Armidale to feel the excitement of philosophical debate

June 26, 2007

Armidale will be buzzing with lively conversation throughout the first week of July when 200 philosophers gather to discuss the meaning of just about everything.

They will be attending the 2007 conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy (AAP), to be hosted by the University of New England and held from Sunday 1 July to Friday 6 July at the heritage-listed C.B. Newling Centre ("the Old Teachers' College") in Armidale.

Some of them, with their colleagues in History and Sociology, will also be attending the associated 2007 conference of the Australasian Association for the History, Philosophy and Social Studies of Science, to run – also in the C.B. Newling Centre – from Saturday 30 June to Monday 2 July.

Members of the wider community can participate in the intellectual excitement and discussion: as an important part of each conference, there is an open invitation to the public to attend a Keynote Address on a topical subject. The open lecture for the AAP conference will be given by Professor Eleonore Stump from St Louis University in the United States. In a talk titled "Modes of knowing: autism, fiction, and second-person perspectives", Professor Stump will present new insights into the social function of stories, plays and films – insights gained through recent studies of the "mind-reading" (or "social cognition") skills of ordinary people, and the lack of such skills in autistic people. Her talk will be on Tuesday 3 July, from 8 pm till 9.30 pm, in the Auditorium of the C.B. Newling Centre.

The open lecture for the History and Philosophy of Science conference will be on Saturday 30 June, from 5 pm till 6.30 pm, in Room G31, C.B. Newling Centre. Associate Professor David Miller from the University of NSW will trace the history of the debate as to whether scientific discoveries are "public knowledge" or "intellectual property" – a debate (going back to the League of Nations in the 1920s) that shaped twentieth-century concepts about the role of science in society. Dr Miller is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and author of Discovering Water: James Watt, Henry Cavendish and the Nineteenth-Century Water Controversy (2004). For inquiries about either of the public lectures, phone (02) 6773 3581.

The choice of Armidale as the venue for this year's AAP conference highlights the significant place of UNE Philosophy – with its distinguished professor Peter Forrest – in the spectrum of an Australian philosophy that is a world leader in some branches of the discipline. The Australian contribution to the history and philosophy of science is similarly outstanding in the international context. The Australian Academy of the Humanities has reported that the number of Australian scholarly publications in both Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science is "considerably in excess of the world average".

Philosophers from Japan, Brazil, the United States, the UK, New Zealand and Singapore will join those from throughout Australia at the AAP conference to present about 150 papers across a wide range of philosophical areas – including applied ethics, Asian philosophy, philosophical psychology, philosophy and religion, metaphysics, aesthetics, and epistemology.

Papers at the History and Philosophy of Science conference will range from weapons research in the ancient world, through seventeenth-century physics and astronomy, to amphetamine use by Allied Armed Forces in World War II and "the politics of bicycles" in contemporary Australia. Participants from UNE include Dr Eric Livingston, speaking on the sociology of problem-solving in science, and Professor Peter Brown, who will outline the history of controversies surrounding publication of the discovery, on the Indonesian island of Flores, of the remains of Homo floresiensis (a very small human relative, nicknamed 'the Hobbit').

THE IMAGE of Socrates displayed here expands to reveal "The Death of Socrates" by Jacques Louis David.

Posted by Jim Scanlan at June 26, 2007 04:36 PM