Regular Sessions

All regular (contributed) sessions are scheduled for 55 minutes, with a five-minute break to move between rooms. Speakers normally talk for 30-40 minutes, allowing 15-25 minutes for Q & A.

Special Streams 2019

AAP 2019 welcomes papers in all areas of philosophy. In addition to regular streams on topics such as Epistemology, Ethics, Philosophy of Mind, and Political Philosophy (among numerous others), we are organising the following Special Streams on more specific topics. Please contact stream convenors for more information.

_{Assessing Practical Ethics}

Analytic philosophers began giving increased attention to practical (or applied) ethics around 50 years ago, so this may be a good time to assess how this project is developing. What should the main aims of this project be, and how well is it achieving those aims? Are there any significant problems that work on practical ethics commonly displays? If so, how might those problems be tackled? Papers focusing on practical ethics in general or on some subset of practical ethics (such as environmental ethics or bioethics) are both welcome.

Convenor: Keith Horton  University of Wollongong

Bayesian Cognitive Science - Open Challenges and Future Directions

This stream invites papers on current issues in Bayesian cognitive science. Possible topics include, but are not limited to, the following: Can Bayesian norms provide a unified treatment of cognition? Should one be realist or anti-realist about the theoretical posits of Bayesian cognitive science? Is Bayesian cognitive science incompatible with 4E cognitive science? Does active inference unify life and mind? How might posits from information and probability theory speaks to consciousness, if at all? If the brain is probabilistic, why don’t we experience the world in probabilities? Is Bayesian cognitive science consistent with a modular view of cognitive architecture? Why aren't we all at home, inside our bedroom with the lights out?

Convenor: Michael Kirchhoff  University of Wollongong

Combatting Gender Inequalities in Philosophy

Professional philosophy has long been called to account by feminist philosophers for the under-representation of women, both in its traditional canon and its contemporary disciplinary incarnation. Increasingly, the causes of this persistent phenomenon have been interrogated using a philosophical lens focussed on its institutional and psychological dimensions. How is gender inequality in philosophy best explained? In what way is it a problem? And what are the most plausible and effective remedies?

Convenor: Fiona Jenkins  Australia National University

Gender Balancing the Philosophy Curriculum

As part of a new presidential project of the AAP papers are invited on the issue of introducing gender balance into the philosophy curriculum. Papers focusing on particular areas of the curriculum and on teachers’ experiences in attempting to revise the philosophy curriculum are particularly welcome.

Convenor: Karen Green  University of Melbourne

Minimal Cognition

What might be considered cognitive behaviours (e.g. flexibility, adaptive learning or intelligence, and decision making) have now been studied in insects, bacteria, plants, and even slime moulds, while work on minimal modelling shows that even sparse components can generate interesting behaviours. The aim of this stream is to explore the lower boundaries of cognition, discuss the behaviour/cognition relation, and to debate the deciding factors (or a rejection of) boundary placement.

Convenor: Nick Brancazio  University of Wollongong

Multicultural Philosophy

The practice of philosophy has a long history outside of the white European tradition. This breadth is not always well reflected in academia, where the perspectives of marginalised groups, including those racialised as non-white, are often neglected. In this stream, we will explore philosophical issues surrounding cultural and religious diversity both within and outside of academia. We welcome contributions from all theoretical frameworks, particularly from non-western schools of thought.

Convenor: Krushil Watene   Massey University

Shared Intentionality and Social Minds

This stream aims to explore the topic of shared intentionality understood broadly as the variety of ways in which we get to participate in collective endeavours. Submitted papers should address some of the features of these different forms of shared intentionality. These include joint or collective action, shared emotions, shared norms and intentional states that underlie communal life as exhibited in sharing institutions, social types, communal history and humans’ capacity to think and reason about states of affairs. Topics might include discussions on the nature of social cognition, shared agency, the nature of groups and collectives, group attitudes and actions, the nature of social kinds, such as race and gender, social structures, practices and norms and specific sorts of social entities, e.g. laws, artifacts, linguistic entities, institutions and organizations.

