fragments of consciousness

Attention and Consciousness

Here's the program for a workshop on Attention and Consciousness, put on by the ANU Centre for Consciousness.  It will be held in the Sparke Helmore Lecture Theatre in the ANU College of Law later this week.  If you'd like to attend, please email dicrosse [[at]] coombs.anu.edu.au.

THURSDAY JUNE 25

8:40-9      Coffee/registration

9-10:30    Eric Schwitzgebel (Philosophy, UC Riverside)
                Consciousness and Attention

11-12:30  Matthew Finkbeiner (Cognitive Science, Macquarie)
                Visual Attention and Reportability

2-3:30      Brian Scholl (Psychology, Yale)
                The Logic of Seeing (and not Seeing)

4-5:30      Ned Block (Philosophy, NYU)
                Attention and Veridicality

7pm         Conference Dinner


FRIDAY JUNE 26

9-10:30    Chris Mole (Philosophy, UBC)
                Attending and Referring

11-12:30  John Campbell (Philosophy, UC Berkeley)
                Where Does Consciousness Fit In?
                On the Boolean Map Theory of Visual Attention

2-3:30      Declan Smithies (Philosophy, ANU/OSU)
                What Is Attention?

4-5:30      David Chalmers (Philosophy, ANU)
                Wrap-Up/Discussion

Bob Meyer

Bob Meyer just has died, of a heart attack after a year-long battle with cancer.  Bob was a long-time member of the Philosophy Program in the Research School of Social Sciences here at ANU, and even after he moved across the university and then retired, was a ubiquitous presence here.  He was a larger-than-life character who was enormous fun to be around.  

Bob was well-known for his work on nonclassical logic, especially relevance logic (or as Bob always insisted, relevant logic).  He was also famous as Maximum Leader of the Logicians Liberation League, whose manifesto (presented at Indiana University in 1969 complete with a cream pie attack) ends as follows:

Beware you snakes of the Philosophical Power Structure, which you have created and which you maintain to put down the logician; you have caged the eagle of reason, the dove of wisdom, and the lark of a definite, precisely formulated formal system, with exact formation rules, a recursive set of axioms, and clear and cogent rules of inference, and you have made them your pigeons. Oh, you filterable viruses, we will shake you off and fly once more.

Bob was author of one of my all-time favorite philosophy articles (which I read in graduate school long before knowing him), "God Exists!", published in Nous in 1987.  This article demonstrates that the existence of God is equivalent to the axiom of choice.  One direction is easy (just let God do the choosing), while the other direction requires a bit more work, applying Zorn's lemma to infinite causal chains.

Bob's cancer was said to have a 97% fatality rate, but he had high hopes for being in the 3%.  He wrote to me a while back: "I do remain (stupidly?) cheerful--after all, I worried for years that all that smoking would lead to cancer. I don't have that worry any more."  I'll remember him coming to a party last year as Wonko the Sane (pictured here with his wife Bobi, daughter Dorothy, and me; here are some more photos of Bob), the character from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who took his house to be the only pocket of sanity and the rest of the world to be the Asylum.  That captures something of the Bob Meyer worldview.  His many quirks were grounded in an enormously warm humanity.  We'll miss him.

PhilPapers news

In the two months or so since it launched, PhilPapers has thrived.  There are now close to 3000 registered users, and twice as many again active unregistered users.  Many journals have asked to be added to the database, and we are developing methods whereby this can easily be done.  In the meantime, there are a couple of major items of news.

First, PhilPapers has been awarded a grant of 200,000 pounds by the Joint Informations Systems Committee in the UK.  This grant will be administered by the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London, where David Bourget will be based for the next three years.  With support from London and ANU (which will now be the joint sponsors of PhilPapers), this grant will enable the development of many new features for PhilPapers.  Congratulations to David for doing all the work to make this grant possible.  Many thanks also to Barry Smith at the Institute, and to Tim Crane before him, for their support.

Second, we have introduced a system of editorships for PhilPapers categories, from the area level down to the leaf level.  Editors will have a set of powerful tools for populating and maintaining PhilPapers categories, as outlined in the editors' manual.  We strongly encourage qualified philosophers to apply.  If you're interested and have any questions, feel free to drop me an email.

We are hoping to develop the community around PhilPapers in a number of ways.  The editorships are one.  The discussion forums are another.  There has been some good discussion so far, but there is the potential for a lot more.  We would like to see these turn into a locus for all sorts of high-quality interaction between professional philosophers (of the sort that one sees on the best blogs, for example) whether concerning philosophical articles and books, philosophical issues, issues regarding the profession of philosophy, or discussion of ideas for Philpapers itself.  To that end, the forums are now moderated, and we have also introduced a PhilPapers blog based on the forums.   We strongly encourage qualified philosophers to take part in discussions in the forums, and to initiate discussions about matters of interest.

Consciousness and the Vegetative State

There will be a workshop on Consciousness and the Vegetative State this Thursday-Friday March 26-27 at the ANU (National Europe Centre at 1 Liversidge St), sponsored by the Centre for Consciousness.  The workshop will bring together scientists and philosophers (four of each) to discuss foundational issues raised by recent work on vegetative state, especially the use of brain imaging in an attempt to detect signs of consciousness.  If you plan to attend, please email dicrosse [[at]] coombs.anu.edu.au.

