Conference for philosophers and psychologists taking place in Estonia for the first time brings 150 researchers to Tartu
The 23rd annual meeting of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology begins in Tartu tomorrow, on 14 July, with psychologists, neuroscientists, linguists, computer scientists, biologists and philosophers from 23 countries, including Austria, Belgium, Canada, the USA and Germany. For the first time the annual meeting takes place in the Baltic states.
Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Tartu and the local organiser of the conference Daniel Cohnitz says that interdisciplinary research with linguists and psychologists is practiced and endorsed a lot by the philosophers in the UT Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics. So, they are very happy that the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology has chosen the University of Tartu as the venue of their annual conference.
“We hope that such interdisciplinary events also display to the wider public that philosophy is not just pointless, abstract reflection in an ivory tower, but is in fact dealing with cutting-edge questions and problems that arise for researchers in linguistics, psychology, computer science and neuroscience,” said Cohnitz about the significance of the conference taking place in Tartu.
The 23rd annual conference focuses on recent years’ research in theoretical philosophy and empirical results in psychology, linguistics and neurosciences.
Keynote speakers at the conference are experts in their field. For example, linguist Marilyn Vihman from the University of York studies children’s language development. In 2011 she held a lecture course at the University of Tartu on psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. Joshua Knobe is an experimental philosopher at Yale University and is considered to have discovered the “Knobe–effect”. The “Knobe–effect” shows that the moral judgement of an action’s consequences affects the non–moral classification of the action. Keynote speakers also include Cecilia Heyes (psychology, the University of Oxford) and Lucy O’Brien (philosophy, University College London).
Previous conferences of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology have covered topics such as spatial concepts, theory of mind, attention, joint attention, reference, problems of consciousness, introspection and self-report, emotion, perception, early numerical cognition, infants' understanding of intentionality, memory and time.
The conference is organised by the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology along with the University of Tartu Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics. The conference takes place in Tartu from 13 to 17 July 2015. The conference’s programme can be found at http://espp2015.ut.ee.
Additional information: Daniel Cohnitz, Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the UT, tel: 737 5427, e–mail: daniel.cohnitz [ät] ut.ee.
This project of the Baltic-German University Liaison Office is supported by the Gereman Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) with funds from the Foreign Office of the Republic Germany.