Even though Balcerak-Jackson’s Emmy Noether group has moved to Konstanz, there’s still a lot going on in Cologne. This workshop on non-causal explanation looks intriguing, great line-up too.

CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

WORKSHOP:

EXPLAINING WITHOUT CAUSES
Non-causal Explanation in the Sciences, Mathematics and Philosophy

LOCATION: UNIVERSITY OF COLOGNE, MAIN BUILDING, NEUER SENATSSAAL

DATE: DECEMBER 6-7, 2013

CONFIRMED SPEAKERS

Mazviita Chirimuuta (University of Pittsburgh)
Laura Felline (University of Louvain)
Stephan Hartmann (LMU Munich)
Andreas Hüttemann (University of Cologne)
Marc Lange (University of North Carolina)
Mary Leng (University of York)
Alexander Reutlinger (University of Cologne/LMU Munich)
Benjamin Schnieder (University of Hamburg)

Further information in due course.

If you would like to participate please contact: Alexander.Reutlinger@uni-koeln.de

This one is for grad students. The area is pretty broad, but I suspect that many submissions will reflect the (excellent!) work of the keynote speakers: Tim Crane, Thomas Hofweber, and Anna-Sara Malmgren. They’re asking for extended abstracts by September 1. I know one of the organising groups, ‘Understanding and the A Priori’ quite well as I spent over a week in Cologne at a couple of their previous conferences a few years ago. It’s a good group and since the conference is taking place at Cologne, I expect it to be a great opportunity for grad students working in core areas of analytic philosophy! Note that accommodation costs for speakers are covered.

We invite graduate students to submit abstracts on the philosophy of language, logic and mind, as well as on metaphysics and epistemology for presentation at the LEMMing Graduate Conference, jointly organized by the research groups Understanding and the A Priori (Cologne), Formal Epistemology (Konstanz), Phlox (Hamburg) and Nominalizations (Hamburg).

The graduate conference will take place from November 29 to December 1, 2012 at the University of Cologne (Germany). Keynote speakers will be
(1) Tim Crane (University of Cambridge)
(2) Thomas Hofweber (University of North Carolina)
(2) Anna-Sara Malmgren (Stanford University)

The material must be suitable for a presentation of no more than 45 minutes. Nine submissions will be selected for presentation. All presentations will be followed by a 10-minute comment by a postdoc affiliated with the research groups.

The deadline for submission is September 1, 2012.

The costs for accommodation (but not for travel) for the accepted graduate speakers will be covered.
Applicants should send the following documents for blind review:

(1) A separate cover page including: author’s name, title of paper, institutional affiliation, contact information and specification of the area(s) to which the paper is related (possible areas are: Language, Logic, Epistemology, Mind, Metaphysics);
(2) A substantial abstract of the presentation no longer than 1’500 words, excluding title and references, with no information identifying the author or the author’s institutional affiliation.

The documents should be sent as email attachments in *.pdf format to lemmingcologne@googlemail.com. Please use ‘Graduate Conference’ as subject line. Receipt of submissions will be confirmed by email.

Applicants must be graduate students by September 1, 2012. Please note that we do not accept more than one submission per person.

Notification of acceptance will be sent by October 15, 2012.

For more information please visit the website http://lemminggc.wordpress.com/call-for-abstracts/ or contact lemmingcologne@googlemail.com.

This workshop in Cologne might be of interest to some readers.

L A W S & C H A N C E S
Workshop in Cologne
March 5, 2012

DFG Research Group Causation | Laws | Dispositions | Explanation

SPEAKERS

Claus Beisbart (University of Dortmund)
Barry Loewer (Rutgers University)
Alexander Reutlinger (University of Cologne)
John T. Roberts (University of North Carolina)
Markus Schrenk (University of Cologne)

TALKS

Loewer: “Two Accounts of Laws and Time”

Schrenk: “Do Better Best Systems Accounts deliver the Metaphysics, Epistemology or Pragmatics of Laws?

Beisbart: “Big or Bug? A Skeptical Guide to Humean Chances”

Reutlinger: “Ceteris Paribus Law = Statistical Law?”

Roberts: “Counterfactuals, Norms, and Natural Modality”

REGISTRATION
Please register by sending an email to Arno Göbel: arno.goebel@gmx.de. We can offer only a limited number of places. The Deadline for registration is February 26, 2012.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact the organizer:
Alexander.Reutlinger@uni-koeln.de

FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE RESEARCH GROUP
http://www.clde.uni-koeln.de/

Another interesting workshop in Cologne. This one is organized by the DFG Research Group on Causation, Laws, Dispositions, and Explanation, involving Andreas Hüttemann, Markus Schrenk, and many others. Speakers include Helen Beebee, Jonathan Jacobs, James Ladyman, among others.

