Art der Ankündigung: Veranstaltung

CONFERENCE

ARISTOTLE’S METHODS OF PHILOSOPHICAL INQUIRY

23-24 MAY 2025

Organisation:

• Nevim Borçin
• Béatrice Lienemann

FRIDAY, 23 MAY 2025: 

Location: Espace Güggi-MIS 08 0101, University of Fribourg

08:45 – 09:15:                        Registration

09:15 – 09:30:            Béatrice Lienemann (University of Fribourg)

Welcome & Introduction

09:30 –10:30:                         Nevim Borçin (University of Fribourg)

Aristotle on Philosophising with Aporiai 

10:30 – 11:30:                        Joseph Bjelde (Humboldt University Berlin)

                                      The puzzle of Topics 8.3 & The task of 8.5

11:30 – 11:50:                        Coffee Break

11:50 – 12:50:                        Giulio Di Basilio (Goethe University Frankfurt)

Ethical Enquiry in Aristotle’s Eudemian Ethics: Argument &   Observation       

              

12:50 – 14:30:                        Lunch Break

14:30 – 15:30:                        Christof Rapp (LMU Munich)

Eleven Shades of Dialectic. On the Variety of Non-Demonstrative Methods in Aristotle   

                    

15:30 – 16:30:                        Ronja Hildebrandt (TU Dortmund)

                                      Ethics and Rhetoric in Aristotle’s Protrepticus

16:30 – 16:50:                        Coffee Break

16:50 – 17:50:                        Thornton Lockwood (Quinnipiac University)

                                                The puzzling nature of Nicomachean Ethics Book 5

19:30 – 22:00:                        Conference Dinner

SATURDAY, 24 MAY 2025

Location: Laure Dupraz MIS 11 2 102 24.05, University of Fribourg

09:00– 10:00:             Dorothea Frede (University of Hamburg) 

Keynote Address: All Teaching and All Learning Proceeds From Preexisting Knowledge

          

10:00 – 11:00:                        Giulia Bonasio (Durham University)

Aristotle on Protagoras’ dictum: a case study of the endoxic method

11:00 – 11:20:                        Coffee Break

11:20 – 12:20:                        Lucas Angioni (University of Campas) 

Commensurate Universality in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (what ties Book I and Book II together)

12:20 – 14:30:                        Lunch Break

14:30 – 15:30:                        Paolo Crivelli (University of Notre Dame)

Aristotle’s Strategy for a Defense of the Principle of Non-Contradiction     

                                        

15:30 – 15:50             Coffee Break

15:50 – 16:50:                        Pieter Sjoerd Hasper (University of Hamburg)

Aristotle’s Scientific Methodology: Explanation by Composition from Principles

Vortrag: The Empowering Conception of Humanity

Uhrzeit: 18:15

Ort: Alfried Krupp Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald und online

URL: https://www.wiko-greifswald.de/programm/digitale-veranstaltungen/zugang-zum-digitalen-hoersaal/zugang-zum-digitalen-hoersaal-ab-14/ 

Öffentlicher Abendvortrag von Professorin Carla Bagnoli, Ph. D. (Università degli Studi di Modena e Reggio Emilia/Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) im Rahmen der internationalen Fachtagung „Kant’s moral philosophy – beyond the straw man“ (27-28 Mai 2025, Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald).

In Kant‘s view, progress towards the realization of the moral ideal begins with the individual radical change of mind, but it ultimately depends on the human capacity to form collectives driven by shared rational norms. This is an empowering conception of humanity, which can be appreciated in contrast to two views. First, differently than the habituation theory, it acknowledges that changes in habits may be instrumental to achieving the necessary varieties of shared action, but they are not sufficient to sustain individual and collective commitment to the moral ideal and must be held in check by reason. Second, it shows that grace is theoretically and practically untenable. The collective pursuit of the moral ideal requires a complex institutional organization of rational agency, structured by appropriate legal frameworks. Faith and hope are distinct practical attitudes key to sustain the complex varieties of individual, social and institutional agency that allow for the full realization of the moral ideal. By considering them disjunctively, we gain a convincing explanation of the dynamics of inner moral change and its agentive impact, the role of corporative agency recruited to resist the propensity to evil, and the distinctive ways in which ethical and religious congregations are vulnerable to heteronomy.