THURSDAY MARCH 26

9:30-10  Coffee/Registration

10-11:20 David Reutens (Queensland Brain Institute)
                 Clinical Differentiation of Vegetative State from its Mimics

11:40-1  Jakob Hohwy (Philosophy, Monash)
                 Dimensions of Consciousness

2-3:20   Malcolm Horne (Florey Institute)
                Functional Neuroimaging and Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Treatment from Vegetative Patients

4-5:20   Neil Levy (Philosophy, Melbourne/Oxford)
                Consciousness in the Vegetative State: Some Residual Doubts.

7        Conference Dinner

FRIDAY MARCH 27

10-11:20 Levin Kuhlmann (Neuroengineering, Melbourne)
                 The Functional and Anatomical Correlates of Awareness: MRI Investigations of Patients with Post-Coma Unresponsiveness.

11:40-1  Tim Bayne (Philosophy, Oxford)
                The Vegetative State and the Problem of Other Minds

2-3:20   Peter McCullagh (John Curtin School, ANU)
                Three Decades of Begging the Question: An Epistemological Slant on PVS

4-5:20   David Chalmers (Philosophy/Centre for Consciousness, ANU)
                Wrap-up Discussion

Metametaphysics

I just received my copies of the book Metametaphysics: New Essays on the Foundations of Ontology, which I co-edited with David Manley and Ryan Wasserman.  The book grew out of the ANU conference on Metametaphysics in 2005, followed by the Boise conference on the same topic in 2007.

There are 17 papers in the book, by a superb group of authors: Karen Bennett, Matti Eklund, Kit Fine, Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, John Hawthorne, Eli Hirsch, Thomas Hofweber, Kris McDaniel, Huw Price, Jonathan Schaffer, Ted Sider, Scott Soames, Amie Thomasson, Peter van Inwagen, Steve Yablo, and me.  The papers include definitive statements of many of these authors' view, and I think that a number of them are going to be very widely discussed.

The book looks fantastic -- thanks to OUP for doing a great job with it.  Special thanks also to David Manley who did the bulk of the editorial work that made the book possible.  Ryan and I did various things, but David wrote the superb introduction, co-ordinated the review process, prepared the index and proofs, and did much else besides.  A lot of work, but I think the result suggests that it was worth it.

Online consciousness conference

The Online Consciousness Conference has been up and running for a few days now.  The conference, organized by Richard Brown, has a keynote paper by David Rosenthal and nine contributed papers, each followed by one or two commentaries, usually with both a video and a written version.  There are lively and high-quality discussions in the comment threads after each paper.  I'm a bit late to the party, having been out of town for the first few days of the conference.  But as it happens, six of the ten papers take my work as a primary target (Derek Ball on mysterianism, Kati Balog on the phenomenal concept strategy, Dave Beisecker also on the phenomenal concept strategy, Richard Brown on arguments for dualism, Barbara Montero on Russellian physicalism, Gualtiero Piccinini on first-person data), so I've posted comments in those six threads.  Other philosophers are encouraged to join in.

Fodor on the extended mind

Jerry Fodor has a lively and thoughtful review of Andy Clark's new book Supersizing the Mind in the latest issue of the London Review of Books.  The paper is in effect a critique of the extended mind thesis, targeting Andy's and my joint paper "The Extended Mind", Andy's book, and my foreword to the book.  Fodor makes two or three interesting objections to the extended mind thesis.

Fodor's first objection is that we haven't given any clear content to the claim that extended objects (such as iPhones and notepads) can be parts of the mind.  Here it's worth noting that we never put things in exactly this way in the original paper: at a couple of points we talk of external objects being parts of cognitive processes, but not parts of minds.  I do talk about parts of the mind in the foreword, but this is mainly to quickly give a sense of the thesis for general readers. In any case, I think that talk about "parts" here (and of "minds", for that matter) is quite dispensable.

PhilPapers

I'm pleased to announce the launch of PhilPapers, a virtual environment for philosophical research.  David Bourget and I have been working on this project for a year or two now, with significant help from Wolfgang Schwarz.  PhilPapers is an outgrowth of the MindPapers project in the philosophy of mind, but it is much greater in scope and ambition.  PhilPapers encompasses all areas of philosophy, and it has many features that MindPapers lacks.

The core of PhilPapers is a database of close to 200,000 articles and books in philosophy.  Around this database, the site has all sorts of tools for accessing the articles and books online wherever possible, for discussing them in discussion forums, for classifying them in relevant areas of philosophy, for searching and browsing in many different ways, for creating personal bibliographies and personal content alerts, and much more.

The best way to get an idea of what PhilPapers can do is to go to the site and try it yourself (we've compiled a basic introduction to some of the features).  Even a casual browser can browse listings for new and old papers, search for papers in a given area or by a specific author, read the discussion forums, and so on.  However, we encourage you to create a user account, which enables many more sophisticated features.  If you do this, you'll have a profile page from which you can set up personal research tools such as bibliographies, filters, and content alerts (via RSS or email).  Your profile page will include a list of your own work (compiled via name matching), which you can edit where appropriate.  With a user account, you can also submit new entries (giving publication information and/or a link, and optionally uploading a paper to our repository), edit and categorize existing entries, and contribute to discussion forums.

Conferences

There have been a bunch of lively workshops at ANU and Sydney recently.  I've put a few Powerpoint presentations on my website: a wrap-up talk from the Introspection and Consciousness workshop, an introductory presentation from the Hyperintensionality and Impossible Worlds workshop, and a talk ("Conceivability Arguments for and against Contingentism") from the Contingentism in Metaphysics conference.

At least two more workshops will be happening at ANU in the coming months, both on issues tied to the philosophy and science of consciousness: one on Consciousness and the Vegetative State in late March (probably March 20-21), and another on Consciousness and Attention in late June (probably June 24-26).

