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.

Comments

[Russell Blackford]

I feel rather naive about philosophy of mind, which is definitely not my research field, but I read the review by Fodor and made some comments over here: http://metamagician3000.blogspot.com/2007/07/consciousness-emerges.html. I don't quite know what the motivation would be to resist this sort of property dualism (from, say, a naturalistic perspective). It may not be totally convenient, but I can't see any totally convenient view available.