Dave Hilbert Retirement Conference

On Sept 4th and 5th 2026, the UIC philosophy department will host a conference in honor of the retirement of David Hilbert. The conference will celebrate Dave's career by hosting talks which engage with his work on color and on George Berkeley. The program is below. 

All are encouraged to attend. Attendance is free but registration is required. Please register by emailing hilbert.conference@gmail.com. Any questions about the conference can also be addressed there. 

Program

Sept 4. 

Location: UIC Institute for the Humanities

Behavioral Sciences Building, 

1007 W Harrison Street, Suite 153

10:15am Opening Remarks

10:30am-12pm: Will Davies (Oxford)

What Is Color Vision Now? Hilbert on Constancy, Complexity, and Chromatic Representation

David Hilbert’s “What Is Color Vision?” (1992) proposed an empirical route into the philosophy of color: characterize color vision functionally, in terms of the extraction of relatively stable information about surface reflecting properties, and use that account to constrain color ontology. His later work on color constancy complicated this picture by emphasizing illumination-dependent dimensions of appearance and the task-dependence of color matching and similarity judgments. These complications raise questions about which aspects of appearance count as aspects of color, and about what it means for surfaces, transparent media, illuminants, and light sources to appear the same color.

I revisit Hilbert’s question using a contemporary population coding framework. On the view I explore, chromatic information is flexibly encoded and read out in relation to task, context, form, and scene organization. This framework does not straightforwardly reveal a single property that color vision functions to detect. But it does reinforce Hilbert’s deeper methodological lesson: philosophical questions about color cannot be separated from empirical questions about the organization and function of color vision.

12-1:00pm: Lunch

1-2:30pm: Lisa Downing (OSU)

Berkeley between Cartesianism and Newtonianism 

This vague title gestures at two points that I will make in this paper:  (1) When it comes to physics/natural philosophy, Berkeley faces a choice between Cartesianism and Newtonianism, and he definitively chooses Newtonianism.  (2) Berkeley inherits a lot from Cartesianism, especially from Malebranche, and I contend that this is exactly what allows him to choose Newtonian physics.  For Berkeley, because of his semi-occasionalism, Newtonian attraction does not present a special problem; rather, Berkeley has a general problem with causal notions employed in natural philosophy.  This general problem motivates (at least in part) De Motu.  In considering where this motivation leads Berkeley, I will return to the much-debated question of whether Berkeley is an instrumentalist or other sort of anti-realist, and, if so, about what.   

2:30-2:45pm: Break

2:45-4:15pm: Jonathan Cohen (UCSD)

Color Constancy, Complexity, and Extrapolationism (or: What Twenty Years of Color Science Teaches Us About Constancy) 

Hilbert's work on color constancy has been central to the philosophy of color for decades; this talk revisits constancy in light of more recent research. A lesson of vision science over the last twenty years is that there is substantial disunity and complexity in "the" phenomenon of color constancy. While a few have flagged this complexity, it has had limited uptake in philosophical discussions, which still tend to treat constancy as a single, relatively homogeneous phenomenon. Appreciating the complexity of constancy might well lead to skepticism --- e.g., the view that "color constancy" picks out something real but irreducibly heterogenous, or that it fails to refer at all. I'll argue that these are overreactions, and will offer a unified computational account of color constancy, drawing on and revising a view I have defended elsewhere, that makes room for (and, indeed, predicts) the observed heterogeneity. 

4:15-5:30 Reception

Sept 5. 

Location: ARC Building, room 241

940 W Harrison St 

10:00-11.30am: Colin Klein (ANU)

Diffusion Models Represent Directively (joint work w. Nuhu Osman Attah)  

Diffusion models lie behind most sophisticated image-generating AI. How they work raises a number of philosophical questions. Notably: it doesn’t seem like they represent facts about the pictures that they generate, or the categories of items they depict, or really anything at all other than statistical facts about the distribution of noise. We argue that diffusion models represent, but they represent directively rather than descriptively. We suggest that this might make for an interesting architectural taxonomy of AI systems, and raises interesting questions for the project of mechanistic interpretability. 

11.30am-11.45pm: Break

11:45am-1.15pm: Dave Hilbert (UIC)

The Road to Color Realism 

Organizers: Rachel Goodman and Aidan Gray

The conference is sponsored by the UIC philosophy department and by the UIC Institute for the Humanities.