There are many interesting upcoming conferences elsewhere, as well.  In the consciousness area alone, there's the first Consciousness Online conference February 20-27 (deadline for submissions is January 12), Consciousness and the Self at CSU Fullerton April 29-30, and then two major conferences in June: ASSC 13 in Berlin (June 5-8), and Toward a Science of Consciousness: Investigating Inner Experience in Hong Kong (June 11-14).  The Hong Kong conference will be the central point of an Asia Consciousness Festival in Hong Kong June 5-21, comprising all sorts of consciousness-related events.  Another interesting-looking conference that I'll be taking part in is the upcoming conference on Philosophical Methodology in St Andrews, April 25-27.

Update: Two other relevant events are the Minds, Brains, and Beyond conference in memory of Susan Hurley, at Bristol on March 20-22, and the NEH Summer Institute on Experimental Philosophy, at Utah from June 22 to July 17.

Postdocs at ANU

The following ad for a couple of postdocs at ANU has just gone up on the APA Jobs for Philosophers website (it won't appear in the printed version).  A full ad and an online application procedure are on the ANU website, and informal details are on my website.

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to appoint two or more research-only Postdoctoral/Research Fellows (Level A/B). The fellows will be appointed in association with projects directed by Professors David Chalmers and Jonathan Schaffer. Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy or a related discipline prior to appointment, and should specialize in metaphysics, epistemology, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and/or the philosophy of language. Appointment will be for up to three years. The Program will consider proposals to fill the positions by secondment, and particularly welcomes applications from women.  Full details, including details on how to apply, are available at http://consc.net/fellows.html. Closing date: December 15, 2008.

A taxonomy of philosophy

Now back to philosophy.  Or at least, to philosophical taxonomy. David Bourget and I are finalizing a new project for access to online work in philosophy.  To a very rough first approximation it will be like MindPapers generalized to all of philosophy, although there will be many significant differences (it will be less ambitious in some respects, more ambitious in others).  More on that when it goes public, hopefully within the next month or so.

One part of the project is a classification scheme, under which any paper in philosophy can be classified in up to three areas.  The idea is that at least eventually, the classification scheme should be about as fine-grained as the MindPapers scheme.  Philosophy is divided up into five clusters (Metaphysics and Epistemology, Value Theory, Science Logic and Mathematics, History of Western Philosophy, Other Philosophical Traditions).  Each cluster is divided into six or more fields (in M&E, for example, these are Epistemology, Metaphilosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Action, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Religion).  Each field is divided into 5-10 areas (in Philosophy of Mind, for example, these are Consciousness, Intentionality, Perception, Metaphysics of Mind, Epistemology of Mind, Mental States and Processes, and Misc).  Then each area can be divided into up to ten topics, and up to ten subtopics of each in turn (in roughly the way that the main areas of philosophy of mind are divided into topics and subtopics in Mindpapers).

With help from a number of others, including consultants in a wide range of areas, we've made a very rough first attempt at a taxonomy.  Unsurprisingly, this taxonomy is better-developed in some areas than others.  And even in areas where it is reasonably well-developed, many tricky decisions have to be made.  Eventually, we will have ongoing projects for the refinement and development of these categories, with systematic consultation.  For now, however, we're trying to get things up to scratch for a first draft.

At the moment, the various areas of M&E (apart from philosophy of religion) are developed to a fair degree of detail, though there is still work to be done.  Value Theory and Science/Logic/Mathematics are more patchy.  Some fields in these clusters (such as Philosophy of Gender, Race, and Sexuality, Philosophy of Education, and Philosophy of Social Sciences) are hardly subdivided at all, while other areas (such as General Philosophy of Science, Social and Political Philosophy, and many other areas in these clusters) are extremely patchy and incomplete.  As for History of Philosophy, we've decided not to subdivide this for now beyond a few obvious groupings, and then categories for a few individuals in each period (these were settled by mechanically choosing those with more than n entries with their name in the title in the database, followed by a small amount of tweaking), although we may well subdivide these further eventually.  And we haven't made any attempt to subdivide the Other Philosophical Traditions.

For now, I'm calling for feedback from the philosophical community, either via e-mail or via comments on this blog.  Especially valuable will be thoughts on categories that we've missed, on ways to structure categories that don't yet have much structure, and on better ways of structuring things in tricky cases.  The field structure is largely set (though perhaps not irrevocably), but the area structure is still a work in progress in many cases, and topics and subtopics are still very much in progress.  In many cases what we have has been compiled partly from our own sense of the fields, partly from Internet sources (the Stanford Encyclopedia has been valuable), and partly from feedback from others, but all three of these things have been more extensive and useful in some fields than in others.  So further feedback will be very useful at this stage.  For now, our aim is to fill in structure in the first three main clusters, though thoughts about the other two clusters are also welcome.  Of course we probably won't be able to follow every suggestion, but we'll at least give every reasonable suggestion some consideration.

Some methodology: we'd like to stick to 5-10 subcategories per category where possible, as this makes the system much more usable (and there are also relevant technological constraints).  Of course sometimes there will be fewer (especially at the topic/subtopic level), and some topics may not have subtopics at all, especially in smaller areas.  In a few cases it seems unavoidable to have more subcategories, but this shouldn't happen too often.  Typically, finest-grained categories will have around 15-100 papers in them.  More than this calls for further division, while less than this calls for less division.  For now, we don't want to go beyond five levels.  A given category can be crosslisted under multiple parent categories, marked withn asterisk in the taxonomy.  Each crosslisted category has a primary parent category under which it is listed without an asterisk, though in some cases this selection is fairly arbitrary.  For many purposes the choice of primary parent category won't matter much, as the relevant papers can show up in multiple places.