Carla Bagnoli is a Full Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, where she also coordinates the Ph.D. program in „Religions, Cultures, and Societies.“ She has held visiting positions at prestigious institutions such as All Souls College, University of Oxford, and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. Her research focuses on philosophy of agency, moral epistemology, and Kantian constructivism, with a particular interest in practical reasoning and responsibility. Among her numerous publications, her recent book Ethical Constructivism (Cambridge University Press, 2022) explores the foundations of moral normativity.

Moderation: Professor Dr. Micha H. Werner

Ort der Veranstaltung: University of Geneva, Espace Colladon, Rue Jean-Daniel-Colladon 2, 1204 Geneva

Program:

21.05.2025

09:00-09:45 Alice Helliwell: Creative Value and AI

10:30-11:15 Andrea Rivadulla-Duró: Creative Transitions

Chair: Anaïs Giannuzzo

14:00-14:45 Joshua Shepherd: Agentive Fragmentation and Creative Agency

15:45-16:30 Antti Kauppinen: Why Is AI Such a Bad Poet?

Chair: Agnès Baehni

22.05.2025

09:00-09:45 Claire Anscomb: Trust and Creativity in AI Art Practices

10:30-11:15 Elliot Samuel Paul: The Paradox of Creative Agency

Chair: Noëllie Cherubini

14:00-14:45 Francesca Secco: Can Spontaneous Creative Thinking be Praiseworthy?

15:45-16:30 Patrik Engisch: Creativity, Artworks, and Technical Artifacts

Chair: Julia Langkau

Organization: Julia Langkau, Patrik Engisch

Young Academy Distinguished Lecture: Can Biology Help Us Defend Free Will? An Emerging Debate in Philosophy, 10 June 2025, 17:00 (CEST)

Venue: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Johannessaal, Dr. Ignaz Seipel Platz 2, 1010 Vienna, Austria, and online

Organiser: Dr. Anne Sophie Meincke (University of Vienna & Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences)

Description:

Humans – members of the biological species homo sapiens – are products of evolution. Therefore, if we have free will, it is plausible to assume that our free will is also a product of evolution. But do we actually have free will? Is it – at least sometimes – up to us what we decide to do? Strikingly, philosophers have long ignored biology when it comes to answering these questions. Instead, they have quibbled about whether and how free will might fit into a supposedly deterministic universe as studied by (classical) physics. Only recently has the debate about free will begun to open up to biological considerations – so far, however, mostly with sceptical results. We are told that it is not we but our brains that decide what we want and how we act, or that our genes determine our decisions, or other biological factors beyond our control. 

In this Young Academy Distinguished Lecture, Alfred R. Mele, Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University, and Anne Sophie Meincke, member of the Young Academy and philosopher at the University of Vienna, will take an overdue fresh look at the relationship between free will and biology: Can biology help us understand and perhaps even defend free will? If so, how? If not, why not? To make progress here, it is necessary to critically analyse the arguments put forward against free will in the name of biology. Do these sceptical arguments really show what they claim to show? If not, then there is room to explore what constructive role biology could play in an attempt to defend free will against scepticism. Perhaps the common conception of a biological organism as some kind of deterministic machine is not accurate after all? How should we understand organisms instead? What biological function could free will serve? Taking evolution seriously also suggests considering the possibility that free will may not be a privilege of human organisms.

First Lecture: Alfred R. Mele: „Free Will and Neurobiology“

Second Lecture: Anne Sophie Meincke: „Free Will Is Real and Biology Helps Us Understand Why“

The Young Academy Distinguished Lecture Series brings cutting-edge scientific topics to the public, presented by distinguished experts and members of the Young Academy. The present two lectures kick off the interdisciplinary conference “Free Will: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Biology and Neuroscience”, organised by Anne Sophie Meincke and taking place at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on 11 and 12 June 2025.

More information (including the programme with abstracts of the lectures) is to be found here.

To attend in person, please register free of charge here. On-site childcare is available upon request.

Or follow the event via live stream.

Interdisciplinary Conference „Free Will: New Perspectives from Philosophy, Biology and Neurosciences“, 11th – 12th June 2025

Venue: Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria, & online

Organiser: Dr. Anne Sophie Meincke (University of Vienna)

Description:

In everyday life, we naturally assume that it is up to us how we act, and that we are therefore responsible for our actions. However, free will in this strong, ‘libertarian’ sense – involving a choice between alternatives – is increasingly being questioned by philosophers and scientists. While traditional concerns were predicated on the deterministic laws of classical physics, today sceptics also cite biology and neuroscience. We are told that our genes or our brains, not we, decide what we want and how we act.

