British Society of Aesthetics

The Open Court Popular Culture and Philosophy Series

Submit abstracts of 100-300 words, along with CV’s, to jason.holt@acadiau.ca by August 15, 2013 for 3000-4000 word philosophy papers written in an accessible, engaging style for a general readership.

Possible topics include, but need not be limited to, the following:

- The existential Cohen

- Clinical Cohen: a philosophy of despair
- Themes of silence and darkness in Leonard Cohen
- Leonard Cohen and the meaning of life
- The singer-songwriter as philosopher (Cohen vs. Dylan)
- Poetry vs. song (high and popular art): the Cohen case
- Realism vs. romanticism in Leonard Cohen

- “A sip of wine, a cigarette…”: the Cohen aesthetic
- Leonard Cohen and the limits of irony
- Soundtrack aesthetics: Cohen on film
- Cohen’s religious eroticism
- Cohen’s philosophy of love
- Touching perfect bodies: mind in Cohen’s metaphysics

- The new age/hippie Cohen: philosophy and freedom
- The Buddhist Cohen
- Cohen’s “Judeo-Christianity”
- Cohen and biblical interpretation
- The politics of Leonard Cohen
- Feminist positions on Leonard Cohen
- (Inter)national Cohen: does being Canadian matter?

International Society for Presence Research
Vienna, Austria
17-19 March 2014

Presence is commonly referred to as a sense of "being there" in a technologically mediated environment and more formally as the perceptual illusion of non-mediation. In other words, the user of an artificial environment fails to accurately and completely acknowledge the role of technology in his/her experience and thus, feels and behaves in this environment as if it was `real'.

The organisers seek original, high-quality papers and demonstrations that contribute to our collective understanding of the power and breadth of presence phenomena and presence applications in any/every aspect of life. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

* Presence theory
* Measures of presence
* Presence and emotion
* Presence and education
* Presence and social interaction
* Gender and Presence
* Neuroscience approaches to Presence
* Presence in gaming and entertainment
* Philosophical perspectives on presence
* Ethics of presence
* Presence technologies and applications (e.g. in business, arts,
medicine and therapy)
* The future of presence research

Submissions:

Note that all submissions are to be in APA format and (with the exception of panel proposals) not identify the author(s) directly or indirectly (for blind peer review).

All submissions are to be made through EasyChair by 20 August 2013. Contact presence2014@univie.ac.at or see http://presence2014.univie.ac.at for more details.

Bergen, Norway, 2-4 October 2013.

Player experience and dynamics in computer games are structured around apparent spatial relations inside the gameworld. It is furthermore common to use spatial metaphors such as “action space”, “possibility space”, “experiential space” to explain central aspects of these games. Papers are invited that aim to clarify and critically evaluate views about the nature of spatial relations in computer games. The papers may address such questions as: Is space in games fictional or real? What is the nature of space in games if it is not fictional? What are the formal properties of space in computer games? What is the role of spatial relations in defining interactivity? What is the relation between in-game spatial orientation and ordinary spatial orientation?

Accepted papers will have a clear focus on philosophy and philosophical issues in relation to computer games. They will refer to specific examples from computer games rather than merely invoke them in general terms.
In addition to papers that are directed at the main theme the organisers also invite a smaller number of papers in an “open” category.

The abstracts should have a maximum 1000 words including bibliography. Please note if you intend your paper to fit in the “open” category. Deadline for submissions is 17:00 GMT, June 14, 2013. Please submit your abstract in PDF format through review.gamephilosophy.org. All submitted abstracts will be subject to double-blind peer review.

Notification of accepted submissions will be sent out by August 15, 2013. A full paper draft must then be submitted by September 25, 2013 and will be made available on the conference website.The organisers also issue a call for workshops to be held on October 1. Please contact the programme committee chair if you are interested in organizing a workshop.

For information about the conference please visit 2013.gamephilosophy.org and gamephilosophy.org. A wiki-based bibliography for the conference theme will be made available.

Deadline: 11 August 2013

The editors of the Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics invite contributions for a special issue that examines the philosophical reflection on art as practiced outside the Western philosophical traditions. The editors are looking for original articles that discuss and analyse aesthetic problems, articulated in dialogue with, independent of, or in contrast to the Western tradition of philosophical aesthetics. With this in mind, submissions of not more than 3,500 words are invited by 11 August, 2013. Essays can be on any topic within philosophical aesthetics, as long as they explore aesthetic and artistic practice throughout the world, including, but not limited to, Near Eastern, African, Asian and Latin and Native American traditions, or focus on these traditions' relationships with the philosophy of art in the Western analytic or continental traditions. Suggested topics include:

The representation of movement in Manga comics
Native American theories of literature
Confucianism and the ethics of music
The reception of Aristotle's Poetics in the Arabic world
The possibility of a comparative aesthetics
Modernism and Islamic formalism
Aboriginal conceptions of pictorial perspective
What is 'outsider art'?
The role of the rasika in Indian accounts of aesthetic value

Papers should be submitted in Rich Text Format (.rtf). Submissions should be anonymised for peer-review, and can be made by registering as an Author at http://www.pjaesthetics.org/ and uploading your document for submission. You will also find author guidelines and more information on the website.

PJA is unique among postgraduate journals in that it is peer-reviewed by full-time academics. PJA operates a strict anonymous editorial procedure in order to increase fairness for those from groups currently underrepresented in philosophy. PJA aims to provide feedback on all submissions, whether successful or not.

