What is consciousness? What is its place in the physical universe? How did it arise in the course of cosmic evolution? Can there be a genuine scientific understanding of consciousness? And is there such a thing as consciousness in the first place? These and other questions that immediately arise as soon as one begins to investigate the nature of consciousness and how it fits within a scientific view of reality will be addressed by this major international conference. They occupy a prominent place in contemporary studies in metaphysics and philosophy of mind worldwide, often involving complex interdisciplinary connections between philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence (informatics), biology, and cognitive neuroscience. At the same time, these questions play a fundamental role in the philosophies of great thinkers of the past such as, among others, Descartes, Leibniz, William James, Brentano, Edmund Husserl, and Merleau-Ponty. This conference will bring together systematically oriented historians of philosophy and contemporary philosophers of mind to re-examine inherited views and spark fruitful lines of future inquiry. The conference is held in honour of the late Timothy L.S. Sprigge—one of Edinburgh’s most distinguished metaphysicians and author of insightful writings on the nature of consciousness.
Speakers
Fred Adams
University of Delaware
Consciousness: Why and Where?
Ken Aizawa
Centenary College of Louisiana
How Consciousness Can Safely Emerge
Brenda Almond
University of Hull
Religious Consciousness: Revisiting the God of the Philosophers
Pierfrancesco Basile
University of Bern
It must be true—but how can it be? Some Remarks on Panpsychism and Mental Composition
Jason Brown
New York University Medical Center
What is a Mental State?
Andy Clark
University of Edinburgh
Locating the Conscious Mind
Stephen Clark
University of Liverpool
How to Become Unconscious
David Cockburn
University of East Anglia
Doubts About "Consciousness”
Tim Crane
University College London
Consciousness as Predicated of Human Beings
Barry Dainton
University of Liverpool
Phenomenal Holism
James Giles
University of Guam
The Metaphysics of Awareness in Taoist philosophy
Alastair Hannay
University of Oslo
Phenomenology versus Metaphysics
Jaegwon Kim
Brown University
Explaining Consciousness: From Emergentism to A Priori Physicalism
Julian Kiverstein
University of Edinburgh
The Metaphysics of Time Consciousness
Geoffrey Madell
University of Edinburgh
Substance Dualism: You Know it Makes Sense
Eduard Marbach
University of Bern
Is there a Metaphysics of Consciousness without a Phenomenology of Consciousness? Some thoughts derived from Husserl's Philosophical Phenomenology
Leemon McHenry
California State University, Northridge
Sprigge’s Ontology of Consciousness
Brian P. McLaughlin
Rutgers UniversityConsciousness, Identity, and Explanation
Howard Robinson
Central European University, Budapest
Quality, Thought and Consciousness
William Seager
University of Toronto
Concessionary Dualism and Physicalism
Peter Simons
Trinity College Dublin
Consciousness for Four-Dimensionalists
Galen Strawson
University of Reading
Fundamental Singleness: How to Turn the 2nd Paralogism into a Valid Argument
Conference Committee
Pauline Phemister, Philosophy, Edinburgh (p.phemister@ed.ac.uk)
Leemon McHenry, Philosophy, California State University, Northridge (leemon.mchenry@csun.edu)
Jesper Kallestrup, Philosophy, Edinburgh (jesper.kallestrup@ed.ac.uk)
Julian Kiverstein, Philosophy, Edinburgh (julian.kiverstein@ed.ac.uk)
Pierfrancesco Basile, Philosophy, University of Bern (pierfrancesco.basile@philo.unibe.ch)
The conference is sponsored by:
The Royal Institute of Philosophy
Mind Association
Scots Philosophical Club
The British Society for the History of Philosophy