Friday, 13 December 2024, 2pm–4pm (CET)

Guido Bonino & Paolo Tripodi (Turin)

TITLE: Academic Success in America: Analytic Philosophy and the Decline of Wittgenstein

ABSTRACT: There is a rather widespread consensus, among historians of philosophy, concerning the decline of Wittgenstein amid recent analytic philosophy. However, the exact import of such a decline, its chronological development, as well as its causes and several other features, are difficult to ascertain with the traditional methods of the history of philosophy. In this talk we apply a distant reading approach, and a variety of other quantitative methods, to provide a more reliable and accurate account of Wittgenstein’s decline. We focus on a corpus consisting of the metadata of US PhD dissertations in philosophy from 1981 to 2010 (although other kinds of data are also taken into consideration), and we try to relate the topic of the dissertation to the success of the candidate in his/her subsequent academic career. The results of this analysis, corroborated by other evidence, allow us to put forth the more reliable and accurate account just hinted at, and at the same time to suggest – as a contribution to external history of philosophy – a plausible mechanism at the basis of the decline itself, notably a process driven by those who controlled the recruitment policies in the philosophy departments.

Friday, 8 November 2024, 2pm–4pm (CET)

Yael Peled (Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity)

TITLE: Thinking about Thinking about Thinking: Reflections on an Interdisciplinary Philosophy of Language

ABSTRACT: What are the relations between philosophy and interdisciplinarity? Is philosophy merely one among a variety of disciplines in the part-whole relations of interdisciplinary knowledge work? Or does it play a different and more substantive role, in terms of providing epistemic (infra)structures for the purpose of identifying the logic of interdisciplinary inquiry, and its processes, dynamics and trajectories? Does there exist a philosophy of interdisciplinarity, and, if so, what might it – and its constitutive elements - be? Reflecting on the topic of interdisciplinary philosophy of language as a case study, the talk identifies a set of philosophical themes that emerge from the rich nexus between (inter)disciplinary positionality, self-knowledge and knowledge work. 

Friday, 18 October 2024, 2pm–4pm (CEST)

Sofía Seinfeld (Open University of Catalonia)

TITLE: The Impact of Embodiment in Virtual Reality on Attitudes, Perceptions, and Behaviors

ABSTRACT: When people see and control a life-size virtual body from a first-person perspective in VR, they might experience the illusion that the artificial body is their own real body, a phenomenon known as virtual embodiment. Evidence shows that it is possible to feel embodied in virtual bodies that look drastically different with respect to our own real body in terms of gender, age, and race. In this talk I will discuss how virtual embodiment impacts perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors, being a potentially useful tool for the treatment of intimate partner violence, to reduce racial bias, or to enhance interpersonal skills.

Thursday, 27 June 2024, 2pm–4pm (CEST)

Diana Omigie (Goldsmiths)

TITLE: The Role of Epistemic Emotions in Shaping the Music Listening Experience

ABSTRACT: Over the course of a typical music listening episode, most individuals will find their focus switching between the music and other thoughts or actions. In this talk, I will first briefly review what is known about the role of epistemic emotions in aesthetic engagement. I will then present a series of studies demonstrating that the experience of curiosity, and conversely mind-wandering, during music listening is influenced by the heard music’s unfolding structure. Finally, I will present a novel model of time-varying music engagement that seeks to account for how music listening operates in typical real world listening situations, where draws on attention are many. I will end the talk by considering the presented work’s broader implications for empirical aesthetics research and by outlining promising directions for future research.