Mid-term Conference of the Italian Society of Analytic Philosophy: Individuals and Collectivities

Call for Papers

Mid-term Conference of the Italian Society of Analytic Philosophy

Individuals and Collectivities
1-2 December 2017, University of Genova, Italy

Keynote speakers
Diego Marconi (Università di Torino)
Elisabeth Pacherie (Institut Jean Nicod, Paris)
Lea Ypi (London School of Economics)

Scientific Committee
Carla Bagnoli, Francesca Boccuni, Clotilde Calabi, Massimiliano Carrara, Richard Davies, Ciro De Florio, Massimo Dell’Utri, Elisabetta Galeotti, Valeria Ottonelli, Carlo Penco, Giulia Piredda.

Symposium

The Conference will host a symposium sponsored by the Italian Society of Analytic Philosophy and organized by Elisabetta Lalumera, Cristina Meini and Giulia Piredda on Personal Identity across the Lifespan. Speakers will be announced soon.

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Conference abstract submissions

We invite 1000-word abstracts (references included) anonymized for blind review.

Abstracts should be submitted through Easychair

Abstract submission deadline: 20 July 2017

Acceptance/rejection notification: 10 October 2017

Conference outline

The divide between individual entities and subjective viewpoints on one hand, and collective entities and intersubjective perspectives on the other shapes many traditional debates in metaphysics, theory of action, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, ontology, as well as moral, social and political philosophy. However, the way in which we think of this divide is constantly called into question, both descriptively and normatively.
Descriptively, the challenge comes from new discoveries about the functioning of the human mind and language functions, from the deep changes that we are witnessing in the organisation of our social world and the ways in which social structures affect individual behaviour, and from the decline of the political institutions and actors that used to shape the political life of Western democracies. Which discoveries or which theories of language and mind help rethinking the relation between individual and collective viewpoints? Which social, technical and institutional changes require a reformulation of our idea of collectivity?
Normatively, in light of these changes in our social landscape and our knowledge about human conduct, we need to rethink the main ethical and political questions related to the divide individual/collective and the relation between these two ways to categorize our social life: what forms of individual commitment are called for if political agency must be successful and legitimate? How should we conceive the relation between our personal moral convictions and the point of view of the collective social entities we belong to? To which extent the changing modes of collective organisation relieve individuals from their personal responsibility, or deepen their moral involvement?

Possible topics of inquiry include (but are by no means limited to):
– individual freedom and social constraints
– subject formation and social institutions
– language and idiolect
– individual and collective intentionality
– individual competence and social norms
– individual agency and social structure
– individual viewpoints and contextual restrictions
– individual and collective political action
– individual and group rights
– the varieties of collectives and social entities
– collective emotions
– collective obligations
– singular and general causation
– stereotypes and utterance interpretation
– deixis and singular and plural forms of the first persona
– speaker’s meaning and conventional meaning
– conventional meaning and  radical interpretation

The Conference is sponsored by the Italian Society of Analytic Philosophy and is open to contributions from all philosophical disciplines and traditions of thought.

Organizing Committee

Sandro Balletta, Francesca Boccuni, Ciro De Florio, Stefano Leardi, Valeria Ottonelli, Carlo Penco, Giulia Piredda, Damiano Simoncelli, Federico Zuolo.

All queries about submissions should be emailed to [email protected]