Calendar

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

Summer Program:

In perception, the world is represented by me. So goes a very naive thesis about perception. Yet when faced with phenomena of hallucination and illusion many theorists come to accept that in perception one merely represents a possible world that can more or less accurately match the actual world. Recently, a much more radical thesis arose: Perception is probabilistic. This would mean that in perception one does not simply represent one possible world, but one represents multiple possible worlds at the same time each to a certain degree. Should we come to accept this preposterous claim? I argue for the conservative position that perception is not probabilistic. We do find sub-personal probabilistic representations in certain neural populations of the perceptual apparatus. Yet, contrary to what has been suggested elsewhere, for instance the role perception plays in justifying beliefs merely requires a degreed notion which is not of probabilistic structure. And, most importantly, our phenomenology does not involve conflicting alternative hypothesis with certain degrees.

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

Summer Program:

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

Summer Program:

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

Summer Program:

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

Summer Program:

PoPRocks (formerly known as ‘WoPoP’) is an ongoing series in the NYC area for early career researchers – typically grad students and postdocs – working on philosophy of psychology/mind/perception/cognitive science/neuroscience/… . We usually meet roughly once every 2 weeks to informally discuss a draft paper by one of our members. Typically presenters send a copy of their paper around 1 week in advance, so do join the mailing list (by emailing poprocksworkshop@gmail.com or one of the organizers) or email to ask for a copy of the paper. We aim for a friendly, constructive discussion with the understanding that the drafts discussed are typically work in progress.

Summer Program:

Many cognitive processes rely on the preservation of contents across mental transitions or processes. Inference, for example, is a certain sort of content preserving mental transition from premises to conclusions. Content preservation is also important in communicating the contents of perception for further processing and for the influence of desires and belief on action. But what is content preservation? …

Embodied cognition theorists emphasize the role of the body and the environment in constituting mental processes. By examining how our brains interact with the rest of our bodies and how our entire bodies interact with the environment, we can learn much about human behavior and the human mind. Tools can be understood as extensions of the body, and in some cases as becoming part of the body. Does our mind extend to our tools? How does this change our world? How should we understand this relationship? In order to help us think through these fascinating questions, we will hear from an archaeologist who has theorized about the evolution of this human capacity, a biomedical engineer who uses computers to make robotic prostheses more fluidly extend human bodies, and a music theorist who shows how musical instruments become part of our bodies.

This event is free and open to the public, however, registration is required via Eventbrite.

Speakers:

— Lambros Malafouris (Johnson Research and Teaching Fellow in Creativity, Cognition and Material Culture; University of Oxford)
— Sunil Agrawal (Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Rehabilitation/Regenerative Medicine; Columbia University)
— Jonathan De Souza (Assistant Professor of Music Theory; University of Western Ontario)

Respondent:

— Lan Li (Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Center for Science & Society)

This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Science and Society and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989) is well-known for his “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) in which he criticizes empiricist theories of knowledge acquisition. Empiricism, he argues there, relies on what he calls “the Myth of the Given.” The Myth of the Given is often understood as a dilemma for epistemological foundationalism. However, Sellars also remarks that not even Kant and Hegel (“that great foe of immediacy” EPM §1) were entirely free of “the entire framework of givenness”). This suggests that the Myth of the Given is not limited to the epistemological foundationalism of pre-critical dogmatic metaphysics. I shall argue (following James O’Shea) that the Myth of the Given is primarily a problem about how we should account for our cognitive awareness of the categorial structure of experience. I shall then argue that Sellars should be interpreted as arguing for a non-semantic mind-world relation, which he calls “picturing”, to explain how the Myth of the Given should be overcome.
By doing so Sellars shows how to avoid both the Given and idealism, thus overcoming a long-standing opposition within the history of philosophy since Kant. This argument is also relevant for the divide between “left-wing Sellarsians” (Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, Williams) and “right-wing Sellarsians” (Churchland, Dennett, Millikan); the left-wing Sellarsians developed the criticism of the Myth of the Given and the right-wing Sellarsians developed picturing into an account of animal cognition. On my interpretation, this divide itself is unfortunate because it leads us to overlook a fundamental coherence to Sellars’s views.

What do the worlds of global finance and nationalist populism have in common? How can we understand the rise of today’s ‘new fascisms’ through the prism of financialization? This one-day workshop brings together scholars from across disciplines to debate  these key questions for our understanding of contemporary capitalism. The workshop is part of Public Seminar’s Imaginal Politics initiative and is organised jointly with the Department of Social Science, University College London. The workshop will include three panel discussions and will close with a talk by Judith Butler on ‘Anti-gender ideology and the new fascism’.