Category: Philosophy of Mind

Job: “Hearing and Remembering” (Turin, Italy)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences at the University of Turin, Italy, is hiring two postdocs to work on the research project “Hearing and Remembering,” led by Elvira Di Bona. The project investigates the relationship between sound and memory, combining philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science.

Applications are possible until August 31, 2026. The announcement reads:

The Department of Philosophy and Education Sciences at the University of Turin (Italy) invites applications for two 30-month Postdoctoral Fellowships in Philosophy of Mind, funded by the FIS 5-year Project “Hearing and Remembering (HeaR)” (FIS – Fondo Italiano Scienza). The project, led by Prof. Elvira Di Bona, investigates the relationship between sound and memory through an interdisciplinary approach combining philosophy, psychology, and cognitive science. It examines the temporal experience of sounds (including environmental sounds, speech, and music), compares auditory and visual perception, and investigates the nature of auditory memory.

Position 1: Philosophy of Memory (BANDO 28/POST DOC)

Salary: €36,622.37 gross per year

The successful candidate should have demonstrated expertise in philosophy of memory. Responsibilities include:

  • conducting research in philosophy of memory within the analytic tradition;
  • producing at least three research publications during the fellowship;
  • teaching, in English, an introductory course in philosophy of mind;
  • contributing to the organization of public engagement, outreach and dissemination activities related to the HeaR project (https://sites.google.com/unito.it/hear/home-page).

The provisional starting date of the job is Fall 2026. Applications have to be made via the PICA online system (“Piattaforma Integrata Concorsi Atenei”, https://lavorainateneo.unito.it/details.html?id=f6f6e24b-eed4-46de-a6b2-285da1d17722).

The deadline is August 31st 2026.

Position 2: Philosophy of Perception (BANDO 27/POST DOC)

Salary: €35,174.00 gross per year

The successful candidate should have demonstrated expertise in philosophy of perception. Responsibilities include:

  • conducting research in analytic philosophy of perception on the relationship between temporal perception and auditory and/or visual perception;
  • producing at least three research publications during the fellowship;
  • contributing to teaching activities, including teaching a seminar, and undergraduate and graduate student supervision;
  • contributing to the organization of public engagement, outreach and dissemination activities related to the HeaR project (https://sites.google.com/unito.it/hear/home-page).

The provisional starting date of the job is Fall 2026. Applications have to be made via the PICA online system (“Piattaforma Integrata Concorsi Atenei”, https://lavorainateneo.unito.it/details.html?id=bf535331-c0c6-4db3-8721-7bde3653424b).

The deadline is August 31st 2026.

Both postdoctoral researchers will work closely with Prof. Elvira Di Bona, collaborate with members of the MUMBLE group, and contribute to the research activities of the HeaR project. The working language of the project is English.

Prospective candidates are welcome to contact Prof. Elvira Di Bona (elvira.dibona@unito.it) with informal questions about the research positions. Questions regarding the call or the online application procedure should be addressed to: assegniricerca@unito.it.

Talk: “The Voice that Whispers Ideas” (Aleksandr Fadeev)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

On August 20 from 16:30–18:00 (UTC+2), Aleksandr Fadeev (KU Leuven) will talk about “The Voice that Whispers Ideas – Inner Speech, Semiosis, and Insight Problem Solving” in the Inner Speech Colloquium, organized by Jonida Kodra, Daniel Müller, and Mathijs Geurts (University of Osnabrück and Paris Lodron University Salzburg).

The talk can be accessed via Microsoft Teams. The abstract reads:

Inner speech, the internal silent experience of language, plays a central role in human cognition, supporting a range of cognitive processes, including thinking, memory, and self-awareness. Beyond its cognitive functions, its role in the generation and transformation of meaning remains largely underexplored. Drawing on Vygotsky’s theory and Lotman’s semiotic model of autocommunication, the talk discusses a semiotic perspective in which inner speech is understood as a dynamic process of semiosis: socially acquired signs undergo structural, functional, and semantic transformations through internalisation, thereby enabling the emergence of new and personally meaningful formations. From this broader perspective, the talk discusses how phenomenological variations in inner speech may be relevant for understanding processes of meaning transformation.

As an empirical case, we focus on insight problem solving, in which changes in problem representation and semantic restructuring are particularly important. Across a series of experiments, participants solved compound remote associate tasks (CRATs), and reported their inner speech experience after finding solutions, as well as whether solutions emerged through gradual analytical search (non-insight) or via a sudden insight (“Aha!” experience). A mixed-method approach combined open-ended reports, VISQ, semi-structured interviews, and dual-task procedures.

Findings indicate that inner speech is highly prevalent during problem solving but varies across solution types: insight solutions are associated with more condensed and less articulated forms of inner speech, whereas non-insight solutions involve more deliberate and expanded forms. These differences suggest that different modes of problem solving are associated with distinct phenomenological forms of inner speech. The study is discussed in relation to the broader semiotic view of inner speech, suggesting that phenomenological variations may contribute to understanding how meaning transformations unfold and may inform theoretical accounts of inner speech.

Job: “Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition” (Turin, Italy)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

The Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition at the University of Turin invites expressions of interest regarding applications for this year’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship call.

Applications are possible until September 9, 2026. The announcement reads:

The Center for Logic, Language, and Cognition (LLC) at the University of Turin invites expressions of interest from postdoctoral researchers wishing to apply for a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship (2026 call).

LLC is an interdisciplinary research center that brings together philosophers, logicians, linguists, psychologists, and computer scientists working on reasoning, language, and cognition. Most of its members belong to the Department of Philosophy and Education, ranked among the top 50 philosophy departments worldwide (QS World University Rankings).

We welcome proposals across the full range of the Center’s research, and especially in the following areas (potential supervisors in brackets):

A full list of faculty and their research is available at https://www.llc-philosophy.unito.it/people.

The Center currently hosts two grants that offer a particularly active environment for postdoctoral work: COST-X (ERC Starting, PI Neri Marsili), on communicative norms and online misinformation, and HeaR (FIS, PI Elvira Di Bona), on auditory perception and memory.

Interested candidates are invited to send:

  • a CV, including a list of publications;
  • the name of one or two potential supervisors among the LLC faculty;
  • a description of the proposed project (length at the candidate’s discretion; please indicate whether you intend to apply for a Global Fellowship).

Please send these materials to Luca Borgonovo (luca.borgonovo@unito.it) by 20 June 2026 (soft deadline). The official EC deadline for full proposals is 9 September 2026; we will support selected candidates throughout the process.

Job: “Valence Asymmetries” (Barcelona, Spain)

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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”

Posted on by Alexander Max Bauer

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”

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