Actions: The Mental and the Bodily

The study of agency has traditionally payed much more attention to the actions we perform with our body than to the actions we perform with our mind. This two-day conference aims to redress that imbalance by revisiting mental action in light of recent work in philosophy and psychology. The programme brings together philosophers and psychologists working on different strands of the topic with the hope of yielding new insights and revealing novel lines of enquiry.

Keynote Speakers

Lucy O'Brien (UCL) & Matthew Soteriou (KCL) ‘Still and Silent Soliloquy’

Kath Bicknell (Macquarie) & Wayne Christensen (Warwick) ‘Cognition, Collaboration, and the Highly Context-sensitive Nature of Affordances’

Lucy Campbell (Warwick) ‘Mental action and practical knowledge’

Tom Crowther (Warwick) ‘Dreams, Imagination and the First Person’

Tom McClelland (Warwick) ‘Autotelic Experience and Affordances for Mental Action’

Open Call Speakers

Nicolas Alzetta (Antwerp) ‘Using Cognitive Control Functions to Specify Mental Actions’

Juan Pablo Bermudez (Externado University of Colombia) ‘The Upside of Mental Effort’

Lilian O’Brien (Helsinki) ‘Control and Attributability’

Chiara Brozzo (Tubingen) ‘A Minimal Hierarchical Theory of Bodily Action’

Yarran Hominh (Columbia) ‘Habitual Mental Action’

Sophie Keeling (Edinburgh) ‘Agency and Self-Awareness’

Antonia Peacocke (NYU) ‘Content Plurality in Mental Action’

Sam Wilkinson (Exeter) and Max Jones (Bristol) ‘Can the Predictive Processing Framework Explain the Mental Act of Imagining’

Discussants at Large

Michael Brent (Denver)

Robyn Waller (Iona)

Registeration will be opened in due course. For any enquiries, contact [email protected] .

This conference marks the end of the Leverhulme-funded project 'Mental Action and Cognitive Phenomenology' led by Tom McClelland at the University of Warwick.