Mother-friendly conference organising: an experiment

To see how far we could get with small fixes — improving the aspects of academic conferences that are pretty easy to change — I organized an experimental conference along with June Gruber, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Colorado Boulder (and a fellow academic mom). The conference, held at the University of California Berkeley earlier this month, brought together an outstanding group of speakers using the latest psychological work to challenge misconceptions about the mind — from the idea that pursuing happiness is a good way to achieve it, to the idea that babies are born racist. We called the conference the Misconceptions of the Mind Conference: MoMiCon 2016. And we didn’t just invite the mommies: We invited the babies.

For more, go here.

CFR: Philosophy of Iris Murdoch, Oxford

This one day event will consider a number of different themes from the philosophical writings of Iris Murdoch.

This page will be updated with the schedule closer to the time, but the list of talks is as follows:

Justin Broackes: “Reading On ‘God’ & ‘Good’.”‘

Edward Harcourt: “The Last and Secret Name of All the Virtues?”

Mark Hopwood: “Murdoch, Moral Language, and the Universality of Moral Reasons.”

Sabina Lovibond: “Iris Murdoch and the Quality of Consciousness.”

 

For more information, go here.

Dialogues on Disability – Bryce Huebner

Time to celebrate: yesterday was the first year anniversary of Shelley’s excellent series of interviews with disabled philosophers! For this month’s special instalment, she invited her first guest, Bryce Huebner, to reflect on the insights provided by the series so far, and the issues surrounding disability and philosophy more generally. As always, it’s an important and thought-provoking read.

During the past year, I conducted landmark interviews for Dialogues on Disability with twelve disabled philosophers who are variously situated with respect to disability, race, gender, institutional status, age, culture, nationality, and sexuality, and whose philosophical work covers a wide range of areas of specialization and research interests. This first-anniversary installment of the series is designed to highlight insights and lessons that each of the twelve philosophers offered the philosophical community and to reflect upon the implications of these contributions to philosophy. Bryce Huebner, who was my first interviewee of the series and who has generously provided technical support over the course of the year, has returned today to assist me in this celebratory retrospective installment of the series.

You can read the full interview and join in the discussion here.