Of course there are many ways to produce a taxonomy like this, and this is just one way.  For a start, the system is produced by analytic philosophers and has a bias toward carving things as an analytic philosopher would.  Still, we'd like the system to be useful to continental philosophers and those in other traditions.  Continental philosophy is covered to a considerable extent under 19th and 20th century philosophy, and there's a separate field under "Other Philosophical Traditions" both to capture contemporary work that doesn't fit well elsewhere, and to provide a way to mark continental papers for those who are looking for them.  There's no reason why papers from continental and other traditions can't be included under the first three clusters too, though, and we're open to using categories that will help make that possible.  Even from within an analytic perspective, of course many taxonomies are possible, but as always some choices need to be made.  We're not suggesting that this is a definitive taxonomy (it's just something to make a website more useful), and we'd look forward to seeing other taxonomic attempts by others.  And again, keep in mind that what we have currently is extremely preliminary and is highly sketchy and inexpert in some fields.

With that in mind, all constructive feedback by e-mail or in the comments is welcome.  Feedback from those with expertise in relevant areas is especially welcome, and non-anonymous comments are especially appreciated.  Again, here's the draft taxonomy.  Thanks in advance,

The problem of consciousness meets "Intelligent Design"

It had to happen eventually.  The "hard problem" of consciousness is being invoked in favor of anti-Darwinist ideas such as "Intelligent Design".  Here's a key quote from an already infamous New Scientist article:

"According to proponents of ID, the "hard problem" of consciousness - how our subjective experiences arise from the objective world of neurons - is the Achilles heel not just of Darwinism but of scientific materialism. This fits with the Discovery Institute's mission as outlined in its "wedge document", which seeks "nothing less than the overthrow of materialism and its cultural legacies", to replace the scientific world view with a Christian one."

The reporter contacted me to ask for a comment when she was writing the article.  I told her that like many other scientists and philosophers (even people like Steven Pinker!), I have serious doubts about the possibility of a materialist explanation of consciousness, but that those doubts do little to support a religious agenda or intelligent design.  I declined to be quoted on the record, though, because of the danger of being taken out of context as supporting the movement.  Perhaps this was a mistake, as the article doesn't do a good job of separating the issues.  I'd hate to see the consciousness/materialism issue and the design/theism issue run together in the popular imagination.  As Peter Hankin says amusingly at Conscious Entities:

"Oh boy: if there was one thing the qualia debate didn't need, it was a large-scale theological intervention. Dan Dennett must be feeling rather the way Guy Crouchback felt when he heard about the Nazi-Soviet pact: the forces of darkness have drawn together and the enemy stands clear at last!"

Anyway, let's get things straight.  The problem of consciousness is indeed a serious challenge for materialism.  In fact, I think it's a fatal problem for materialism, as I've argued at length here and there.  But it simply isn't a problem for Darwinism in the same way. Even if one rejects materialism about consciousness, Darwinism can accommodate the resulting view straightforwardly.

The simplest way to see this is to note that the "hard problem" does nothing to suggest that consciousness doesn't lawfully depend on physical processes, at least in the sense that certain physical states are reliably associated with certain states of consciousness in our world.  Even if materialism is rejected, there is still good reason to believe that there is such a dependence, via laws of nature that connect physical processes and consciousness.  But if so, there is no problem at all with the idea that evolution can select certain physical states, which yield certain states of consciousness.  If interactionist dualism (on which consciousness has a causal role) is true, evolution might even select for certain states of consciousness because of their beneficial effects. And if epiphenomenalism (on which consciousness has no causal role) is true, consciousness can still arise by evolution as a byproduct.  Perhaps the thought that consciousness is a byproduct is unattractive, but if so the problem lies with epiphenomenalism, not with evolution.

So I think there is very little support for anti-Darwinist ideas to be found here. I think there's also not much support for theist ideas: of course traditional theism requires that materialism be false, but the falsity of materialism does little to positively suggest that theism is true.  As for intelligent design, I'm on the record as saying that I can't rule out the hypothesis that we're living in a computer simulation, so I suppose that it follows that I can't rule out the hypothesis that our world is designed.  But there's not much here to support traditional theism or to oppose Darwinism, and whatever support there is doesn't come from the problem of consciousness.  In any case, I hope that these issues remain firmly separated, as they should.

Mind and Consciousness: Five Questions

A nice recent development in philosophy publishing is the "5 Questions" series, in which philosophers in various fields offer personal and autobiographical ruminations.  Snippets from a few of these volumes are available online, including formal philosophy, foundations of physics, normative ethics, philosophy of mathematics, political philosophy, and a few others.

The latest in the series is Mind and Consciousness: 5 Questions, edited by Patrick Grim, with an impressive cast of contributors.  I've now written a draft of my contribution to this volume.  This is mainly autobiographical rambling and metaphilosophical pronouncement rather than philosophy per se, so it won't be to everyone's tastes.  But any thoughts are welcome.  I see that the contributions by David Rosenthal and Michael Tye are also available online.

Congrats to Jonathan Schaffer

Congratulations to my colleague Jonathan Schaffer, who has been awarded the APA's 2008 article prize for the best article published by someone under 40 in the last two years, for his article "Knowing the Answer".  In addition, Jonathan has been awarded the AAP's prize for the best article published in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy in 2007, for "From Nihilism to Monism".  That's quite a double!

