Macquarie University, Sydney
May 3-4, 2012
May 3-4, 2012
Keynote speakers: Kirk Ludwig and Seumas Miller
Social Ontology as ontological inquiry of social reality – of collectives, practices, laws, material culture and other aspects of reality dependent on sociality including humans themselves and their minds – is a rapidly evolving international field of research. Collective intentionality is one of the key concepts in social ontology in terms of which the basic constitution of all things social is nowadays discussed. It is closely related to themes like mutual belief, joint action and shared emotion. Though many of the central authors in contemporary social ontology are philosophers (including Michael Bratman, Margaret Gilbert, Philip Pettit, John Searle, Raimo Tuomela and others), social ontology also brings together research in many other disciplines, including theoretical sociology, law, economics, cognitive science, psychology, anthropology and political science. The common focus in all these theoretical endeavours is the basic constitution of entities and processes of the social world.
Interest in social ontology is globally shared, and prominently represented in the biannual Collective Intentionality Conferences (https://sites.google.com/
Keynote speakers:
Kirk Ludwig is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University. His publication includeDonald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (with Ernie Lepore) (Oxford University Press, 2005) and Donald Davidson’s Truth-theoretic Semantics (Oxford University Press, 2007). Ludwig is currently working on a book manuscript titled Understanding Collective Action: From Individual to Institutional Agency.
Seumas Miller is Professor of Philosophy at Charles Sturt University and the Australian National University. His publications include Social Action – A Teleological Account(Cambridge University Press, 2004) and The Moral Foundations of Social Institutions – A Philosophical Study (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
Call for Papers
Extended deadline for abstracts (500-800 words): January 31, 2012. Abstracts should be in word- or pdf-format, prepared for blind review, and sent tokellie.williamson@mq.edu.au
We anticipate longer and shorter paper sessions. Feel free to indicate which one you would prefer. Graduate students are also encouraged to submit.
Conference fee: AUD40 for full-time staff, AUD20 for graduate students and those not in full-time employment.
The workshop is organized under the auspices of the Macquarie Centre for Values, Agency and Ethics (http://cave.mq.edu.au/home/), in cooperation with the Macquarie University node of the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (http://www.ccd.edu.au/)
For more information, please contact: Carlos Bernal-Pulido (carlos.bernal-pulido@mq.edu.
The organizing committee
Carlos Bernal-Pulido
Heikki Ikaheimo
John Sutton