Convenor: Glenda Satne   University of Wollongong

Special Sessions

GENDER AND INEQUALITY IN PHILOSOPHY

Monday, 1:30 -3:30  Room: 67.104

Women and other non-dominant groups are significantly underrepresented in philosophy. Epistemic injustice is a type of injustice that affects individuals specifically as epistemic agents, i.e. as knowledge users or contributors. I argue that standard conceptions of academic excellence in philosophy constitute a form of epistemic injustice, which results in the underrepresentation of non-dominant groups in philosophy, which in turn perpetuates epistemic injustice by leaving intact standard conceptions of academic excellence – thereby creating a vicious circle. While many accounts of epistemic injustice are agential/interactional, I argue that standard conceptions of academic excellence produce and maintain epistemic injustice in a distinctively structural/institutional form. I argue that standard conceptions of academic excellence, much like standard conceptions of objectivity, conceal dominant (e.g. male, white, non-disabled) assumptions and interests, which result in the exclusion or marginalization, and hence in the underrepresentation, of members of non-dominant groups (e.g. women, racialized groups, people with disabilities) as epistemic agents in philosophy – resulting in an exclusionary process of philosophical knowledge production. Following the strategy adopted by feminist theorists for the concept of objectivity – namely, reconceptualizing rather than abandoning it – I propose to reconceptualize the concept of academic excellence from feminist insights and commitments for greater structural epistemic justice.

Convenor: Fiona Jenkins ANU

Participants: Amandine Catala - UQAM, Yannik Thiem - Columbia

INEQUALITY AND IMPLICIT BIAS: AAP DISCUSSION PANEL

Monday 4:00 – 5:45  Room 67.104

This panel explores how adequate the idea of implicit bias is to explaining the extensive range of disparate phenomena it is supposed to account for and asks how useful this framework has been (or might be) as applied to gender inequality in philosophy.

Each panellist will speak to an aspect of this question for 5-10 minutes, before a broader discussion with one another and the audience.

Participants: Colin Klein (ANU), Edouard Machery (Pittsburgh), Talia Morag (Deakin), Alison Wylie (UBC) 

Chair: Fiona Jenkins (ANU)

AUTHOR MEETS CRITICS - MURRAY SMITH'S FILM, ART AND THE THIRD CULTURE: A NATURALISED AESTHETICS OF FILM

Monday, July 8  1:30 – 3:30  Room: 67.302

Murray Smith’s Film, Art and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford: 2017) has stimulated much debate in aesthetics and philosophy of film. Alluding to C.P. Snow’s famous account of the adversarial ‘two cultures’ (scientific and humanistic) and advocacy of a ‘third culture’ combining the two, Smith argues that a naturalized approach to aesthetics has much to offer contemporary philosophical understanding of art and the philosophical theorization of film. In this panel, philosophers of art and film will address key claims in Smith’s work on the naturalization of aesthetics and how this might help us advance inquiry into the aesthetics of film. Topics to be address include naturalism and aesthetics, theorising cinematic experience from a naturalistic perspective, and the role of emotional engagement in understanding and evaluating cinema.

Convenor: Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie)

Participants: David Macarthur (Sydney), Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie), Murray Smith (University of Kent, via Skype), Jane Stadler (QUT, via proxy presenter)

SYMPOSIUM ON FICTION: SINGULAR TERMS IN FICTIONAL DISCOURSE

Tuesday, July 10  1:30 – 3:30  Room: 67.302

The issue of how to understand singular terms as used in fictional discourse  in, and about, fiction continues to be a hot topic of debate among philosophers of fiction. In this symposium we focus on a number of related issues in this area, including the semantics of names of real individuals (eg, ‘Napoleon) as they occur in talk in and about fiction, and the view, famously maintained by Kripke, that fictional names are ambiguous between a reading on which they are not genuine names and a reading on which they are genuine names that stand for fictional objects.

Convenor: Laura Schroeter (Melbourne)

Participants: Manuel García-Carpintero (Universitat de Barcelona), Fred Kroon (Auckland)