2nd Normind meeting
After a successful first meeting in Bergen, the next Normind meeting is set for September 4th at the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen.
The meeting is a general philosophy of mind and cognitive science workshop, open to both researchers working within and outside the Nordic region, though a central aim is to foster networking activities within the region.
Register by emailing asmith@hum.ku.dk with the subject line "Normind registration". Please indicate if you intend to join us for dinner (at your own expense).
Programme
10:30 – 10:45: Welcome
10:45 – 12:05: Dan Zahavi: "Plural self-awareness and the we-perspective"
12:05 – 12:50: Lunch
12:50 – 14:10: Ingar Brinck: "The core of social expertise"
14:10 – 14:25: Break
14:25 – 15:45: Pauliina Remes: "Self-Knowledge in the Neoplatonist Plotinus"
15:45 – 16:00: Break
16:00 – 17:20: Valterri Arstila: "The sense in which experiences are temporally extended"
17:20 – 18:00: Open session
18:15 - 20:00: Drinks in Islands Brygge
20:30: Dinner in Islands Brygge
Abstracts
Dan Zahavi: "Plural self-awareness and the we-perspective" In a number of recent publications, Hans Bernhard Schmid has defended a novel proposal concerning the nature of collective intentionality and argued that plural pre-reflective self-awareness plays the same role in the constitution of a common mind that singular pre-reflective self-awareness plays in the case of the individual mind. Whereas I agree with Schmid that it is crucial to clarify the nature of the we-perspective and the ‘sense of us’, I will in my talk focus on some worries I have regarding the details of his proposal and regarding his defence of what might be called a token-identity account of experiential sharing.
Ingar Brink: "The core of social expertise"
I will focus on developments in the research on social cognition that explore the notion of
expertise to clarify the function and role of second-person engagement and embodiment. Relying on Dreyfus’ notion of expertise as skilled coping seems self-defeating for interactionism, being too narrow to account for the range of behaviour that interactionism requires. Thus, Gallagher has argued that conceiving of expertise as implicit and automatic ignores its subjective and intersubjective dimensions. I will discuss four different reactions to this difficulty. Then I will present an account of expertise inspired by Ryle (1949). I suggest that we think of expertise as a process rather than a state, emerging from the interaction between sensorimotor and conceptual processes in real-time in response to environmental conditions.
Pauliina Remes: "Self-Knowledge in the Neoplatonist Plotinus: Between Detectivism and Constitutivism"
The Neoplatonist Plotinus (ca. 204-270 AD) is the originator of the distinction between soul and a self, enabling the investigation of self-knowledge with more precision and directness than was possible in antiquity before him. In the Enneads, Plotinus describes self-knowledge as an accomplishment, the quest for which begins with introspection and ultimately grows into a process of sculpting ourselves. Self-knowledge is thus understood as transforming the character and the life of the person engaging in it. The possibility for this, however, is grounded upon an innate capacity for introspection.
Valterri Arstila: "The sense in which experiences are temporally extended"
It is commonly held that we have experienced temporally extended phenomena like change, motion and succession. Philosophers have explained such experiences by subscribing to the doctrine of the specious present, the idea that our experiences embrace temporally extended intervals of time. In this talk, I argue that temporal experiences can be explained without relying on the doctrine. I will end by considering the ways in which our experiences can be thought to be temporally extended.