This conference gathers leading experts in philosophy, biology and neuroscience who argue the opposite. Cutting-edge research into the biological and neural basis of human and animal agency challenges deterministic assumptions, adding to doubts from quantum physics and pointing to non-reductionist views of agency and action causation. At the same time, recent advances in the philosophy of biology and metaphysics offer new conceptual resources for understanding agency and free will under indeterminism. The conference explores the resulting prospects for a scientifically grounded, ontologically robust concept of ‘libertarian’ free will, breaking new ground in interdisciplinary research on free will.

Invited Speakers:

Björn Brembs (University of Regensburg), John Dupré (University of Exeter), Geert Keil (Humboldt University of Berlin), Christian List (LMU Munich), Anne Sophie Meincke (University of Vienna), Alfred R. Mele (Florida State University), Kevin Mitchell (with Henry Potter; both Trinity College Dublin), Stephen Mumford (Durham University), Helen Steward (University of Leeds), Peter U. Tse (Dartmouth College).

Concluding Reflections:

Johannes Jaeger (University of Vienna), Josef Quitterer (University of Innsbruck)

More details (including the conference programme) are to be found here (in English) and here (in German). To attend in person, please register free of charge by 2nd June 2025 here. 

Or follow the event via live stream.

This conference is associated with the Elise Richter-research project “Bio-Agency and Natural Freedom”, led by Dr. Anne Sophie Meincke and funded by the Austrian Science Fund (grant DOI 10.55776/V714). It will be preceded by a Young Academy Distinguished Lecture by Alfred R. Mele (Florida State University) and Anne Sophie Meincke (University of Vienna & Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences) on the question “Can Biology Help Us Defend Free Will?” on 10th June 2025 at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

The Konstanz 2025 Workshop on Normative Generics:

Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives of Normative Generics, Scripts, and Stereotypes.

Normative generics are generic sentences like their descriptive counterparts, but rather than merely describing a kind of generalization, their meanings are said to have a distinctively more normative flavor. How the meanings of normative and descriptive generics differ, and the source of the normative flavor, is a matter of intense debate, and further complicates the already challenging landscape of existing accounts of generics.

The difference between descriptive and normative generics has been observed in important work going back to the 1970s (cf. especially Lawler or Burton-Roberts), with other significant work following some decades later (Carlson, Greenberg, Cohen, a.o.). Work by Leslie brought the topic to particular prominence in the last decade, especially in philosophy.

This workshop addresses open questions in the analysis of normative generics–pertaining to their semantics, their pragmatics, their discourse functions, and the kinds of cognition that might underpin their use. We are particularly interested in how various kinds of social cognition provide explanatory tools for understanding aspects of their use (e.g., in recent work by Berio & Musholt, Hesni, a.o.)

Date: Thursday and Friday, May 22-23, 2025

Location: University of Konstanz

Speakers:

Elin McCready (ICREA; U.A. Barcelona)

Hana Filip (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)

Gen Eickers (Osnabrück University)

Frank Veltman (University of Amsterdam)

Leda Berio (Ruhr University Bochum)

Alda Mari (Institut Jean Nicod/ CNRS)

Samia Hesni (Boston University)

Manfred Krifka (ZAS)

Organized by:

Hadil Karawani (University of Konstanz)

Daniel Skibra (University of Konstanz)

The workshop will be in-person only, but is open for participants who would like to attend. We ask that you register by May 16th if you intend to join us. 

More information (including information on how to register) is available on the website:

www.knormgens.weebly.com

This workshop is made possible by a generous grant from the Zukunftskolleg at the University of Konstanz.

The research project „The Therapeutic Game“ (PI Stefan Rinner) funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and based at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen is organising an interdisciplinary two-day online conference on questions regarding language and its use in psychotherapeutic settings, to be held via Zoom on May 8 and 9 2025. Our goal is to bring together researchers interested in this topic from different fields, including philosophy, linguistics, psychology, psychiatry, communication studies, and sociology.

Please find the complete programme here: https://the-therapeutic-game.webnode.page/conference/.

To register please write an email with the subject “registration” to language.of.psychotherapy@gmail.com – you will receive an automated email with all required information, including the zoom login.

This hybrid workshop explores Wilfrid Sellars’ key writings through an innovative multi-nodal commentary format. This approach enables real-time discussion particularly suited to navigating Sellars‘ intricate, conceptually dense philosophical web. Texts are drawn from the forthcoming collection of writings by Sellars: Fraught with Ought: Writings from Wilfrid Sellars on Mind, Meaning, and Metaphysics (OUP, 2026), edited by Luz Christopher Seiberth, Jim O’Shea and Mahdi Ranaee.

