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TBA
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This conference celebrates the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Saul Kripke’s masterpiece, Naming and Necessity, by showcasing new work on a range of topics on which it has had a lasting influence. These topics include, but are not limited to: the nature of names and natural kind terms; the failure of the description or cluster/description theories; the distinction between metaphysical necessity and epistemic apriority; empty names; the metaphysics of essence and origin; the nature of modality and possible worlds; conceivability and the epistemology of modality; the role of philosophical intuition; and the mind-body problem.

Dates: 12th and 13th December, from 9am to 5pm.

Venue: The CUNY Graduate Center, 365 5th Avenue, New York, New York.

Format: hybrid

Registration: for both online and in person attendance, please register by the 28th of November, 2022 at https://forms.gle/Jbr3uaFx1ZwRxJpZ7.

Speakers:

Organisers:

The Center for Philosophy of Religion at Rutgers University is pleased to host an in-person, working-papers conference on the Psychology and Epistemology of Religious Experience. We are seeking abstracts (150-350 words) from those interested in participating. The tentative date is 15-16 April 2023. And the deadline for submission is 28 February 2023. Participants with accepted submissions will be given hotel accommodations and a modest honorarium to help defray travel costs.

Theme

The overall theme of the workshop is the Psychology and Epistemology of Religious Experiences. Philosophers of religion frequently assign religious experiences important epistemic roles, such as justifying religious beliefs. But religious experiences of the kind philosophers are interested in are also studied in other fields as well, such as psychology and religious studies. However, the psychology and epistemology of religious experiences are presumably not independent; studying them together is likely to be insightful in various ways. To that end, we are interested in bringing together scholars working on the psychology and epistemology of religious experiences. Potential topics include:

·       The nature of religious experiences

·       Taxonomies of religious experiences

·       Potential psychological mechanisms and accounts of religious experience

·       The relation between perception and religious experiences

·       The epistemology of religious experience

·       The interactions between the psychology and epistemology of religious experience

·       The relation of cognitive science of religion to religious experience

Any proposed papers on these topics, or similar ones, are welcome. Papers exploring interdisciplinary approaches are also welcome.

Instructions

Please submit an abstract (150-350 words), long abstract (350-650 words), or full paper to Timothy Perrine at tp654@scarletmail.rutgers.edu. Submission should be prepared for blind review. In a separate document please provide your name, institutional affiliation (if applicable), and contact information. Submission deadline is 28 February; acceptances will be decided by 5 March; and the workshop will be held 15-16 April.

Rutgers Epistemology Conference

Keynote: Harry Brighouse (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Pedagogy Workshop Leader: TBA

Location: The Graduate Center, CUNY—New York, New York

Abstracts & Workshop Applications due: July 31st 2023

Responses: August 31st 2023

Organizers: Michael Greer (CUNY), Maria Salazar (CUNY)

Contact email: gscope.committee@gmail.com

The committee for the Graduate Student Conference on Philosophy of Education (GSCOPE) invites abstracts for papers on the topic of Higher Education, Democracy, and Controversy. The theme of the conference & post-conference pedagogy workshop reflects the difficulty in creating and maintaining respectful discourse in higher-education classrooms, especially surrounding controversial empirical, moral, and political issues. Some argue that this is an equity issue. Undergraduate students who come from rural and/or underprivileged areas are more likely to experience alienation on campus, sometimes because they have never been exposed to certain “politically correct” language or ideas, and sometimes simply because they lack the financial and social capital that their peers have. It seems crucial (and follows from democratic and civic values) to foster safe learning environments for all students, especially those students who are more likely to feel alienated on college campuses and in elite spaces. At the same time, some argue that the aim of higher education is purely epistemological, and not civic or democratic. Proponents of this view might hold that free speech and academic freedom must be properly protected for higher education to perform its proper social function: education. What is the appropriate relationship between higher education, knowledge-production, teaching, free speech, and democracy? How can higher education instructors and professors be effective teachers in the light of these relationships?

Papers must pertain to higher educationbut maybe about anything from interpersonal classroom dynamicstoinstitutional policies to campus controversy. We are particularly interested in papers that explore the following topics:

• Philosophical issues around teaching controversy

• Navigating different identities in the classroom and on campus
• Free speech and controversial issues in classrooms and on campus
• Differential roles of various higher education actors when it comes to protecting free speech (administration, tenured professors, students, residential life)

• Training (or lack thereof) of graduate students to be teachers and the impact of this on teaching in our current political moment

• Theright relationship(s) between democracy, knowledge,free speech, and higher education

• The role of controversy in democracy
• The relationship between controversy and equality

• Teaching as an equity issue – how education might foster or impede different kinds of equity (class equity, racial equity, urban/rural equity, gender equity)

• Disagreement in classrooms

• Epistemological issues around disagreement and understanding
• Trust in classrooms
• Pedagogical tools to cope with disagreement in classrooms
• Philosophical views on coming to understanding from different social locations, epistemic commitments, and material circumstances

We especially welcome contributions that:

• Think about universities outside of the “top 50” and the “top 500” — we want our conversation to reflect issues found across the entire spectrum of international higher ed institutions
• Engage with CUNY-specific issues and offer CUNY-specific solutions

Abstracts should:
– Outline the paper’s principal argument(s).
– Give a good sense of the paper’s philosophical and/or empirical contributions and methods.
– Be anonymized.

