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The website for 2008 WMU Graduate Conference, December 5-7, is now up.
The conference is open to papers in all areas. Submission deadline is October 15. This year, the speakers are John Doris and John Norton. I had a very positive experience at this conference last year.
I spent the last month in Australia. First at RSSS where I did a satisfactory bit of work and enjoyed good tea time conversations. I only wish I could have stayed there longer! Then I traveled to Melbourne to attend the 2008 AAP conference.
I presented my paper on centered worlds, and an argument in the paper was met with a devastating objection from Josh Parsons and Wolfgang Schwarz. Unfortunately for me, their criticisms were right on, so that part of the paper has to go back to the drawing board and I need to do some more reading and re-reading. However, the ensuing discussions with Wo was particularly helpful in figuring out some options and also how a Lewisian might respond. In addition to that crushing blow, I also received other useful suggestions and comments from people at the conference and ANU. Let’s call it a learning experience.
Given the packed schedule, I could not even make it to every talk I wanted to go to. But the ones I did go to were all quite interesting. I was especially happy to finally learn about Stuart Brock’s experiments on the fictionality/alethic puzzle of resistance.
In non-philosophy news, I became enamored with Melbourne partially because of my newfound Aussie rules football fandom. Through some arbitrary, arational decision procedure, I am now a fan of Collingwood Magpies and enjoyed watching them come from behind and beat Adelaide at MCG. (In most domains I defer my judgment to David Lewis, but not the domain of the AFL team to support! I was told that Lewis was a lifetime Essendon supporter. Boo.)
Back to the states soon.
I attended the Central APA in Chicago this past weekend. This time, I tried to select more politically-oriented sessions, despite my lack of knowledge in that area. Subsequently, I was exposed to a lot of interesting issues I probably would never have thought about otherwise. Hopefully I have learned something.
Claudia Card’s biographical John Dewey lecture on her experience as a lesbian female philosopher was both depressing and inspiring. Depressing because it seems some things, though less overt, have not changed very much. Inspiring because of the way she dealt with the challenges. Although the talk was not philosophical, per se, it did explain where her philosophical outputs come from. After hearing the talk, I am now really interested in reading her work, if I have time.
I also really enjoyed a symposium on wanted pregnancy and autonomy, with Amy Mullin, Susan Brison, and Maggie Little. Obviously, as a male, a lot of issues do not really come up for me. But since they never come up, it is likely that I would never have thought of the ways in which even a wanted pregnancy compromise a woman’s autonomy, or questioned the many social norms surrounding pregnancy and pregnant women that, upon close examination, appear to be inconsistent with our other moral beliefs and downright bizarre.
The thing that struck me about both of these talks is how personal they are. I like this idea of a personal philosophy, in contrast with the abstractness that our discipline often deals in. The speakers related their personal experiences to their philosophical theories. In my opinion, this makes for a much more engaging talk. Thinking about mereology is interesting, but I think I can actually do that better by reading a paper than listening to someone speak.
I also attended a symposium on responsibility in resisting oppressions. I wrote about some of my questions as I thought about that issue on Go Grue.
Oh, I also tried to talk to the representative from MIT Press at the book exhibit about cover design. I think he was weirded out by my over-enthusiasm.
This past weekend I traveled to Kalamazoo to attend the Western Michigan University Graduate Conference. It was again a great experience. Bell’s Brewery is a cool hangout, I must say. Thanks to Alison Niedbalski, Marcus Adams, and Fritz Allhoff for organizing the conference and Kevin Dewan for letting me stay at his place, as well as Indian cooking tips and very good coffee.
I was really ecstatic to finally meet Shaun Nichols, whose work on imagination has influenced me a lot. In fact, the paper I presented was a defense of his view against a recent argument from our immersive experiences in pretense, and showing how we can adequately explain such experiences without postulating a new cognitive function, namely desire-like imagination. There were very useful comments and references for my talk, which will hopefully help me improve this work. Ali’s comments on my paper especially forced me to make an important clarification and suggested an aspect of the dialectic that I had not previously thought of.
Of the other engaging talks, I found Jonah Schupbach’s experimental results on the conjunction fallacy most interesting. Apparently, there is a recent line of argument that explains why people err with probabilities of conjunctions by appealing to Bayesian confirmation. Jonah conducted some experiments and shows that this may not be what is going on. I thought that was really cool.
Overall, it was a neat experience, if not a bit tiring and anxiety-inducing as well. (I tried to talk through, rather than read, for the first time in public, so that was pretty scary. I think it ended up being alright.) So, I hope the graduate students at WMU decide to do this again next year. If they do, you should of course submit something!
Aidan has the latest info on The University of Texas at Austin Philosophy Grad Conference 2008.
The conference is open to papers in all areas. The deadline is January 15th. They got (again) two amazing keynote speakers: Dave Chalmers and Tamar Gendler. I went last year, and it was really philosophically interesting and just plain fun. If you feel that you will be more convinced by my past self than my present self, you can read my back-from-conference post.