Jonathan is the second ANU philosopher to win the APA article prize in the last few years, following Alan Hajek in 2004.  Once one combines this with Kim Sterelny's Jean Nicod Prize, Bob Goodin's election to the British Academy, Daniel Stoljar's acclaimed book and forthcoming PPR book symposium, and Frank Jackson's election as a Companion of the Order of Australia, these are good times for ANU philosophers.  Our new junior philosophers are no slouches either, with Susanna Schellenberg having papers accepted to Journal of Philosophy and Mind, and Nic Southwood having papers accepted to Ethics and Nous and a book accepted by Oxford University Press, both within about a year of getting their Ph.D.

Travel wrap-up

I've recently returned from five weeks of philosophy travel: Seoul (for the World Congress of Philosophy), Beijing (a couple of lectures and some Olympics), Kirchberg (the Wittgenstein conference on Reduction on Elimination), Syracuse (the SPAWN conference on perception), Krakow (the European Congress of Analytic Philosophy), and Dubrovnik (a workshop on Consciousness and Thought).  I've put photos from the five conferences online: Seoul, Kirchberg, Syracuse, Krakow, Dubrovnik.  I've also put online photos from three July events in Australia: the AAP in Melbourne, a workshop on the representational and relational character of perceptual experience here at ANU, and the Jack Smart lecture by Brian Skyrms.

In addition, I've put online Powerpoint for the wrap-up talks I gave at the ANU and Dubrovnik conferences, R&R and The Critique of Pure Thought, and for the commentary I gave at Syracuse (on Jesse Prinz on attention): Is There Consciousness Outside Attention?  Some of these may turn into papers at some point, but for now the Powerpoint will do.

Back in the saddle

I'm back in Canberra after a month of traveling in the US and Canada: Pasadena, Buffalo, Toronto, Brown, New York, Rutgers, Texas, Arizona. The highlight was the consciousness conference in Tucson, which had superb sessions on consciousness vs attention, local vs global neural correlates of consciousness, brain imaging as mind reading, first-person methods and the richness of consciousness, and many others. Various blog posts on the conference have been posted by John Derbyshire, Anand Rangarajan, and Eric Schwitzgebel (and here). I've posted some photos here.

Having turned 42 since returning, I've also posted some photos from my Life, the Universe, and Everything party.

Supersizing the Mind

Andy Clark's book Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension is being published by Oxford University Press later this year. Among other things, this book fleshes out and defends the ideas put forward in our joint 1998 article "The Extended Mind". It includes a comprehensive (and I think largely compelling) set of replies to the various objections to the extended mind thesis that have been raised over the last decade, and also has a lot on applications of the extended mind idea within cognitive science.

I've written a foreword to the book, which I've just put online. The foreword will also form the basis for my talk in the Barwise Prize session at the Pacific APA meeting later this week. Of course this short piece doesn't go into remotely the depth of Andy's book, but it gives some elements of my current take on the extended mind thesis, ten years after publication of the original article.

Philosophy teams

Some frivolity for the new year. Some of you may know about the fish philosophers and the bird philosophers:

Fish philosophers: Adrian Haddock, Kelly Roe, Nathan Salmon, Scott Sturgeon, J.D. Trout, Jennifer Whiting. (Borderline case: Ellery Eells.) Captain: Bill Fish.

Bird philosophers: Tim Crane, Antony Eagle, Alicia Finch, Mike Martin, Chris Peacocke, Rob Sparrow. (Borderline cases: Gabe and Susanna Seagull.) Captain: Alexander Bird.

There are also:

Occupation philosophers: Lynne Baker, Alex Barber, Bill Brewer, John Gardner, Cliff Hooker, Jeff King, Ray Monk, Graham Priest, Sydney Shoemaker, Peter Singer, Ken Taylor. (Captain: Steve Jobs?)

Body-part philosophers: Justin D'Arms, Philippa Foot, Michael Hand, R.M. Hare, H.L.A. Hart, Cathy Legg, Louis Loeb.

Colour philosophers: Max Black, Jessica Brown, Ian Gold, T.H. Green, Thomas Pink, Wolfgang Schwarz, Anita Silvers, Ming Tan, Roger White. (Captain: Hue Price?)

Then there are the autological philosophers: Jack Smart, Kit Fine, Stephen White. And the heterological philosophers: Max Black, Steven Gross, Alva Noe. (I leave aside hard cases such as Crispin Wright and Joe Heterological.) And the philosophers whose name are sentences: Lynda Burns, Immanuel Kant, Benson Mates, Adam Pautz, John Shook, Jeff Speaks.

More philosophers for these categories, and more categories?

Jobs at ANU

Two advertisements for positions at ANU have just appeared in Jobs for Philosophers.    The first is for post-doctoral fellowships associated with the Centre for Consciousness:

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to appoint one or more research-only Postdoctoral/Research Fellows (Level A/B). The fellows will be appointed in association with Professor David Chalmers’ Federation Fellowship project on ‘The Contents of Consciousness’, and/or in association with other projects in the Program in related areas. Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in philosophy or a related discipline prior to appointment, and should specialize in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, the philosophy of language, metaphysics, and/or epistemology. Appointment will be for up to three years. The Program will consider proposals to fill the positions by secondment, and particularly welcomes applications from women. Send applications (reference: CASS4400), preferably by e-mail (Word, rtf, or pdf format) to jobs@anu.edu.au, or by mail to: Applications Officer, Human Resources Division, Chancelry 10A, Australian National University, Canberra ACT 0200, Australia. Full details are available at http://consc.net/fellows.html. [Formal information is available here and here.]  Closing date: November 30, 2007.

