Philosophy of Science

Vienna's October cluster, and a conference diary that admits its gaps

Four meetings in sixteen days at the University of Vienna, including a congress on how the story of the Vienna Circle has been told. Plus the UCLA date muddle settled from the department's own page, three further meetings that survived checking, and five that did not.

11 September: Hanslick, Jeans, Adorno and the question of what an interpreter may claim

Eduard Hanslick was born on this date in 1825, James Jeans in 1877, Theodor Adorno in 1903. Each spent a career on the same awkward question: how far an interpreter may go beyond what the object actually says. In 2001 the date itself became a name, and two philosophers fell out over whether it named anything.

Jürgen Habermas

Metaphysics returns to the timetable: philosophy's autumn conference season

Between the end of September and the middle of December, philosophers meet in Los Angeles, Columbus, Nijmegen, Evanston, Oxford, Durham and Athens. Read together rather than as a list, the programme says something specific: the question of what there is has stopped belonging to one tradition.

David Chalmers

This Day in Philosophy — 8 September: Helmholtz, and the discovery that perception is inference

Hermann von Helmholtz died on 8 September 1894. He measured the speed of a nerve impulse, and concluded from a lifetime of work on the senses that we do not perceive the world directly: we infer it, unconsciously, from signs. The claim reshaped epistemology and is the ancestor of today's predictive-processing theories of the mind.

'We are doing philosophy — just not their way': a call for experimental philosophy to stop apologising

Ethan Landes argues that experimental philosophers should stop justifying their surveys by their relevance to analytic debates and declare themselves an independent tradition. The comment thread that followed shows the discipline is not close to agreeing what makes something philosophy.

A new criterion for machine consciousness: if it works, it is true

An opinion piece in Neuroscience of Consciousness argues that the debate over consciousness in artificial intelligence is being conducted on the wrong ground. The question, its authors say, is not whether a system performs the right computations but whether attributing consciousness helps explain its behaviour — the first serious change of criterion since Turing.

Eric Schwitzgebel, David Chalmers

This Day in Philosophy — 5 September: Comte and Boltzmann, the founder and the casualty of the faith in science

Auguste Comte died on 5 September 1857; Ludwig Boltzmann took his own life on 5 September 1906. One announced that humanity had entered the age of positive science; the other was worn down defending the reality of atoms against physicists who called them a convenient fiction. The same date holds the promise of positivism and its price.

A philosophy department is saved — and philosophy argues about how to defend itself

The philosophy programme at the University of Dundee, marked for closure, has been partly reprieved. In the same weeks a survey measured how much the public actually wants universities to keep philosophy departments. And an old quarrel flared up inside the field: is experimental philosophy really philosophy?

The congress that meets every four years goes to Kobe: the CLMPST 2027 call is open

The world congress of logic, methodology and philosophy of science has met every four years since 1960. The eighteenth is at Kobe University in August 2027. The call for papers is open — and the single word added to the congress's name tells you how the field has changed in a quarter of a century.