CFP: The Sense of Mineness

Conference on the Sense of 'Mineness'

Call for abstracts

When: Saturday 21st and Sunday 22nd March, 2015

Where: LOGOS, University of Barcelona

Website: http://senseofmineness.wordpress.com/

We are happy to invite submissions of proposals for presentations at the conference on the sense of mineness to be held at LOGOS, University of Barcelona, on 21st-22nd March 2015, as part of the Spanish Research Council project "About Ourselves".

Keynote speakers

·         Barry Dainton (U. of Liverpool)

·         Uriah Kriegel (CNRS/Institut Jean Nicod)

·         Christopher Peacocke (UCL and Columbia U.)

·         Frédérique de Vignemont (CNRS/Institut Jean Nicod)

Conference topic

In recent discussions of phenomenal consciousness, a distinction is sometimes made between the qualitative character of an experience (i.e. the specific way it feels to the subject, e.g. painful or reddish or funny) and its “for-me-ness” or “mineness” (Zahavi 1999, 2005) or “subjectivity” (Levine 2001) or “subjective character” (Kriegel 2009), i.e. the fact that there is something it is like at all for the subject. (The second aspect is discussed under different terms by many more contemporary authors, including G. Strawson, Hohwy, Metzinger, Gallagher, Poellner, and Flanagan, and was also central to earlier work by William James, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre.)

While the qualitative dimension of phenomenality was the focus of most of the classical debate on the “hard problem” of consciousness, the subjective dimension is now increasingly treated as an important phenomenal feature deserving attention in its own right. Some (e.g. Dainton 2008, Schear 2009), however, have challenged the claim that there is a unique, distinctive aspect of phenomenal consciousness that marks all of a subject’s conscious states as hers.  It is also unclear whether a notion of phenomenal “mineness” is really needed for the various explanatory tasks it has recently been recruited for. The LOGOS conference on the sense of mineness aims at taking stock of the current state of this debate.

Questions to be discussed include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Is there a distinctive subjective component of phenomenology (i.e. a "sense of "mineness" or "me-ish-ness" or "for-me-ness")?
• Does such a component form part of (i) all conscious thoughts (ii) only I-thoughts?
• What role, if any, should such a sense of mineness play in our understanding of the "first-person perspective"; of selves; of the unity of consciousness; of personal identity and its persistence through time (etc.)?
• What are the relations between this putative phenomenal aspect and other self-directed feelings, such as the sense of bodily ownership; the sense of one's own movement; the sense of agency? Is the sense of mineness in some way reducible to those other feelings?
• What are the relations, if any, between the sense of mineness and other phenomenal aspects of experience that are not obviously directed towards the self, but may still be thought to be of relevance, such as cognitive phenomenology or affective phenomenology (etc.)?

Talk format: Speakers selected on the basis of the call for papers will be invited to give a 40-minute talk, followed by a 20-minute general discussion.

Submission format and deadline: submissions should be prepared for blind reviewing and should consist of:

1. A short 200-word abstract stating the main claim(s) and argument of the proposed talk;
2. An extended 1000-word abstract (in the same document as (1));
3. A separate document containing the paper's title and the author's name, email address, position and institutional affiliation.

Please send both documents in an email with the subject line "Abstract Submission", to the addresssenseofmineness@gmail.com., by the 15th of January 2015.  We will aim to notify acceptance or rejection by the 25th of January.

Travel grants (subject to confirmation): We might be able to offer some help towards travelling costs to a limited number of junior or unwaged participants. If this might be relevant to you, please mention it in your cover document (3).

Registration: attendance to the conference is free, but as places are limited, please register by sending an email with the subject line "Registration" at senseofmineness@gmail.com.

Organisers: Marie Guillot (LOGOS, U. Barcelona) and Manuel García-Carpintero (LOGOS, U. Barcelona).

Sponsored by the Spanish Research Council, as part of the project About Ourselves (FFI2013-47948-P)

Website: http://senseofmineness.wordpress.com/

Contact: [email protected]

____ Dr Marie Guillot Investigadora postdoctoral Juan de la Cierva  LOGOS, Universitat de Barcelona