Call for Participation

D I S P O S I T I O N S, C A U S E S, M O D A L I T Y
Workshop in Cologne
7-9 March 2012

DFG Research Group Causation | Laws | Dispositions | Explanation

Convenors: Arno Goebel, Andreas Hüttemann, Alexander Reutlinger, and Markus Schrenk

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Helen Beebee: Against Dispositional Essentialism
Ralf Busse: Existence, Essence, and Law
Richard Corry: Powers take the Field
Jonathan Jacobs: How to be an Aristotelian and a reductionist about modality
James Ladyman: Dispositions and Forces
Olivier Massin: ‘When forces meet each other’
Barbara Vetter: How to be a dispositionalist about possibility
Daniel von Wachter: Causes do not necessitate their effect
Neil Williams: The Significance of Causal Relevance

IMPORTANT DATES:
7-9 March 2012 Workshop
31 January 2012 Registration

REGISTRATION
Please send an email to arno.goebel@gmx.de by the end of January to express your interest to participate. We can unfortunately offer only a limited number of places.

TOPIC OF THE WORKSHOP | ABSTRACT
Dispositionalists are philosophers who defend the view that many or all properties have an irreducible dispositional nature. Some dispositionalists have recently claimed that causal powers, capacities, tendencies, etc. bring their own kind of modality to the world which is neither eliminable by counterfactual conditionals nor reducible to natural or metaphysical necessity. Forces or vectors sometimes serve as a preliminary characterization of a disposition?s sui generis modality. However, such a theory of dispositional modality has yet to be spelled out in detail. It would also have to reveal how dispositions and causation are related. This workshop wishes to investigate into the possibility (or impossibility) of such a project.

TRAVEL GRANTS
We will be able to offer a restricted number of travel grants (up to 250 Euros each). PhD students and advanced M.A. students are encouraged to apply for these grants by submitting a short letter of motivation (200 words) and a short CV. The deadline is 4 December 2011. Please send the applications to Alexander.Reutlinger@uni-koeln.de.

FURTHER INFORMATION ON THE RESEARCH GROUP
http://www.clde.uni-koeln.de/

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact one of the organisers:
arno.goebel@gmx.de
Alexander.Reutlinger@uni-koeln.de
markus.schrenk@uni-koeln.de

The folks of the Emmy Noether ‘Understanding and the A Priori’ research group are putting together this interesting looking workshop on modal epistemology, with some good people! I’d be interested in attending if I weren’t on another continent at the time — I’ve been to their events before.

Workshop: The Epistemology of Modality
Cologne, Germany, February 23-24 2012

Modal discourse is ubiquitous in everyday life: how things could have been different, what we might do, what the future could be; questions of this kind, with different readings of (or restrictions on) the kind of modality involved, are likely to be asked about almost any subject that attracts interest in human life, no matter whether the topic is addressed informally or through a scientific discipline. Analytic philosophy also concerns itself with modal discourse in many ways; as an object of analysis, as a tool (when a modal account is offered of apparently non-modal phenomena) and, more directly, when philosophers argue about metaphysical modal claims. But how do we get to know the answers to the modal questions? By definition, modal claims transcend the way things are. This seems to pose a peculiar difficulty for the epistemology of modal discourse, somewhat analogous to the (alleged) problem for our knowledge of abstract objects known as “Benacerraf dilemma”; in both cases there seems to be a tension between the metaphysics and the epistemology of the relevant area. A related issue is whether the solution to the problem, for modal discourse, requires tracing modal knowledge back to a priori or conceptual truths. In the workshop, we aim to discuss and develop different answers that have been given recently to this problem.

Speakers: Jacek Brzozowski (Köln), Bob Hale (Sheffield), Sonia Roca-Royes (Stirling), Daniele Sgaravatti (Köln), Anand Vaidya (San Jose), Timothy Williamson (Oxford).

Participation in the workshop is free, but registration is needed and there is a limited number of available places. For registration and inquiries please write to: contact@fromthearmchair.net
Registration deadline: January 10 2012

The Workshop is organized by the Emmy Noether research group ‘Understanding and the A Priori’: http://fromthearmchair.net/