Since I will be in North America this Spring, I thought I should take the opportunity to attend any interesting conferences on the continent, and this is one. It takes place in Toronto 13-15 May. I noted the CFP earlier and I quickly put together something (they required full papers) based on my paper in the Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume. The paper, called ‘Naturalizing Aprioristic Metaphysics’, is a reply to the Ladyman-Ross critique of aprioristic metaphysics, and I also sketch what I understand to be the methodology of (aprioristic, Aristotelian) metaphysics. The draft of the paper is available here. Basically I just stripped the paper by cutting the section on Hofweber’s critique of metaphysics and toned down the Aristotelianism a bit, but I may try to include a bit more commentary on Ladyman and Ross in my actual presentation. Apparently the organizers received quite a few submissions, so I’m pleased that they picked mine to be presented. I might’ve attended the conference anyway, but now I’ve got a good excuse! I expect a healthy debate between the keynote speakers, who include James Ladyman, Katherine Hawley and Anjan Chakravartty.

I tend to bookmark some blog posts that I find interesting in the hopes that I’d some day get around to commenting on them on my own blog. Most of the time that doesn’t happen, or by the time I get around to it the posts are quite old. But that doesn’t mean that it wouldn’t be worthwhile to at least point them out, so what follows is a random collection of things that have caught my eye recently, or not so recently!

• Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday: Problems in Quantum Mechanics. This one is all the way from 2008, but I watched it maybe six months ago. With Sean Carroll and David Albert. It’s kind of introductory, but I at least found the stuff on the many-worlds interpretation quite helpful.
• Certain Doubts How to Think about Infallibility, by Jon Kvanvig. As a thoroughgoing fallibilist who nevertheless thinks that there is a priori knowledge, infallibility is a topic that I’ve sometimes pondered. Kvanvig doesn’t deal with it quite in the manner that I would, but the modal approach discussed is interesting. I’m inclined to think that a search for Cartesian certainty is misguided though.
• Maverick Philosopher Is It Rational to Fear Death? I think it’s healthy to think about death sometimes, but the reasoning in this post according to which the fear of death is irrational doesn’t quite seem right to me. It omits any discussion about the fear of losing one’s subject and claims simply that the fear of being nothing is irrational. On a related note, there is a conference coming up on this topic in Newcastle: Death: Its Meaning, Metaphysics, and Morality.
• Entia et Nomina Rafal gives us a hint about a conference at Bydgoszcz, Poland, entitled Ontological Proofs Today, featuring E. J. Lowe, Richard Swinburne, and others.
• the cookshop Finally something completely different: The Earth as a Floating Egg. The name of an album consisting of some strange soundscapes, drawing inspiration on ancient Finnish and Babylonian myths. I can’t remember where I found the link, but the blog in question looks like a promising place to find exceptional music…

I’ll take the opportunity to advertise the Annual Ratio One-Day Conference at Reading, since the theme, Classifying Reality is particularly interesting and since two of the speakers are contributors to my Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics volume, namely Lowe and Rosenkrantz. E. J. seems to be in high demand, since he is also giving the inaugural address at the Joint Sessions this year (I’ll post that CFP soon as well although I expect that people have already seen it). Unfortunately I don’t think I will be able to make it to the Ratio conference, but were I still in the UK I would certainly go.

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Reading invites you to the annual One-day Ratio Conference on Saturday 7 May 2011.

The theme is: Classifying Reality.

Speakers: E. J. Lowe (Durham), D.H. Mellor (Cambridge), Gary Rosenkrantz (University of North Carolina, Greensboro), Barry Smith (SUNY, Buffalo).

Registration fee: £25 (staff), £15 (students), which includes lunch and refreshments during the day.

Further details are available on the Department website at www.rdg.ac.uk/Phil

Contact: Astrid House (a.house@reading.ac.uk)

The conference is sponsored by Wiley-Blackwell and is grateful for a generous grant from the Mind Association.

