Workshop in Experimental Philosophy

The Workshop in Experimental Philosophy at the University of Wroclaw, Institute of Philosophy, Wrocław, Poland on 21-23 May 2010. We invite all those interested in experimental philosophy to participate in the workshop but most eagerly encourage young scholars, graduate students and curious undergraduates to take the opportunity and get acquainted with this new field of philosophical research.

Like philosophers of centuries past, we are concerned with questions about how human beings actually happen to be. We recognize that such an inquiry will involve us in the study of phenomena that are messy, contingent, and highly variable across times and places, but we do not see how that fact is supposed to make the inquiry any less genuinely philosophical. On the contrary, we think that many of the deepest questions of philosophy can only be properly addressed by immersing oneself in the messy, contingent, highly variable truths about how human beings really are.

[...] The aim is usually to provide an account of the factors that influence applications of a concept, and in particular, the internal psychological processes that underlie such applications. Progress here is measured not in terms of the precision with which one can characterize the actual patterns of people’s intuitions but in terms of the degree to which one can achieve explanatory depth.

Joshua Knobe & Shaun Nichols, Experimental Philosophy Manifesto

There will be three groups of sessions:

• introductory lectures about experimental philosophy as a philosophical methodology, its relation to classical analytical philosophy, and about the most significant and well-known experiments and their results;
• lab sessions regarding constructing questionnaires, putting them on-line, collecting data, and interpreting it using R-language;
• presentations of current research of the invited lecturers, giving insight into experimental philosophy put into action.

After the workshop a participant should know the foundations of experimental philosophy and be able to design their own experiments, conduct them, and interpret the data using the most suitable statistical methods.

The speakers include:

• Edward Cokely, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany (applied Xφ);
• Adam Feltz, Schreiner University, U.S. (applied Xφ);
• Joachim Horvath, University of Cologne, Germany (philosophical methodology);
• Paweł Kuśmierczyk, Wroclaw University of Economics, Poland (methodology of experimental economics);
• Bryony Pierce, Bristol University, United Kingdom (applied Xφ).

Registration:

You can register by sending following information to tomekwysocki@gmail.com entitled xphi workshop registration:

• name, home university, specialization and year of studies (if applies).

The deadline for registration is 5th May 2010. For the sake of the quality of workshop we want to keep the group from being too numerous. In case there will be more people willing to participate than places we can provide the decisive factors are the date of registration and whether the participant submits a poster.

There will be no registration fee, however the participants should pay for their accommodation. A group of rooms will be reserved.

Further information, including detailed schedule, will be given in March.

If all the participants are Polish some of the lectures will be given in Polish. Otherwise, all the sessions will be in English.

Posters / publication:

Although the main aim of the workshop is to present the basic concepts and methods of experimental philosophy, the participants are encouraged to submit posters. Preferred size of a poster is A1.