The second is for continuing positions in the RSSS Philosophy Program (abbreviated version here):

The Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences, seeks to make continuing appointments, 1 or 2 depending on rank.  Appointment will be offered at Levels B through E2 (Assistant to Full Professor, salary package: $66,764-$131,929 plus 17% super), depending on qualifications and experience.  This is an opportunity for outstanding scholars to take up an ongoing research position in a program with a major international profile and a very strong graduate program.  Applications are invited in any area of philosophy consonant with work currently being done in the Philosophy Program, but preference for one of the positions may be given to Social & Political Theory. Applicants must, except in exceptional circumstances, be willing and able to make a major contribution to one or more of the overarching themes  around which the work of the School is organized.  The Research School of Social Sciences particularly welcomes applications from women. The beginning dates are negotiable. Further particulars are available here.

Re the continuing positions: these full-time permanent research positions (tenurable after a few years, in the case of a junior appointment) are of course very attractive, and applications/enquiries from distinguished philosophers are encouraged. The information regarding rank of the continuing positions in the ad and on the ANU website is confusing, but these should be treated as an open rank positions.   The JFP ad doesn't list a closing date, but the ANU ad lists a closing date of November 19 (9 days from now).  I don't know how serious this closing date is, but it would be a good idea to send applications as soon as possible.  Note that e-mail applications are accepted for both positions.

MindPapers

I'm pleased to announce the launch of MindPapers, an online bibliography of around 18,000 published papers and online papers in the philosophy of mind.  The site grew out of a combination of my old bibliography and my old page of online papers, but it is much bigger than both, and it has many new capabilities.

The expansion and new capabilities are thanks to David Bourget -- ANU graduate student, pure representationalist pioneer, and programmer extraordinaire.  David added many new tools (which are outlined here, along with a history of the site) for importing papers from various sources, and also added many new tools for using the website.  Some of the tools available to users of the website include (i) links and citation information throughout, (ii) highly flexible navigation, display, and search options, (iii) the ability to submit and edit entries, (iv) automated off-campus proxy access to commercial sites, and (v) a lot of cool statistical information.

The bibliography has also roughly doubled in size.  There is an all-new section on the philosophy of perception, and the other sections are restructured and expanded throughout.  The philosophy of mind parts include new subsections on such topics as what it is like, conceptual analysis and a priori entailment, Searle's biological naturalism, neutral monism, idealism and phenomenalism, phenomenal intentionality, conscious thought, temporal consciousness, consciousness of agency, bodily experience, attention and consciousness, unconscious states, thinking, interpretivism, intentional objects, collective intentionality, formulating physicalism, realization, various subtopics of personal identity, mental acts, various subtopics of self-knowledge, robotics, folk concepts and folk intuitions, language and thought, various subtopics of the philosophy of neuroscience, as well as around 50 subtopics of the philosophy of perception.  In the science of consciousness section, there are new subsections on binocular rivalry, visual pathways, neglect and extinction, schizophrenia, anosognosia, vegetative states and coma, the minimally conscious state, synesthesia, hypnosis, meditation, drugs and consciousness, other altered states, verbal reports and heterophenomenology, Eastern and contemplative approaches, and a few others.

Although MindPapers subsumes the old page of online papers, we have retained a distinct front-end for Online Papers on Consciousness, both for continuity with the old version, and because this site has a somewhat different emphasis: free online papers only, and structured in a way that is somewhat more oriented to issues about consciousness and cognitive science, and somewhat less to academic philosophy.  Everything available under online papers can also be found under MindPapers, however, by setting the viewing options appropriately.

I encourage everyone to try things out.  There will certainly be errors, bugs, and missing items: if you find these, please notify us using the tools on the site.  People with published and/or online papers in relevant areas might start by searching on their own names to see if there's anything we've missed.  Any suggestions for further development are welcome.

Update: The site went down for a while overnight, probably due to all the traffic from around the web, but it's up and running again now.

Bits and pieces

• An initial announcement and call for papers has been issued for next year's "Toward a Science of Consciousness" conference in Tucson, April 8-12.  Confirmed plenary speakers at this point include: Andy Clark, Stan Dehaene, Alison Gopnik, Stuart  Hameroff, Christof Koch, Adrian Owen, Eric Schwitzgebel, Rupert Sheldrake, Susanna Siegel, Wolf Singer, Frank Tong, Michael Tye, and numerous others, with more still to come.


• Congratulations to the five current ANU graduate students -- Ben Blumson, Jacek Brzozowski, Yuri Cath, Ole Koksvik, and Dan Marshall -- who have had articles accepted at leading philosophy journals in the last month or two.  Berit has details.


• RIP Alex, the African Grey parrot trained by my Arizona ex-colleague Irene Pepperberg.  I'm now even sorrier that I didn't take up Irene's invitation to "meet the A-man" before she left for MIT.


• My philosophical humor page has been updated.  Additions include Rachael Briggs' modal logic version of "Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend".

Recent collections on consciousness

I've been meaning to do some posts about a number of recent interesting books on consciousness and related topics, but I haven't gotten a chance.  So rather than do a series of separate posts, I thought I'd do a single post here about a number of books that are worth checking out.  I'll devote this post to collections, and save single-authored books for another post somewhere down the line.

