June 30, 2011

Crispin Wright’s Philosophical Ramblings
By S. Matthew Liao

This summer Crispin Wright (NIP Director and Professor at NYU) will walk The Pennine Way, 268 miles across the Pennine mountain tops.

The Aim: To raise money to support graduate students from elsewhere to visit the Northern Institute of Philosophy and to support Northern Institute of Philosophy graduate students to visit other institutions. This is in line with a general mission of the Institute to support early career philosophers to develop their interests and skills through collaboration and philosophical interactions. The costs of such visits and exchanges are seldom adequately provided for in the budgets of grant giving authorities, and philosophy departments, even when in principle willing to support research-related travel by graduate students, are less and less able to do so. The hope is to build a Trust Fund at NIP to enable NIP to provide such support as a part of the regular working routine of the Institute.

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Posted on June 30, 2011 at 9:53 pm in Epistemology, General Announcement, Logic, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, S. Matthew Liao's Posts | Leave a Comment

September 19, 2009

Surveying Loose Talk
By Antti Kauppinen

This is the first in a series of posts about recent work in experimental philosophy. I will be examining some persistent general issues with the different experimental approaches by way of looking at particular papers in some detail. I’ll begin with ‘Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience’ by Justin Sytsma and Edouard Machery. The problem that the study highlights is that everyday language is often vague, ambiguous, or just spoken loosely, so that we can’t draw conclusions about people’s concepts just by looking at what they say in response to prompts. We first need to tease out just what people mean, and this can’t be done in a survey that doesn’t allow for a back-and-forth between the researcher and the subject. This would be a problem even if experimentalists solved all the other problems raised by myself and others.

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Posted on September 19, 2009 at 8:59 pm in Antti Kauppinen's Posts, Experimental Philosophy, Philosophical Methods, Philosophy of Mind | 5 Comments