• Phase I (Aug-Sep 2025): Remote commentary on unpublished/out-of-print texts
• Phase II (10 Oct 2025): Paderborn University seminar (in-person/online)

Respondents: Claudia Cavaliere (Padova), Jim O’Shea (UCD), Ryan Simonelli (Wuhan), Sybren Heyndels (Prague)

Format: Pre-read, discussion-based, hybrid (15-20 participants, doctoral priority)

Register by 30 June 2025 with the organizers:

• Sebastian Luft (Paderborn), lufts@mail.uni-paderborn.de
• Luz Christopher Seiberth (Potsdam) seiberth@uni-potsdam.de

Im Rahmen der Tagung „New Work on Kant“ (2. – 3. 7. 2025) stellen sieben junge Philosophinnen und Philosophen aus den USA, Kanada und Deutschland aktuelle Aufsätze zu Kants „Kritik der reinen Vernunft“ zur Diskussion. Besonderes Augenmerk liegt dabei auf grundlegenden Problemen der Fragestellung und Methode von Kants Hauptwerk und seiner gegenwärtigen Bedeutung für kritisches Philosophieren.

Organisation: Dr. des. Konstanty Kuzma & Prof. Dr. Christian Martin

Veranstalter: Institut für Philosophie, Universität Stuttgart

Anmeldung: per Mail bis zum 1. Juni bei konstanty.kuzma[at]philo.uni-stuttgart.de

Call for Applications

P3: Pluralism, Pragmatism, Perspectivism

HHU Summer School, 15th ‑ 19th September 2025

Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany

https://p3-summerschool.netlify.app

In the intellectual climate following the decline of post-positivist philosophy of science, scientific pluralism emerged as a direct critical response to the perceived failure of post-positivism to offer a unified view of science. Scientific practices began to be understood in a pluralistic, piecemeal fashion, shifting the focus from a monolithic conception of science to a multiplicity of approaches (cf. Galison & Stump 1996). Pluralism has since evolved into an active and explicit research program within the philosophy of science (cf. Ludwig & Ruby 2021). Very recently, the pluralist stance has materialized in forms like scientific perspectivism (cf. Giere 2006; Teller 2019; Massimi 2022; Kendig 2024) and pragmatist philosophy of science (cf. Price 2011; Andersen & Mitchell 2023; Chang 2022).

At the HHU Summer School, we aim to foster a rich dialogue between pluralism, pragmatism, and perspectivism, anchored in their shared pluralistic foundations (see Price 2011 for a non-representational understanding that underlies both pragmatism and causal perspectivalism). In this context of P3, the role of scientific models as vehicles of representation (cf. Frigg & Nguyen 2021; 2022) and traditional conceptions of truth (cf. Andersen 2023) are reinterpreted through new philosophical lenses. By the same token, the representational means by which the representational function of models is achieved are irreducibly pluralistic. (See Suárez 2024’s proposal for representational pluralism). Questions about the role of scientific instruments and the extent to which instruments are ‘perspectival’ and reflect a ‘point of view’ are becoming increasingly relevant (cf. Giere 2006; Crețu 2022 for a recent reappraisal).

Instructors:

• Ana-Maria Crețu (Bristol)
• Roman Frigg (LSE)
• Catherine Kendig (Michigan State University)
• Martin Kusch (Vienna)
• Mauricio Suárez (Complutense University of Madrid & Clare Hall Cambridge)
• Fenner Stanley Tanswell (TU Berlin)

Lecturers:

• Holly Andersen (Simon Fraser University)
• Anjan Chakravartty (Miami)
• Catarina Dutilh Novaes (VU Amsterdam & St. Andrews)
• Huw Price (Cambridge)

The summer school will be held in person from 15/09/2025 to 19/09/2025, at Heinrich Heine University’s Haus der Universität. We welcome applications from current graduate students (MA and PhD) through our website: https://p3-summerschool.netlify.app/call-for-applications. The application deadline is 15/06/2025. There is no participation fee, but participants must cover their travel and accommodation expenses. We especially encourage applications from members of underrepresented groups.

The event is organised by Daian Bica, Paul Hasselkuß, and Alexander Christian (Düsseldorf). It is hosted and supported by Heinrich Heine University, and endorsed by the German Society for Analytic Philosophy as an asteroid event to GAP.12.