The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, edited by Max Velmans and Susan Schneider.  This is a really impressive volume containing about 55 substantial articles, roughly evenly divided between the philosophy and the science of consciousness, written by many of the leading people in the field.  I've read a number of the articles already, and they are terrific.  For someone wanting a comprehensive yet in-depth guide to the field, there probably isn't a better single source.

The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness, edited by Philip Zelazo, Morris Moscovitch, and Evan Thompson.  A similar volume, but containing 31 chapters mostly on the science of consciousness.  This has especially strong coverage in psychology and cognitive science, although it's somewhat lighter on neuroscience and philosophy (just four overview articles on the philosophy of consciousness).  I haven't read many of the chapters yet, but the quality seems to be high.

(Completing a triumvirate, there is also an Oxford Companion to Consciousness, edited by Tim Bayne and  Axel Cleeremans, forthcoming in a year or two.  This will probably have the most comprehensive coverage of neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology of the three, in a format of around 250 shorter articles, encyclopedia-style.)

Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism

I've just gotten back from a road trip to Sydney for the "Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism" conference (along with half a day at the "Moral Cognition and Meta-Ethics" conference).  I've put some photos online, as have Berit and Joe.  Joe also has a report on the first day.

The purpose of the conference was to bring together various "pragmatist" and "expressivist" (e.g. those of Blackburn, Brandom, Gibbard, Price) approaches to truth and meaning, and to contrast them with more traditional "representational" approaches.  As a flat-footed representationalist, I thought that the conference would be something like going to an interesting foreign country, but what struck me was that most of what the pragmatists had to say was quite congenial to representationalism.  Some amateurish thoughts on these issues follow.

Susan Hurley

Susan Hurley died yesterday.  Susan was a creative philosopher and a force of nature.  She was a major contributor to the philosophy of mind, the foundations of cognitive science, and social and political philosophy.  Her 1998 book Consciousness in Action is full of ideas and insights that can't be found elsewhere.

I first met Susan at the Tucson and Brussels consciousness conferences in 2000, and got to know her better on visits to Oxford and at the Santa Cruz summer institute in 2002 (here's a photo).  We agreed on very little, but she was terrific company, and her ideas always repaid close attention.  My paper with Tim Bayne, "What is the Unity of Consciousness?", started life in part as a commentary on Susan's work in a symposium at the Brussels ASSC conference in 2000.   She was a frequent visitor to the ANU, and last year was offered a professorship here, although to our disappointment she ended up moving to Bristol instead. At the time of her death Susan had a contract for a book on the boundaries of the mind, co-authored with Alva Noe, in the book series I edit at Oxford University Press.  I suppose that this book will now never see the light of day.

Susan was passionate about everything that she did, and had an unquenchable appetite for living and thinking.  She treated her repeated battles with cancer as inconveniences that should not get in the way of doing philosophy.  A month before she died, Susan organized a big conference on perception, action, and consciousness at Bristol, which by all accounts was a big success.  She was due to visit ANU in early September and give a talk.  Characteristically, she kept up this plan until near the end.  It was only last Sunday that she e-mailed me to cancel, saying "I still hope that maybe I can make it there someday, but that may not be probable given my illness".  She will be missed.

X-Phi meets A-Phi

The "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis" last week was a lot of fun -- one of the most stimulating conferences I've been to for some time.  I've posted photos, and the Powerpoint for my wrap-up talk "X-Phi Meets A-Phi" (some of which is summarized below).  Here the A stands for "armchair" or "a priori", as you please.  See the experimental philosophy page and the experimental philosophy blog for some background on the issues, and see also Alex Plakias's conference recap on the Go Grue blog.

The conference had something of a tag-team wrestling format, alternating X-Phi speakers (in the 'red corner") with A-Phi speakers (in the blue corner).  The X-Phi speakers were Steve Stich (with a nice overview of his work on disagreement over the intuitions that analytic philosophers often appeal to, in epistemology, the philosophy of language, and ethics), Josh Knobe (who outlined experimental work on people's intuitions about consciousness, suggesting that they're willing to ascribe nonphenomenal states much more freely than phenomenal states), John Doris (who used empirical work on the role of social processes in moral thinking to support a socially-extended view of cognition), Alex Plakias (on empirical work on moral disagreement) and Adina Roskies (on the implications of acquired sociopathy for moral internalism).  The A-Phi speakers were Frank Jackson (on conceptual analysis as a kind of experimental philosophy), Michael Smith (on pure and applied conceptual analysis, responding to various aspects of the X-Phi critique), Farid Masrour (on the relevance of the distinction between prima facie and ideal intuitions), Jeanette Kennett (who responded to Adina on empirical arguments against internalism), and, I suppose, me.

In the end there was a lot more agreement than disagreement, though there were certainly some contentious issues along the way.  Given the emphasis on conceptual analysis, it's not surprising that different concepts of experimental philosophy were distinguished.  For a start, one needs to distinguish experimental philosophy from empirical philosophy simpliciter, where the key distinction is the focus on data about philosophically relevant intuitions and judgments.  Farid also usefully distinguished "positive" from "negative" experimental philosophy.  The former, typified by Josh Knobe's work on intentional action, tries to find interesting patterns in people's application of concepts to cases, drawing out conclusions about the way those concepts work.   The latter, typified by the work of Steve Stich and colleagues on Getter and Kripke intuitions, tries to find cross-group or cross-cultural differences in philosophically relevant intuitions, with a view to potentially undermining the appeal to these intuitions in traditional philosophy.

