Fordham University Graduate Conference

Body and Mind

Fordham University Philosophy Department Graduate Conference

The number of studies in the cognitive sciences that reveal the profound degree to which the body influences the mind has continued to grow.  However, the grip of Cartesian dualism on philosophy of mind has been slow to loosen.  While few philosophers retain a theory of separate substances of mind and body, the popular computational and connectionist theories of mind of the last few decades continued to leave the body out of the picture.  Recently, a number of so-called “embodied” and “enactive” approaches to cognition have sought to reorient the field.  Sometimes, these have been advanced as radical programs that seek to completely overthrow orthodoxy in philosophy of mind.  These debates seem to be only increasing in pace.  This year’s Fordham University Graduate Philosophy Conference seeks to investigate the impact of the body on the mind through a variety of approaches. 

-Early embodied approaches drew inspiration from and explored the work of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre and others in the phenomenological tradition.  We welcome papers that explore this historical connection as well as those that consider the continuing importance of phenomenology to analyzing consciousness.

-We welcome papers that address competing accounts of the emotions, the nature of concepts, how memory works, the modularity of the mind, mental representation and other traditional problems in cognitive science from classical and embodied perspectives.

-We welcome papers that explore embodied and classical accounts of the problem of other minds and issues of intersubjectivity

-Ultimately, we welcome any paper that seeks to elucidate the important ways the mind is affected by the body or that challenges this new movement in philosophy of mind.