Department of Philosophy GW - University of Salzburg

13/03/2023

Philosophie der PLUS erhält Zuschlag für Cluster of Excellence 2023!

Die Paris Lodron Universität Salzburg PLUS ist im Rahmen der österreichischen Exzellenzinitiative excellent=austria erfolgreich mit der Philosophin Charlotte Werndl am Cluster of Excellence 2023 beteiligt.

08/09/2021

SOPhiA 2021

This year's Salzburg Conference for Young Analytic Philosophy will take place September 09-11, at the Unipark Nonntal.
Over 120 students (from Bachelor to PhD) will present their philosophical work on different topics in Epistemology, Ethics, Logic, Philosophy of Science, Ontology and Metaphysics, Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Political Philosophy, History of Philosophy -- SOPhiA is now the biggest students-congress for analytic Philosophy worldwide.
There will further be a couple of affiliated workshops concerning Scientific Impartiality, Moral an Scientific Expertise, Social Ontology, and Free Will.
You can find the detailed program and further information (covid-safety, registration, etc.) here:
https://www.sbg.ac.at/sophia/SOPhiA/2021/languages/en/programme.php
This year's plenary speakers are Markus Schrenk (University of Düsseldorf), Herlinde Pauer-Studer (University of Vienna) and Marian David (University of Graz).

The conference will be held in Hybrid format with about 1/3 of the talks in-person. All talks will be available online and in-person.

We are looking forward to see you at the conference!

Web site of SOPhiA, Salzburg Conference for Young Analytic Philosophy.

04/03/2020

Departmental work-in-progress seminar

Next Monday 9.03 at 13:30 in room 0.03, we will have the first WIP talk of the term in charge of Giovanni Valente, who will talk about "The power of meta-analysis: a challenge for evidence-based medicine". Here is the abstract:

This talk discusses the outstanding problem of replicability of empirical data in the context of recent work on meta-analysis, especially within the field of evidence-based medicine. Specifically, it deals with the methodological issue of how to determine the degrees of heterogeneity between different collected studies. After critically reviewing the standard measures used to quantify meta-analytical heterogeneity, I argue that they should be revised in such a way to take into account the statistical power of the individual studies. I thus propose some new measures of heterogeneity. Subsequently, I apply them to re-assess concrete case-studies from clinical research, thereby showing explicitly how the relevant values of heterogeneity diverge from those obtained with the original measures.

27/01/2020

Dear all,

this summer (July 26 to July 31, 2020) the MCMP is organizing again the Summer School for Female Students. The target audience is female students at the advanced undergraduate level, in a master program, or at an early PhD level. The lectures are given by Alexandra Zinke and Patricia Palacios and the participation fee is 200 Euro. There will also be talks by Christine Bratu, Hannes Leitgeb, Stephan Hartmann and the MCMP fellows. This is the link to our website with more information regarding the program:

https://www.mathsummer.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/index.html

There will also be a student session. Thus, students can submit a 500 words abstract. All these informations are in the CFA.

The Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) is organising the sevent Summer School on Mathematical Philosophy for Female Students, which will be held from July 26 to July 31, 2020 in Munich, Germany. The summer school is open to excellent female students who want to specialise in mathematic...

15/01/2020

Departmental work-in-progress seminar

Next Monday 20.01 at 13:30 in the conference room (ground floor), Gregorie Dupuis-Mc-Donald will give a talk titled: "Three Problems in Migration Science. A philosophical Exploration of Evidence, Prediction and Causality in light of complex systems science."

Here is the abstract:

I will use our WIP session to give an overview of my Phd research project on human migration. My project is concerned with a phenomenon which has seen noticeable growth and attention in both academic research and in social and political debates. I will thus give a brief overview of what migration science is and what are its main aims. Then, I will focus on three core problems in that science and explain their import. It will be explained that these problems impinge on the efficiency of that science to measure, predict and explain the causal mechanisms behind migration. Finally, I will discuss several models from migration science. The goal will be to analyze standard tools used to study and describe migration. I will indicate the shortcomings of these models. In the end, I will suggest that complex systems science offers a better picture of migration.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

09/01/2020

Departmental work-in-progress seminar

Next Monday 13.01 at 13:30 in the conference room (ground floor), Rawad El Skaf will give a talk titled: "Thought Experiments in Science: An Inconsistency Revealers and Eliminators Account."

Here is the abstract:

I propose and defend an account of scientific thought experiments (TEs) that takes scientific practice seriously, identify their common structure and locate their epistemic function as inconsistency revealers and eliminators: TEs reveal an inconsistency in part of our previously held theoretical believes and offer a way out in the form of a conjecture, a hypothesis that merit further investigation. Contrary to Norton’s elimination thesis, this account appraises TEs as reasoning about particular scenarios: TEs aim to reveal “external”, as opposed to “internal” inconsistencies as defined by Krimsky (1973). I thus analyse the nature and functions of the particulars – objects and processes – involved in TEs’ scenarios, mainly revolving around the theoretical description of more or less well-described processes.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

06/12/2019

Departmental work-in-progress seminar

Next Monday 09.12 at 13:30 in the conference room (ground floor) Preston Werner will give a talk titled: "Moral Perception: Empirical Prospects".