We also brought some experimental philosophy to bear on the relationship between experimental philosophy and conceptual analysis.   In my talk I presented a series of vignettes ranging from (a) someone asking a number of other people for judgments about intentional action to (b) someone asking one other person for such judgments to (c) someone asking themselves for such judgments, and polled the audience on whether each counts as experimental philosophy, or as conceptual analysis.  The numbers slid gradually from (a) to (c), suggesting a pretty strong continuity.  The moral is that positive experimental philosophy, at least, seems fairly continuous with conceptual analysis, though with more than one subject and performed in the third-person mode.

Conference wrap-up

I'm back now from two enjoyable weeks of conferences.  I've posted some photos from the Norms and Analysis conference in Sydney (along with the ANU-Sydney-Kyoto Probability workshop) and have also posted the Powerpoint for my talk, "Moral Relativism and Conceptual Analysis" (my first-ever venture into meta-ethics).  Kenny Easwaran has posted Rachael Briggs' marvelous limerick summary of the N&A conference, and Carrie Jenkins has also posted some comments.   In addition, I've posted photos from the Australasian Association of Philosophy conference, and have posted the Powerpoint for my presidential address, "From the Aufbau to the Canberra Plan".

Canberra update

I've been back in Canberra for a while now.  The month away was a lot of fun, with the highlight being a memorable week in the Caribbean (including a marvelous match between the West Indies and England in Barbados in front of a full house of local fans), and the lowlight being the loss of my laptop in Atlanta airport.  As a result, I've lost my photos from the (excellent) Boise conference on metametaphysics and from the Caribbean, but I've posted some photos from the subsequent conference on formal epistemology in Oklahoma.

Here at ANU, conference season is warming up.  Last Friday saw an enjoyable workshop on "The Epistemology of Experience" with talks by Carrie Jenkins, Jim Pryor, Declan Smithies, and Nico Silins.  Carrie has posted a summary and Ole Koksvik has posted some photos.  Coming up June 15 is a workshop on "Phenomenology and Intentionality" featuring Bill Lycan, Adam Pautz, and Susanna Siegel.  The conference on "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis" will be July 18-20, preceded by an undergraduate workshop July 17.  Interested undergraduates from Australasian universities should e-mail me.  In addition, there are a small number of open 20-minute slots for submitted papers at the main conference.  People with suitable papers on experimental philosophy should get in touch with me.  There are also a number of other conferences coming up in other bits of Australasia.  The AAP website has a fairly extensive list.  Note that the AAP conference in Armidale July 1-6 (at which I'm supposed to give the presidential address, tentatively entitled "From the Aufbau to the Canberra Plan") has extended its deadline for submissions to May 31.

Elsewhere on the web: I recently did a video interview with John Horgan (author of The End of Science and various other books and articles), which has just been posted on the Bloggingheads website.  My webcam skills are revealed to be fairly shaky, but otherwise the interview seems to have come out OK.  It's also worth checking out Jerry Fodor's entertaining review of the "Does Physicalism Entail Panpsychism?" collection by Galen Strawson et al, in which Fodor comes surprisingly close to endorsing a form of property dualism with fundamental laws connecting physical processes and consciousness.

A month in the north

I'm about to head off for a month in the northern hemisphere.  The itinerary includes Boise (for the Metametaphysics conference), San Francisco (for the APA), UC Riverside, UC Davis, Harvard/MIT, Yale, NYU, the Caribbean, Georgia State, and Oklahoma (for the "Why Formal Epistemology?" conference).  Apart from the two new states at the end, the highlight will be a week in the West Indies for the World Cup, taking in matches in Grenada (Australia vs New Zealand), Barbados (England vs West Indies), and St. Lucia (semi-final).  Fingers crossed for no more murders!

Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis

This is advance notice of a conference on "Experimental Philosophy Meets Conceptual Analysis", to be held at ANU on July 18-20, 2007.  The focus of the conference will be on recent work on experimental philosophy, especially the experimental study of philosophical intuitions, and its relationship to more traditional philosophical methods such as conceptual analysis.  Speakers will include John Doris, Joshua Knobe, Stephen Stich, Frank Jackson, Michael Smith, and me.  The conference is open to all and attendance is free, but if you plan to attend, please e-mail Maire Ni Mhorda at maire [at] coombs.anu.edu.au.

The conference will be part of what is shaping up to be a very busy conference season in Australia.  At ANU alone, apart from this conference, there will likely be a conference on basic knowledge in late May or early June, a conference on reasons and rationality in August, and possibly something on perception in June.  At Sydney there will be conferences on Norms and Analysis on June 26-28, on Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism August 29-31, and on Moral Cognition and Meta-Ethics from August 31 to September 2.  Of course there is the Australasian Association of Philosophy, to be held on July 1-6.  There will also be the World Congress of Neuroscience in Melbourne July 12-17 and the International Society for Research on the Emotions in Brisbane July 11-15.  I'm sure there are many others I've missed -- feel free to make additions in the comments.

Consciousness in the news

The mind-body problem has been in the news lately.  A couple of weeks ago, Time magazine had a special issue on mind and brain, with a lead story by Steven Pinker on the mystery of consciousness, along with brief sidebar articles on consciousness by Bernard Baars, Dan Dennett, Antonio Damasio, Michael Gazzaniga, Colin McGinn.  Now the New Yorker has just published a long article by Larissa MacFarquhar on Pat and Paul Churchland (not online, unfortunately), with a lot of nice biographical and sociological background and some philosophical discussion along the way.  I talked to Larissa for this article a year or two ago, when it was a general article on the problem of consciousness, and a fair amount of philosophical background on consciousness has survived into the final version.