop on Moral Psychology and Moral Theory”
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”
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