NIP Early Career Conference CFP

•March 2, 2012 • Leave a Comment

Another CFP from the NIP:

NORTHERN INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY EARLY CAREER CONFERENCE
University of Aberdeen, Scotland
28-29 June 2012

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Professor Emma Borg (Reading)
Professor Timothy Williamson (Oxford)

CONFERENCE AIMS
Our ultimate aim is to showcase outstanding research by EARLY CAREER RESEARCHERS. While there are a number of opportunities for graduate students and more senior philosophers to present and discuss their research, there are relatively few for researchers who have recently finished their PhDs and are building a career in philosophy. This series has been established as a step towards addressing this imbalance.

CRITERIA FOR SUBMISSIONS
We invite submissions from researchers who received their PhD within the last 5 years. Papers must fall under the research remit of the Northern Institute of Philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology and the philosophies of logic, language, mathematics and mind. Only six papers will be selected and each paper will be given a faculty response.

GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS
We invite papers suitable for a 40-minute presentation and of no longer than 4000 words. Papers should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 150 words and must be suitable for blind refereeing. Please indicate at the top of the first page of your paper which of the following categories it falls under: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of mind. Please include a separate cover sheet including name, paper title, institution, month and year of PhD award and contact details. The deadline for receipt of submissions is *13th April 2012*. We aim to notify authors of the decision regarding their paper by 22nd May 2012. Submissions must be in .doc or .pdf format and are to be submitted by e-mail to earlycareerconference@gmail.com

Meals (lunches and one social dinner) and accommodation will be provided for speakers.

Please direct any questions to the conference organisers on earlycareerconference@gmail.com

NIP A Priori Conference CFP

•February 9, 2012 • Leave a Comment

The following CFP has been released by the NIP:

On June 16-17 2012, at the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen we will be having a conference on the A Priori. This conference will be the final event in the five-year AHRC-funded Basic Knowledge Project. The following people are confirmed speakers:

Paul Boghossian, New York University
Laurence BonJour, University of Washington
Albert Casullo, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
David Chalmers, The Australian National University
Carrie Jenkins, University of British Columbia and the University of Aberdeen
Ian Rumfitt, Birkbeck College, University of London
Crispin Wright, New York University and the University of Aberdeen

We will have two additional speakers, who will be chosen through an open call for papers. They will have their travel to our conference reimbursed (up to a maximum of £500). Lodgings in Aberdeen will be booked and paid on their behalf.

Speakers will be given 1 hour (including Q&A) to present their paper.

We invite philosophers who have not earned their PhD prior to 2005 (including graduate students) to submit papers or abstracts to d.dodd@abdn.ac.uk.

Submissions should not be longer than 5,000 words and prepared for blind review.

Deadline for submission:  March 31, 2012.
Notification of acceptance:  May 1, 2012.

Draft: Sosa-style Epistemic Circularity

•June 16, 2011 • 1 Comment

I’ve just finished a shareable draft of my paper ‘Epistemic Circularity and Reflective Knowledge’ (commissioned for a symposium on Sosa’s Reflective Knowledge, to appear in a special issue of Philosophical Papers on the problem of the criterion, edited by Mark Nelson). Comments welcome!

New Draft: Naturalistic Challenges to the A Priori

•May 24, 2011 • 4 Comments

I’m working on a paper commissioned for a collection on the a priori, edited by Albert Casullo and Joshua Thurow.  Here’s the current draft, and comments are very welcome as always.

The paper’s aim is to show that various of the views that get labelled ‘naturalism’ are perfectly compatible with the existence of a priori knowledge/justification, and various ‘naturalistic’ challenges to the a priori can therefore be resisted (at least, by a priorists of the Jenkins 2008 stripe).  I look particularly at the work of Quine, Maddy and Papineau.

A by-product of the paper is an attempt at a more nuanced approach to the classification of philosophical naturalisms than is given by the standard ontological/methodological distinction.

UBC Acquires Another Epistemologist

•May 5, 2011 • Leave a Comment

I was delighted to hear this morning that Masashi Kasaki, a recent graduate of the University of Calgary and student of Jeremy Fantl, has been awarded a Government of Canada Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship to work with me at UBC for a year.  Masashi is working on a bunch of very interesting issues surrounding epistemic contextualism.

This will be my first experience of officially supervising a postdoc.   I gather that my formal duties are minimal, but I want to do a good job in general.   Any advice from those with recent experience of supervising and/or being postdocs?

Grounding Inferential Norms

•March 4, 2011 • 4 Comments

I’m preparing my talk for the exciting-looking Brown Shapiro Conference on the Epistemology of Inference.

It’s going to pull together two strands in my thinking about epistemology, which I hadn’t until now attempted to amalgamate but which (I’m relieved to find) will hopefully mesh neatly.

The first is that I suspect that epistemically normative claims are made true by natural facts.   (I wrote a bit about this idea a few years ago, in Epistemic Norms and Natural Facts.)  The second is newer: I suspect that there’s an interesting story to be told about the epistemology of basic norms of inference, according to which it is reliance on our empirically grounded concepts (in the sense of Grounding Concepts) that guides us to trust in and apply the right inferential rules.

This story is in some respects different from the one I outlined in Grounding Concepts about how reliance on empirically grounded concepts could guide us to true and knowledgeable beliefs: trust in, and use of, inferential norms is (plausibly) not best thought of as a matter of believing certain propositions.  However, I’m going to try and suggest that concepts could do the same kind of work in making trust in an inference rational as they can do in making belief in a proposition rational.

If that’s right, things align tidily.  Empirically grounded concepts are sensitive to empirical input.  Empirical input, presumably, is sensitive to the natural world.  And it is aspects of the natural world it is that make true epistemically normative claims.  So the right concepts can serve as reliable guides to which inferential rules we ought to trust and use.

Kripkenstein and the Cleverly Disguised Mules

•January 10, 2011 • 2 Comments

I’ve just finished a final draft of this paper.  It sketches (in a non-committal way) a kind of contextualism about ‘means’ that delivers a response to Kripkensteinian meaning scepticism analogous to one standard form of contextualist response to epistemic contextualism.

This paper is to appear in Analytic Philosophy (formerly Philosophical Books).

 
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