Here is the abstract:
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Moral perceptualism is the view that perceptual experience is attuned to pick up on moral features in our environment. The possibility of moral perception would have a variety of philosophical implications. Moral perception has received sustained recent attention, but little has been paid to the question of whether moral perception is compatible with what is currently empirically known about perceptual processing. The aim of this paper is to rectify this gap in the literature with an eye toward the philosophical implications. After beginning by dividing up versions of moral perception into “Attentional” and “Contentful” theories as found in the philosophical literature, I assess each views’ empirical plausibility. The upshot is that Attentional Moral Perception is very well supported empirically, while the evidence is more mixed and underdetermined in the case of Contentful Moral Perception. I close by considering future empirical directions, as well as the upshots for moral epistemologists.
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Looking forward to seeing you there!

04/12/2019

Ausschreibung von Studienassistent*innenstellen für das Sommersemester 2020 //
New positions as teaching assistants for winter semester 2020

Bewerbungsschluss // deadline for application: 23.12.2019

Weitere Informationen auf unserer Website // detailed information on our website:

weitere Informationen finden Sie unter: https://www.sozphil.uni-leipzig.de/cm/philosophie/personen/mitarbeiter-a-z/salzburger-symposium-vom-12-14-juli-2019/salzburger-symposium-programmablauf/

03/12/2019

Today at 15:00 c.t., HS 301 (Franziskanergasse 1)

Lecture by Prof. Dr. Thomas Grundmann (Universität Köln)

“What experts are and how laypeople can identify them”

Abstract:

It’s a platitude that (cognitive) experts are epistemically superior to laypeople. But in which respect are they doing better? Do they simply have more true beliefs or knowledge? Do they have a deeper understanding of their domain? Do they help ordinary people (or science) in specifically cognitive ways? In the first part of my talk, I will argue that any of these prevailing accounts of experts has significant shortcomings. I will then suggest a substantial alternative: the competencebased account. In the second part of my talk, I will explain how laypeople can identify experts in this sense. It will turn out that a so far neglected aspect, the understanding of procedural virtues of science, plays a major role in laypeople’s expert identification.

The lecture is free and open to the public!

28/11/2019

Departmental work-in-progress-seminar

Next Monday 2.12.19 13:30 Hernán Bodadilla (Uni Wien) will give a WIP talk titled: Understanding Differently: An Interpretational Account of Scientific Understanding with Exploratory Models.

Here is the abstract:

I present an account of understanding with models called Interpretational Account of Understanding. In this account, understanding amounts to: i) the skill of interpreting a model effectively; and ii) the outcome of enacting the skill, i.e. the effective interpretation. I test this account in two exploratory models of earthquakes: i) the Burridge-Knopoff model (1967); and ii) the Olami-Feder-Christense model (1992). In this context, I suggest introducing a distinction between two kinds of exploratory work, namely programmatic and prospective. Programmatic exploration is based on interpretations of models that rely on core explanatory commitments of the home research program. Prospective exploration is based on interpretations of models that rely on explanatory commitments that are not part of the core of the home program.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

19/11/2019

!!!! TALK CANCELLED !!!!

Due to a strike of Finnair the talk will be rescheduled. As soon as we have more information about a new date we will inform you!
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The seminar series "Scientific tools" invites you to a talk held by Prof. Dr. Tarja Knuuttila (University of Vienna)

Topic: “Models as Erotetic Tools: An Artifactual Approach”
Date: Tuesday, 26. November, 15:00 c.t.
Place: HS 301 (Franziskanergasse 1, Wallistrakt)

Abstract:
I argue for an artifactual approach to modeling, addressing also the shared features of models and fictions (Knuuttila 2005, 2010, 2017).
I discuss, first, the fictional accounts of models that set model
descriptions apart from imagined-objects, prioritizing the latter (e.g. F***g 2010; F***g and Nguyen 2016, 2017; Godfrey-Smith 2006, 2009). While these fictional approaches are able to accommodate surrogative reasoning characteristic of scientific modeling, they also raise difficult questions concerning how the imaginings of scientists
are related to actual representational tools, and coordinated among different scientists, and with real-world phenomena. Instead of concentrating on the representational dimension of models as the fictional accounts do, the artifactual account focuses on the erotetic function of modeling, and on the affordances of the external representational tools through which models are achieved.

For more information please contact the organizer Rawad El Skaf: https://www.uni-salzburg.at/index.php?id=65141&L=1

13/11/2019

Departmental work-in-progress seminar

Next Monday 18.11 at 10:15, Alexander Hieke and Stefan Rinner will give a talk titled "Mentioning Slurs and Avoiding Censorship".

Here is the abstract:

There is a growing tendency to avoid even the mentioning of highly loaded slurs in academic and in journalistic contexts. This can lead to a form of (self-)censorship that should be avoided, as we want to argue in this talk. First, we will distinguish between a use of an expression having the tendency to offend and a use of an expression actually offending an individual or Group. Following this, we will argue that in some contexts mentionings of slurs do not only cause actual offense, but also have the tendency to offend. However, we will also argue that in academic and in journalistic contexts we are sometimes forced to mention a slur in order to avoid self-censorship. Does it follow that we have to be offensive in order to do academic or journalistic work? No, we will argue that academic and journalistic contexts neutralize the tendency to offend by mentioning slurs, if certain academic and journalistic standards are met. Nevertheless, these mentionings can cause actual offense in a sensibilised audience, and, therefore, should not be used ad libitum.
A final remark: The native tongue of both authors is German, so we can only really assess the use and impact of German slurs. But since we are writing for an international academic audience we will also refer to well known slurs of English.
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All the best and see you on Monday!