fragments of consciousness

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.