CFP: 2013 Central States Philosophical Association (CPSA)

The 2013 CSPA meeting, hosted by Oklahoma State University, will take place

October 4-5, 2013
Oklahoma State University, Tulsa Campus
Tulsa, OK 74106

Keynote Speaker: Professor Alison Jaggar (University of Colorado)

Colloquium papers in any area of philosophy are welcome. Submissions dealing with aspects of Profesor Jaggar’s work are encouraged. Papers are limited to 3,000 words. All submissions must be prepared for a blind review and include a word count fin addition to an abstract (not longer than 150 words).  Submissions should be sent by e-mail, using the subject heading “CSPA submission,” to me at s-goldberg@northwestern.edu. Responses to submissions will be sent by July 31, 2013.

The deadline for submissions is May 31, 2013.

Suggestions for commentators and session chairs (including self-nominations) are welcome.

Questions about local accommodations can be addressed to Professor Eric Reitan at [eric.reitan@okstate.edu].

Suggestions and questions regarding the program should be directed to me at s-goldberg@northwestern.edu

Northwestern/Notre Dame Graduate Epistemology Conference this Friday and Saturday

The fourth annual meeting of the Northwestern/Notre Dame (NU/ND) Graduate Epistemology conference is this Friday and Saturday, April 26-27, on the campus of Notre Dame (South Bend, Indiana).  The keynote will be given by Professor Tom Kelly (Princeton).  Details, including the program, can be found here.  I hope to see some of you there.

New Entry at SEP: Logical Pluralism

Just saw this today: Logical Pluralism.

Why here? What does it have to do with epistemology? Well, I wonder how many think as I here. This is totally enigmatic, but I think of logic as a branch of epistemology, and the shining light of formal epistemology. The best available, at least until probability theory is formalized, and we get to Carnap and beyond.

Provocation invites retaliation, of course…

The roles of knowledge in Cambridge, June 28-29

Michael Hannon and I are organizing workshop entitled ‘The Roles of Knowledge’ in Cambridge, June 28th-29th. There will by talks by Jessica Brown, Mikkel Gerken, Michael Hannon, Clayton Littlejohn, Duncan Pritchard and Paulina Sliwa and comments by Natalie Ashton, Chris Cowie, Nick Hughes, Robin Mckenna, Emil Møller and Sebastian Nye.

It will be fun and you’re welcome to attend. If you plan to do so, please drop Michael (who is the organizer-in-chief) an email: mh536@cam.ac.uk.

A website with further details is here: http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/news_events/roles_of_knowledge/roles_of_knowledge.html

 

Conference: Thinking About Knowledge. Epistemology 50 Years after Gettier’s Paper

It is a pleasure to announce a conference marking the 50th anniversary of the publication of Edmund Gettier’s famous article “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” in 1963.

Thinking About Knowledge. Epistemology 50 Years after Gettier’s Paper

Fred Dretske Alvin Goldman John Greco

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Swarthmore College, Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall

9:00am-10:00am: Arrival
10:00am-11:30am: Fred Dretske (Duke University): Golden Gettier: What We Should Have Learned
11:30am-1:00pm: Lunch
1:00pm-2:30pm: John Greco (Saint Louis University): Post-Gettier Epistemology
2:30pm-3:00pm: Break
3:00pm-4:30pm: Alvin Goldman (Rutgers University) Gettier and the Epistemology of Philosophical Intuitions

This event is sponsored by the GPPC Board of Governors and the Mellon Foundation

The conference is free and open to the public

For further information contact Peter Baumann at 610-328-8433 or pbauman1@swarthmore.edu
For directions to Swarthmore College see http://www.swarthmore.edu/visitordash/visitors_content_directions.php
For maps of Swarthmore College see http://www.swarthmore.edu/campusmap/
For more information see http://www.swarthmore.edu/visitordash/dash_visitors.php
Parking is available in the Dupont parking lot at the North Entrance on Whitter Drive, opposite Papazian Hall.

Midwest Epistemology Workshop 7: Notre Dame, November 7-9, 2013

MEW 7 (2013) will be hosted by the University of Notre Dame Philosophy Department on November 7-9. The invited speakers are EJ Coffman, Jim Joyce, Jennifer Lackey, Kirk Ludwig, Jennifer Nagel, Tom Senor and Fritz Warfield. Alvin Goldman will give the keynote address. The local coordinators are Robert Audi and Mike DePaul. As further information becomes available, it will be posted on the MEW website.

MEW 9 (2015) will be hosted by the University of Missouri. Peter Markie and Matt McGrath are the local coordinators. Details are forthcoming.

We do not yet have a host institution for MEW 8 (2014) and would love to fill this gap. If you are a member of a philosophy department at a midwestern university and think your department might be interested in hosting MEW8, please contact either Sandy Goldberg or Al Casullo and we will be happy to provide the requisite information.

We are looking forward to seeing you at Notre Dame in November.

The New Evil Demon Problem for Internalism

A standard NEDP case will take a twin who is internally identical to me but whose beliefs are unreliably formed because of a demon.  I share the intuition with internalists that this twin and I are justificationally identical.  So, it seems that reliable belief formation is not directly relevant to justification.  We can make variants of this case by picking any external property (e.g. sensitivity, safety) and imagining that our internally identical twin lacks that property because of a demon.  Intuitively, such believers will be justificationally identical.

I’ve argued recently (in Episteme, see here) that the new evil demon problem (NEDP) also applies to most internalist views, those which say that nonoccurrent (dispositional, background, unconscious) mental states are directly relevant to the justification of our beliefs.  Here is the case I formulate: Continue reading