Philosophy Meets Cultural Diversity

13-14 March 2015
Center for Philosophy of Science
817 Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA USA

Advance registration is appreciated, but not required.
To register, email Joseph McCaffrey (jbm48@pitt.edu)

::: DETAILED CONFERENCE PROGRAM

Over the last decade, the newly emerging field of “experimental philosophy” has posed a challenge to the claim that professional philosophers’ judgments about philosophically important thought experiments are universal. Rather, in a growing number of studies, it has been shown that people in different cultural groups – Asians and Westerners, males and females, people of high and low socio-economic status, people with different personality types, people of different ages, people with different native languages, etc. – have different intuitions about cases designed to explore what people think about knowledge, morality, free will, consciousness and other important philosophical issues. However, the extent and sources of this variation remain by and large unknown. The goal of this conference is to bring together anthropologists, psychologists, comparative philosophers, and experimental philosophers in order to further our understanding of the similarities and differences in the lay understanding of, on the one hand, knowledge, and, on the other, agency and person across cultures. Furthermore, we hope to sketch new avenues of research for philosophically sophisticated cross-cultural studies of the concepts of knowledge, person, and agency.

Invited Speakers

Miri Albahari (on-line), University of Western Australia, Philosophy
Michael Chandler, University of British Columbia, Psychology
Eve Danziger, University of Virginia, Anthropology
Martin Fortier, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales
Stephen Phillips, University of Texas at Austin, Philosophy
Igor Grossmann (on-line), Waterloo, Psychology
Shinobu Kitayama, Michigan, Psychology
Hagop Sarkissian, Baruch College, CUNY, Philosophy:
Winnie Sung, Nanyang Technological University, Philosophy

Invited Panelists
Clark Barrett (on-line), UCLA, Anthropology
Amita Chatterjee, Jadavpur University, Philosophy
Jonardon Ganeri (on-line), NYU, King’s College London, Philosophy
Will Gervais, University of Kentucky, Psychology
Kaori Karasawa, University of Tokyo, Psychology
Hackjin Kim, Korea University, Neuroscience
Ron Mallon, Washington University, Philosophy
Richard Nisbett, Michigan, Psychology
David Rose, Rutgers, Philosophy
Eric Schwitzgebel (on-line), Riverside, Philosophy
Anand Vaidya, San Jose State University, Philosophy

Organizers:
Edouard Machery, University of Pittsburgh. (machery@pitt.edu)
Stephen Stich, Rutgers University (sstich@ruccs.rutgers.edu)

This project was made possible through the support of a grant from the Fuller Theological Seminary / Thrive Center in concert with the John Templeton Foundation.