Psycho-Ontology

Location: Mishkenot Sha'ananim, Jerusalem

Dates: December 11-15, 2011

For the conference website, which includes links the schedule and to registration forms, click here

Speakers:

1. Lera Boroditsky (Stanford University), “Beyond the physics: How Languages Help Us Construe and Construct”
2. David Chalmers (Australian National University), “Constructing the World”
3. Yoram Hazony (Shalem Center), “Domain-General Operations in the Mind’s ‘Central Processing System’? A Test-Case for Psycho-Ontology”
4. Eli Hirsch (Brandeis University), “Ontological Behavior in Infants (and Adults)”
5. Steven Horst (Wesleyan University), “Intuitive Ontologies, Critical Metaphysics, and Cognitive Pluralism”
6. Steven Pinker (Harvard university), “Language as a Window into Conceptual Structure”
7. Jesse Prinz (City University of New York), “Beyond Reference: How Minds Make Categories”
8. Susanna Siegal (Harvard University), “The Epistemological Significance of Anti-Modularism”
9. Amie Thomasson (University of Miami), “Norms and Necessity”
10. Gil Diesendruck & Shimon Peretz ( Bar Ilan University), “Lockean children: Ontological Differences in the Susceptibility to Category Revision”
11. Raoul Gervais  (Ghent University), “Reduction and emergence as features of cognition: unification and the extended mind hypothesis”
12. Daniel Kaplan & Bennett Helm (Franklin & Marshall College), “Objectivity, Rule Following, and Joint Commitment”
13. Hila Jacobson (Ben-Gurion University), “Perception and Conception”
14. Aviv Keren (Hebrew University), “Psycho-Mathematical-Ontology”
15. Peter Lewis (University of Miami), “Quantum Onto-Psychology”
16. Riccardo Manzotti (IULM University), “Does Situated Consciousness Reveal Something Important About the Structure of the Physical World? “
17. Angela Matthies (Oxford University), “Learning Numbers - How Psychologically Informed Studies on Number Acquisition May Also Have Something in Store for the Ontologist Interested in the Existence of Abstract Objects”
18. Robert Pepperell (Cardiff School of Art), “Art, Neuroscience and Ontology”
19. Kranti Saran (Harvard University), “Do Bodily Sensations Exist?”
20. Axel Seemann (Bentley University), “Perceptual Experience and the Study of What There Is”
21. Oron Shagrir (Hebrew University), “The Brain as a Model of the World”
22. Alfred Tauber (Boston University), “Seeking a Psycho-Ontology Beyond Freud's Philosophical Impasse”
23. Marius Usher (Tel Aviv University), “Convergence/Divergence Dynamics Grounds Action Control, Agent-Autonomy and Responsibility”
24. Josh Weinstein (Shalem Center), “How To Succeed: A Platonic Account of Temporally-Extended Agency”
25. Konrad Werner (Jagiellonian University), “Aspectual Shape of Knowledge or Aspectual Shape of the World?”
26. Benjamin Young (City University of New York), “The Phenomenal Element”
27. Nick Zangwill (Durham University), “Mind, Essence, Categories and Descartes”

Do the operations of the human mind have something to teach us about the fundamental structure of reality? Philosophers such as Hume, Kant, James, Bergson, Husserl, Kuhn, and Goodman have, in different ways, seemed to believe this question should be answered in the affirmative. Yet as disciplines, cognitive science and metaphysics are usually conducted without reference to one another.

“Psycho-ontology” can be defined as the investigation of the relationship between human cognition and features of reality: We do psycho-ontology when we study the way perception, thought, and emotion play a role in helping constitute the world we inhabit. But psycho-ontology can also move in the opposite direction: It can involve studying the fundamental features of reality in order to gain insight into how human cognitive processes work.

To see the call for papers click here.

For more information contact Raquela Karamson-Gribov: raquelakg@shalem.org.il