Sunday, 10 February 2008

conference naturalism normativity and



Conference: Naturalism, Normativity, and the Space of Reasons

Naturalism, Normativity, and the Space of Reasons

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.OShea@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 (and noted on this blog).

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, Coll�ge 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.

[This is perhaps the conference to attend, and at the wonderful UCD

campus as well where I spent a couple of very happy years...highly

recommended!]


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