5th joint eidos/thumos meeting, Genève
24th-26th September 2012
Monday, 24th September, D154 (Battelle, Building D, map)
11.00-12.15 Thomas Crowther (Heythrop College, London): ‘Seeing Stuff’
12.15-13.30 Lieven Decock (Amsterdam): ‘Graded Objecthood and Borderline Objects’
15.00-16.15 Thomas Raleigh (Concordia): ‘On Silhouettes, Surfaces and Sorensen’
16.15-17.30 Istvan Aranyosi (Bilkent): ‘A Mouthful of Content’
Wine Tasting led by Cain Todd, author of The Philosophy of Wine
Tuesday, 25th September, D154
09.00-10.15 Matt Nudds (Warwick): ‘Sounds as Auditory Ephemera’
10.15-11.30 Jenny Judge (Cambridge): ‘Music and the Philosophy of Perception’
11.45-13.00 Roberto Casati (Institut Nicod): ‘Preference for the Impossible’
14.30-15.45 John O’Dea (Tokyo): ‘Art and the Ambiguity in Shadows’
16.00-17.15 Roy Sorensen (St. Louis): ‘Spectacular Absences’
Round Table Discussion chaired by Martine Nida-Ruemelin (Fribourg)
Wednesday, 26th September, CISA (map)
09.00-10.15 Anya Farennikova (North Carolina): ‘Experiences of Absence: Ultimate Ephemera’
10.15-11.30 Vasilis Tsompanidis (UNAM, Mexico): ‘Perceiving Times and De Re Thought’
11.45-13.00 Philipp Blum (Geneva): ‘Seeing-As and Ephemeral Percepta’
When considering the objects of perception, many philosophers have been tempted to place their theoretical focus primarily, if not exclusively, on opaque, material objects, what J.L. Austin once described as “moderate-sized specimens of dry goods” – tables, chairs, pens and so on. Call such objects ‘canonical’ objects of perception. Yet, as Austin also noted, it hardly meshes with our naïve take on our perceptual lives to suppose that this is all we perceive. “Does the ordinary man believe that what he perceives is (always) something like furniture?” Of course not. Rather we take ourselves to perceive, in addition, and for example: flames, soap-bubbles, glimmers, highlights, reflections, echoes, shivers, atmospheric phenomena like rainbows and mirages, shadows, after-images, voices, constellations, and arguably too affordances and values. Call such entities non-canonical objects of perception. This conference aims to open discussion on such less canonical objects and, in particular, those objects the mereological, topological, material and temporal profile of which marks them out as, loosely speaking, ‘ephemeral’.
Unlike material objects, ‘ephemeral’ objects are those whose autonomous existence in the world has, for various reasons, seemed more difficult to vouchsafe, perhaps because they are ontologically dependent in some way (as shadows are on their casters), typically short-lived (soap-bubbles, flames), or more critically, because they appear in some way mind-dependent (as constellations do, or in a somewhat different way mirages, reflections and echoes). The goal of the conference is to isolate peculiar challenges that such objects hold for standard philosophical theories of perception.
Abstracts can be found here.
Organiser: Clare Mac Cumhail (email)
Images:
• Michael Vissochi, 2005. Copse. Assembled sculpture photographed in North East Scotland.
• Berndnaut Smilde, 2012. Nimbus II, cloud in room. Lambda print, 75x112 cm. Hotel MariaKapel, Hoorn. Photo: Cassander Eeftinck Schattenkerk.
Generously funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (CRSI11_127488)