I heard about this massive conference when I was in Cologne in May 2010. Although the conference is likely to lack metaphilosophical discussion of the Aristotelian stripe (possibly with the exception of Jonathan Schaffer), it should nevertheless be very interesting. I should perhaps submit something on the methodology of Aristotelian metaphysics, but an easy option would be to simply comment on one of the competing views, such as Tim Williamson’s account in his The Philosophy of Philosophy.

Here is the original CFP:

Call for Papers:

The Epistemology of Philosophy
University of Cologne
13-17 June 2011

http://rvps2011.net/epistemology/

Despite various challenges to “armchair philosophy,” the fact
remains that many central philosophical questions are still investigated
from the armchair – questions in metaphysics, in the philosophy of
mind, and in value theory, for example. What do philosophers bring with
them into the armchair to try to answer these questions? They bring at
least their grasp of concepts and of language, their imagination, and
their ability to engage in different forms of reasoning. The purpose of
this conference is to provide a forum for exchange between philosophers
working on the foundations of non-empirical knowledge and philosophers
working on the methodological and epistemological questions arising in
specific areas of philosophy. Invited speakers include:

Alex Byrne (MIT)
David J. Chalmers (ANU/NYU)
Andy Egan (Rutgers)
Tamar Szabó Gendler (Yale)
Thomas Grundmann (Cologne)
Terence Horgan (Arizona)
Martine Nida-Rümelin (Fribourg)
Paul Pietroski (Maryland)
Jonathan Schaffer (Rutgers/ANU)
Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers/ANU)
Russ Shafer-Landau (Wisconsin)
Michael Smith (Princeton)
Zoltán Gendler Szabó (Yale)
Timothy Williamson (Oxford)

The conference will also include presentations chosen by submission, and
we encourage researchers to submit abstracts suitable for a 45-minute
presentation on any topic pertinent to the themes of the conference.
Possible topics include the following: Imagination, modal reasoning,
understanding, a priori knowledge, the epistemology of philosophy of
mind, ethics and metaphysics, philosophical explanation, and
disagreement and progress in philosophy. This list is merely meant to be
suggestive. We invite submissions in all areas of metaphilosophy, and we
encourage philosophers working in all sub-disciplines to submit work
that reflects on the epistemology and methodology of their
sub-discipline and on how it relates to the philosophical enterprise
more generally.

The deadline for submissions is 15 February 2011. See the conference web
page for submission instructions: http://rvps2011.net/epistemology/

Please feel free to contact the conference organizers with any questions
or concerns:

Magdalena Balcerak Jackson (mbalcerakjackson@me.com)
Brendan Balcerak Jackson (bbalcerakjackson@gmail.com)

Emmy Noether Research Group
Understanding and the A Priori
http://fromthearmchair.net

The conference will take place as part of the Rhine Valley Philosophy
Summer 2011, a series of independently-organized events in the
Cologne-Bonn region. See http://rvps2011.net for information about the
other events.

I thought this grad conference on Aristotle in Boston would be worth advertising:

The 12th Annual Boston College Graduate Philosophy Conference
18-19 March, 2011

Aristotle: Nature, Logic, Being
Keynote Speakers: Claudia Baracchi, Ronald Polansky, William Wians

“All human beings by nature desire to know.” This line opens Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and its sentiment motivates his philosophical inquiry. The purpose of this conference is to take part in this pursuit by fostering a conversation about Aristotle’s theoretical works. These works have had enduring historical influence and remain a source of inspiration for theoretical investigation today.

As the conference title suggests, we welcome papers on topics in metaphysics, logic, and the natural sciences in the Aristotelian corpus. Papers are to be prepared for blind review, and should not exceed 4000 words. Applicants may forward their submissions to philgrad@bc.edu. The deadline for submissions is January 25, 2011.

The Graduate Conference Committee
Philosophy Department
Boston College
140 Commonwealth Ave.
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467-3806