fragments of consciousness

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.