OPC

The program is now tentatively set for the first annual Online Philosophy Conference (OPC). I hope you will find that it offers an impressive line-up of excellent philosophers presenting cutting-edge work in many different areas of contemporary philosophy. We offer this conference as a way for you to engage these philosophers and this work from the comfort of your own home, office, coffee shop, park ... anywhere but the cold confines of a hotel conference room.

We need you to spread the word, especially among your undergraduate and graduate students who may not have the opportunity to attend such a conference in person and see philosophers presenting their work and responding to the comments and questions of their audience. Please consider sending an email to your students (or relevant listserv) and your colleagues to publicize this event. Given that the OPC is open to anyone in the world with access to the internet, it could be the largest philosophy conference in history. It's success will depend entirely upon how many people participate. So, anything you can do to help promote the conference would be greatly appreciated.

The plan is to post a set of papers (usually 8), along with commentary, each week in May, linked from the conference website: http://experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/online_philosophy_confere/
We've tried to offer a diverse line-up each week. "Attend" whichever "talks" look interesting to you and post comments or questions as you please (comments will be moderated for relevance, appropriateness, and length). The authors will be encouraged to respond to the commentator's remarks and to the thread of questions and comments at several points during the week, though they cannot be expected to address every question and comment.

So, OPC will fill the month of May with exciting (and free) philosophical action. We hope you will be part of it.

The tentative schedule is as follows:

Week One:
Sunday April 30th:

1. Mary Coleman (Bard College), “Holistic Directions of Fit and Smith’s Teleological Argument,” with commentary by Michael Smith (Princeton).
2. Julia Driver (Dartmouth), “Luck,” with commentary by Hans Maes (The University of Kent).
3. Noa Latham (University of Calgary), “Fundamental Laws,” with commentary by Cei Maslen (Victoria University).
4. Alfred Mele (Florida State University), “Practical Mistakes and Intentional Actions,” with commentary by Jing Zhu (Graduate University of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences) & Andrei Buckareff (Franklin and Marshall).
5. Steve Stich (Rutgers) and Daniel Kelley (Rutgers), “Two Theories about the Cognitive Architecture Underlying Morality,” with commentary by Michael Cholbi & Peter Ross (Cal State Polytechnic).
6. Kit Wellman (Washington-St. Louis), “Immigration and Freedom of Association,” with commentary by Fernando Teson (Florida State University—Law).
7. Jessica Wilson (University of Toronto), “Non-reductive Physicalism and Degrees of Freedom,” with commentary by Michael Strevens (New York University).
8. Outstanding Undergraduate Paper: Andrew Bailey (Biola University), “Some Unsound Arguments for Incompatibilism,” with commentary by John Martin Fischer (University of California-Riverside).

Week Two:
Sunday May 7th:

1. David Chalmers (Australian National University), “Probability and Propositions,” with commentary by David Braun (University of Rochester).
2. John Fischer (University of California-Riverside) “Freedom, Foreknowledge, and Frankfurt: A Reply to Vihvelin,” with commentary by Kadri Vihvelin (University of Southern California).
3. Brie Gertler (University of Virginia), “A Fregean Argument against Externalism,” with commentary by Sanford Goldberg (University of Kentucky).
4. Benj Hellie (University of Toronto) “That Which Makes the Sensation of Blue a Mental Fact,” with commentary by Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin).
5. Thomas Hurka (University of Toronto), “Value and Friendship: A More Subtle View,” with commentary by David McNaughton (Florida State University).
6. Uriah Kriegel (University of Arizona), “Another Look at the Manifest Image,” with commentary by Owen Flanagan (Duke University).
7. Stacey Swain, Joshua Alexander, and Jonathan Weinberg (Univ. of Indiana) “The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions,” with commentary by Adam Feltz (Florida State University).
8. Amie Thomasson (University of Miami), “Answerable and Unanswerable Questions,” with commentary by Jason Turner (Rutgers University).

Week Three:
Sunday May 14th:

1. Justin Fischer (University of Arizona), "Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis,” with commentary by Frank Jackson (Australian National University).
2. Joshua Gert (Florida State University), “Irrationality and Harm,” with commentary by Jussi Suikkanen (University of Reading).
3. Joshua Knobe (UNC-Chapel Hill) and Erica Roedder (New York University), “The Concept of Valuing: Experimental Studies,” with commentary by Antti Kauppinen (University of Helsinki).
4. Jonathan Kvanvig (University of Missouri-Columbia), “Coherentism and Justified Inconsistent Beliefs,” with commentary by Michael Bishop (Northern Illinois University).
5. Neil Levy (University of Melbourne), “Why Frankfurt Style Cases Don’t Help (Much),” with commentary by Kevin Timpe (University of San Diego).
6. Adam Pautz (University of Texas—Austin), “Externalist Intentionalism and Optimal Conditions: A Comment on Byrne and Tye,” commentator to be announced.
7. Graham Priest & Neil Thomason (both from University of Melbourne), “Lakatos, Paradox, and Paraconsistency,” with commentary by Stuart Shapiro (Ohio State University).
8. Manuel Vargas (University of San Francisco), “Building a Better Beast,” with commentary by Eddy Nahmias (Georgia State University).

Week Four:
Sunday May 21st:

1. Thom Brooks (Newcastle University), “On Retributivism,” with commentator to be announced.
2. Tyler Doggett (University of Vermont) & Andy Egan (University of Michigan & ANU), "Imagination, Desire, Affect and Action,” with commentary by Tamar Gendler (Yale University).
3. R.A. Duff (University of Stirling), “Virtue Jurisprudence,” with commentary by Lawrence Solum (University of Illinois—Law).
4. Elizabeth Harman (Princeton University), "The Mistake in "I'll Be Glad I Did It" Reasoning: The Significance of Future Desires,” with commentary by Brook Sadler (University of South Florida).
5. Terence Horgan (University of Arizona), “Materialism: Matters of Definition, Defense, and Deconstruction,” with commentary by Thomas Polger (University of Cincinnati).
6. Susanna Siegel (Harvard University), “The Perception of Causation,” with commentary by Sarah McGrath (Holy Cross).
7. Sharon Street (New York University), “Evolution and the Schizophrenia of Quasi-Realism About Normativity,” with commentary by David Enoch (Hebrew University).
8. Jason Turner (Rutgers University), “On How Things Are,” with commentary by David Manley (University of Southern California).
9. Brian Weatherson (Cornell University), “Conditionals and Relativism,” with commentary by Gillian Russell (Washington—St. Louis).