Conference on 'Naturalism, Normativity, and the Space of Reasons' at UCD Dublin March 28-9 '08
Dr. Jim O'Shea
Friday-Saturday, March 28-29th
A two-day conference hosted by the School of Philosophy at
University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland
(For queries, please contact: Jim....@ucd.ie)
Papers will run from Friday morning to Saturday late afternoon/early evening.
A website with registration details, timetable of speakers, times, and
titles will be available very soon.
List of Speakers:
Robert Brandom, University of Pittsburgh
Michael Williams, Johns Hopkins University
Willem deVries, University of New Hampshire
Meredith Williams, Johns Hopkins University
Matthew Chrisman, University of Edinburgh
Jaroslav Peregrin, Charles University, Prague
Aude Bandini, Collège de France, Paris
Topic of the Conference:
The American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars famously remarked in 1956 that “in
characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving
an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the
logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one
says.”
An ever increasing number of philosophers today argue that the crux of a
wide variety of crucial problems pertaining to mind, meaning, knowledge, and
action ultimately concerns the same problem space adverted to by Sellars:
namely, the puzzling relationships between the normatively structured ‘space
of reasons’ or rational validity on the one hand, and the domain of
naturalistic causal explanations characteristic of modern science on the
other.
This conference brings together a distinguished group of philosophers from
Europe and America, all of whose work has been centrally concerned with
investigating the complex and puzzling relationships between the natural and
the normative.
Messages to the list are archived at http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/philos-l.html.
Prolonged discussions should be moved to chora: enrol via
http://listserv.liv.ac.uk/archives/chora.html.
Other philosophical resources on the Web can be found at http://www.liv.ac.uk/pal.