Proposal Guidelines:

Please submit abstracts of up to 500 words by midnight EST on Monday, July 31, 2023.

PDF or DOC.X by email to gscope.committee@gmail.com

Post-Conference Pedagogy Workshop

The theme of our conference Higher Education, Democracy, and Controversy is relevant to graduate student educators, who are routinely under-trained and under-equipped to engage with real-life problems they may encounter in the classroom. The lack of training for higher education teachers is a growing iue in philosophy of education.

This workshop attends to this issue by facilitating a space for graduate student educators to reflect on how to foster good teaching environments for controversial issues, and be good interlocutors with each other on controversial issues. The workshop will also touch on promoting equity in classrooms. We will provide workshop participants with a certificate of completion.

https://philevents.org/event/show/112546

Individuals support forms of domination with varying levels of understanding that they are doing so. In many cases, those very structures of domination distort our conceptions of them through mechanisms such as motivated reasoning, implicit bias, affected ignorance, false consciousness, and belief polarization. These various epistemic distortions, in turn, cause social conflict, notably by promoting political polarization. Those worried by social conflict have spent a great deal of energy decrying the increasingly polarized contexts in which we live. However, epistemic distortions in our sociopolitical beliefs also misrepresent, maintain systems of domination and prevent human needs from being met.

This workshop aims to go beyond pronouncements such as ‘we are polarized’ or that ‘partisanship is on the rise,’ and begin to think through epistemic distortions at the individual and intersubjective levels, the role of criticism and critique in facilitating belief and social change, and the idea of reconciliation, by asking questions such as:

• In what ways are individual beliefs about domination/social structures epistemically distorted?
• What explains why social beliefs are epistemically distorted?
• What are the normative upshots of epistemic distortion for social relationships like allyship, comradeship, and friendship?
• Ought polarization be remedied? Which epistemic resources and theoretical frameworks avail themselves of emancipatory potential?

Convenors

Ege Yumuşak is a philosopher, specializing in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and social & political philosophy. She received a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University in 2022. Her research examines political disagreement—its material foundations, psychological and social manifestations, and epistemic properties. She is currently writing a series of articles on the nature and significance of clashes of perspective in social life.

Nicolas Côté is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Toronto. His research is mainly in normative ethics and social choice theory, but they also dabble in applied ethics and issues of practical rationality. Côté’s doctoral dissertation work focuses on the measurement of freedom, especially on axiomatic approaches to the measurement question, and on how deontic concerns for protecting individual rights interact with welfarist concerns for improving the general welfare. Côté’s current research focuses on the ethics of decision-making under radical uncertainty.

Invited speakers:

Sabina Vaccarino Bremner; Daniela Dover; Cain Shelley

Invited commentators
TBA

The Rutgers Epistemology Conference is a pre-read conference. The papers, the finalized schedule, and further information about the conference will be posted soon.

Registration

There is no registration fee for the conference, but please notify Caroline von Klemperer, the conference manager, if you plan to attend by sending an email to rutgersepistemologyconference@gmail.com. If you wish to participate in the meals, please send a check made out to “Rutgers University” to Caroline von Klemperer by April 15 ($80 if you are a faculty member or a postdoc; $60 if you are a graduate student or an undergraduate). Checks should be sent to Caroline von Klemperer; Rutgers Epistemology Conference; 106 Somerset St, 5th Floor; New Brunswick, NJ 08901. Everyone signed up for conference meals by April 15 will be listed as a participant on the conference website.

https://philevents.org/event/show/112086

Where to stay

All sessions will be held at the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick, NJ. A limited number of reduced-priced rooms are available to those attending the conference. The reduced rate is $170 per night for a single or double room. You can reserve a room here: https://www.hyatt.com/en-US/group-booking/EWRRN/G-RE01.

If you are a graduate student or a postdoc and would like to attend the conference and stay with a Rutgers graduate student, please contact the conference manager at rutgersepistemologyconference@gmail.com. We will try to provide all graduate students and postdocs a place to stay, but we cannot make any promises.

Accessibility

Information about accessibility of the conference venue can be found here.

How to get there

Plane & Train: If you are flying, it is best to fly into Newark Airport. It is about 25 miles from the Hyatt Regency in New Brunswick. The best way to get from the airport to New Brunswick is via NJ Transit. The train stops at the airport and it is a 25 min train ride from the airport to New Brunswick. When you arrive at Newark Airport, follow the signs to the monorail “airtrain”. The airtrain will take you to the NJ transit train stop. Trains run from Newark Airport to New Brunswick about every half hour. A oneway ticket Newark Airport – New Brunswick is about $14. You can buy tickets at the vending machines at the Newark Airport train station or on the mobile app MyTix. The Hyatt is a 5 min walk from the New Brunswick train station.

Train: The best way to get to New Brunswick from New York or Philadelphia is via NJ Transit. The Hyatt is a 5 min walk from the New Brunswick train station.

Speakers

Annalisa Coliva

Adam Elga

Mark Schroeder

Julia Staffel

Scott Sturgeon

Commentators

Eleonora Cresto

Sven Rosenkranz

Nicholas Silins

Michael Titelbaum