CFP: Perceiving at a Distance

Submission deadline: February 12, 2016

Conference date(s):
June 9, 2016 - June 10, 2016

Go to the conference's page

Conference Venue:

Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp
Antwerpen, Belgium

Topic areas

Details

We would like to invite you to contribute a paper to a two-day conference on the philosophy of the distal senses.

The conference focuses on the distal senses, such as vision and audition. Reflection on the capacity to perceive things at a distance gives reason to doubt that sensory experience can be adequately explained in terms of the mechanistic metaphysics that underpins currently popular models of the mind. The conference and associated masterclass will examine alternative positions that can be adopted to make better sense of distal perception. We are seeking contributions that exemplify how cutting-edge research on perception can thrive when resisting a simple-minded, mechanistic view of the mind’s place in nature.

The conference will take place on Thursday the 9th and Friday the 10th of June 2016, at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology, University of Antwerp, Belgium. An associated Masterclass for graduate students will take place one day earlier, on the 8th of June; a call for graduate students to take part in the masterclass will be made separately.

Keynote speakers:

  • Louise Richardson (York)
  • Mark Eli Kalderon (UCL)
  • Amber Carpenter (Yale NUS, York)
  • John Campbell (UC Berkeley)

We invite submissions for 20 minute presentations followed by a 10-minute discussion. Submitted contributions may be on any issue falling within the conference theme, broadly construed. Topics may include:

  • The relation between optics and vision
  • Presence at a distance
  • The objects of olfaction and audition
  • Sympathy in perception
  • The time-lag argument against naïve realism
  • The possibility of mediated perception
  • Sense Data
  • Distal perception as a motivation for intentionalism/representationalism
  • Transparency and its explanatory status in a theory of perception

The conference is sponsored by the New Directions in the Study of the Mind project, a Templeton Foundation funded initiative led by Tim Crane at Cambridge University.

Submission details

Please send abstracts of max. 750 words, and prepared for anonymous review, by Friday 12 February 2016 to:

[email protected]

Decisions by the end of February. We have only a limited number of spaces for invited speakers, and will try to cover or at least subsidise reasonable travel and accommodation expenses for them.

For further information, please contact one of the conference organisers, Maarten Steenhagen ([email protected]) and Winnie Sung ([email protected]).

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