PEA Soup

Nebraska Practical Reason and Metaethics Conference

Mark van Roojen and I are pleased to announce the finalized lineup and schedule for the upcoming conference in Lincoln April 20-22. Speakers include: Peter Railton, Michael Smith, Connie Rosati, Michael Bratman, Mark Schroeder, Nomy Arpaly, Jamie Dreier, Jonathan Way, and Stephen Finlay and Justin Snedegar. Also notice all the exciting folks who will serve as chairs of sessions. You totally should come! The conference is free and open to the public but please let me know if you are coming and sign up for dinners. More info can be found at the conference web site here.

 

Henle Conference on Happiness and Well-Being

Dan Haybron is pleased to announce that the Department of Philosophy at Saint Louis University will be hosting the Henle Conference on Happiness and Well-Being on March 30-31, 2012. A tentative schedule appears below the fold. For futher updates, see https://sites.google.com/site/danhaybron/henle-conference-on-happiness-and-well-being.

NEH Summer Institute in Experimental Philosophy

Ron Mallon and Shaun Nichols and directing an NEH Summer Institute in Experimental Philosophy this July in Tucson.  Details are here: 

http://epi.arizona.edu/ 

Applications are due March 1st.  

Institutes are designed for teachers of American undergraduate students.  Because of recent changes to the program, now up to three spaces may be awarded to graduate students in the humanities.

CFP: PITTSBURGH AREA PHILOSOPHY COLLOQUIUM

Saturday, September 8, 2012

Washington and Jefferson College

Washington, Pennsylvania

Keynote Speaker: Carl Craver (Washington University in St. Louis)

Announcing the Character Essay and Book Prize

The Character Project at Wake Forest University is pleased to announce The Character Essay and Book Prize. This prize is aimed at essays or books on character which are accessible to non-academic audiences in venues with a wide readership. The competition will award $3,000 to each winning submission. We aim to make nine awards total. Three awards will be for submissions which address themes related to the psychology of character, three for submissions related to the philosophy of character, and three for submissions related to the theology of character. Winners will be invited (all expenses paid) to the Character Project’s Final Research Conference in June 2013 at the Graylyn International Conference Center in Winston-Salem, NC (http://www.graylyn.com), and awards will be presented at this event. Deadline for submission is February 1, 2013. For further details, please visit: http://www.thecharacterproject.com/prizes.php . The Character Project is funded by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation.

CFP: Gender, Race, and Sexuality Conference in Barcelona

Gender, Race, and Sexuality Conference in Barcelona: Issues in Philosophical Methodology

Dates: 25-26 June 2012
Venue: Residència Investigadors del CSIC (c.Hospital 64, Barcelona)

The topic of the conference will include issues in connection with gender, race, and sexuality, with special attention to methodological considerations in “applied” (analytic) philosophy.

Details below the fold...

BGSU Manipulation Conference

The organizers of the upcoming conference (3/16-3/17) at Bowling Green State University on the topic of manipulation have announced the line-up, which looks good. Keynote speaker is Marcia Baron. Follow this link for details about the conference, registration, and accommodations.

Ethical AutoCorrect

Computers and smartphones sometimes autocorrect what you type, so that your words are properly spelled. We know that this doesn't work perfectly. Suppose it did. Further, suppose that somehow there were also a perfect Ethical AutoCorrect, which if activated would alter any unethical action you were trying to perform into an ethical action. For example, if activated, and if extreme pacifism were true, then your attempt to switch the runaway trolley from the track with x people on it to the track with only x-1 people on it would fail. When you try to do what is indeed ethical, the Ethical AutoCorrect doesn't change a thing.

Two questions:  First, is such an Ethical AutoCorrect even an coherent idea? Or is there something about ethics such that the very idea of an Ethical AutoCorrect is confused? Second, if it is a coherent idea, and if it were a live option, should you use it?

CFA: 9th Annual Metaethics Workshop

Russ Shafer-Landau is pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the Ninth Annual Metaethics Workshop, to be held at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, on September 28-30, 2012. Jonathan Dancy (Reading and Texas) will be this year's keynote speaker. Abstracts (of 2-3 double-spaced pages) of papers in any area of metaethics are due by May 1. There is a limit of one submission per person. Speakers in the 2010 or 2011 workshop are not eligible to submit abstracts for this year’s event. A program committee will evaluate submissions and make decisions by early June.
        Information on submitting an abstract, plus much other relevant information about the workshop, can be obtained at the workshop website:
https://sites.google.com/site/wiscmew/

New Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy

The latest addition to the Oxford Studies series is Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy. It will be edited by David Sobel, Peter Vallentyne, and Steve Wall. There will be an annual conference and an annual volume published by Oxford. The conference will rotate between Tucson (AZ), Columbia (MO), and Lincoln (NE).  It is possible every fourth conference will be in Europe, but that remains to be determined. The format for all this will be broadly familiar to those familiar with the Madison metaethics, Arizona normative ethics, and recent NOWAR Oxford Studies conferences and volumes, but there will be differences in format worth noting. Stay tuned to this space for calls for papers and further information.