Please direct all enquiries to: editor@pjaesthetics.org

Conversations IX: Grounding Aesthetics

11-13 November, 2013

Hosted by the Department of History and Philosophy, The University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados

The broad theme for the ninth Cave Hill Philosophy Symposium (CHiPS) will be issues related to aesthetics. Most philosophical reflection under the heading 'aesthetics', especially within mainstream Western philosophy, presents itself as an esoteric engagement with a very limited number of masterpieces in a very limited variety of genres/forms. While not wishing to exclude the usual suspects, we believe that what is of concern to aesthetics is of fundamental concern to all of us, shapes our understandings of self and others in countless ways, and deserves integration into much of our present-day social and political thinking.

The keynote speaker will be Dr. Nkiru Nzegwu, Professor of Africana Studies and Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture at Binghamton University, USA. An accomplished painter, her academic areas of expertise include African aesthetics, African philosophy, African feminist issues and multicultural studies in art. She is the founder of the Africa Knowledge Project, which publishes five peer-reviewed journals and hosts three databases. Dr. Nzegwu is the editor of JENdA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies and co-editor of the West African Review.


In an effort to ensure well-prepared, quality presentations, abstracts (300-500 words) are due by August 26, 2013. Participants whose abstracts are accepted by the vetting committee will then be required to submit their completed papers via email as an attachment in Open or LibreOffice, Word, or Wordperfect by the firm deadline of October 14, 2013. (These papers will then be posted on-line for other participants to consult prior to the conference with the intention that time at the Symposium can be devoted much more to discussion than to exposition of the written papers.) In addition to regular paper presentations, the organisers also welcome suggestions for workshops, demonstrations and other relevant activities. The organisers hope that revised papers will continue to be available on-line: those from the earlier symposia can be accessed from http://cavehill.uwi.edu/fhe/histphil/chips.aspx

As members of cultures dominated by media, we tend to construct our identities out of models presented to us by the internet, TV, film, music, and various kinds of print media (Kellner 1995). What it is for us to be “healthy” is no exception. Through the norms embedded in its images, sounds, and messages, a media culture invests its consumers with a potent sense of what it means to achieve health—including the proper ways to pursue and, quite often, purchase it. As a result, we are constrained in our capacity to adopt—and even to imagine—alternative conceptions of “health,” both for ourselves and for the groups of which we are a part. Furthermore, this problem is not easily quarantined by political borders. As U.S. media culture spreads globally, countless others might be infected by its conceptions of “health.”

The organisers invite abstracts that adopt one or both of the following approaches. (1) Abstracts should consider particular products of U.S. media culture and expose ways in which those products are invested with conceptions of “health” that reinforce dominant interests. On this approach, each abstract will focus on a particular film, song, advertising campaign, TV show, corporate website, magazine issue, novel, or another product of U.S. media culture, tying its conception of “health” to the powerful interests that it serves. (2) Abstracts should explore ways in which media culture has been—or could be—co-opted as a tool of resistance, empowering poor, marginalized, or oppressed groups/individuals to advance their own conceptions of “health” as they aspire to what might be called “health from below.”

Final submissions are due June 30.

For more information, see this journal's website: http://trace.tennessee.edu/catalyst/

11-12 October 2013
Humanities Research Centre, University of York

Invited Speakers:

Gregory Currie & Anna Ichino (University of Nottingham)
Stacie Friend (Heythrop College)
Allan Hazlett (University of Edinburgh)
Eva-Maria Konrad (University of Regensburg)
Peter Lamarque (University of York)
Daniel Whiting (University of Southampton)

Conference Theme

The conference aims to bring together recent work on belief and its connection to truth, with issues concerning belief that arise in aesthetics. The question of whether we can arrive at truth, and indeed gain knowledge, from engaging with artworks has received much attention in aesthetics. However, much less has been said about the nature of the beliefs formed as a result of engaging with art.

Suitable topics/questions might include but are not limited to:

Are beliefs formed on the basis of engaging with artworks aimed at truth or governed by a norm of truth?
Are some value-laden beliefs about artworks influenced by motivational factors?
Do beliefs formed on the basis of engaging with artworks exhibit transparency to truth? Are they sensitive to evidence in the same way or to the same degree as garden-variety beliefs?
Given that pictures need not represent the world accurately, how reliable is a belief that is formed on the basis of pictorial experience?
Why are we less able to form beliefs, or change our beliefs, on the basis of aesthetic testimony? Does aesthetic testimony count as evidence but has less weight than testimony in the ordinary case? Or does aesthetic testimony not count for evidence for aesthetic beliefs at all?

Submissions should be 2500-3000 words in length, starting with an abstract of 200-300 words. Submissions should be prepared for blind review, be in Word format, and sent to julie.kay@york.ac.uk no later than Friday 19th July. Please include your name, institutional affiliation, and title of your paper in the body of the email.

Any queries should be sent to the conference organisers, Helen Bradley and Ema Sullivan-Bissett, at art.belief.conference@gmail.com. Further information will soon be available on the conference website: https://artbelief.wordpress.com/

Evental Aesthetics welcomes both full-length articles (4,000-10,000 words, excluding endnotes) and Collisions (1,000-2,000 words). Collisions are brief (but well-written and thoughtful) responses to aesthetic experiences that raise philosophical questions for discussion, but that do not necessarily enact the discussion in full. More information on Collisions is available at eventalaesthetics.net/for-authors/.

Each issue of Evental Aesthetics will now have two parts, one dedicated to a specific theme, and the other (“unthemed”) devoted to aesthetic, philosophical questions of any kind. The Editors therefore seek submissions in two categories.

1. Aesthetics and philosophy (“unthemed”): This section will be devoted to philosophical matters pertaining to any aesthetic practice or experience, including but not limited to art and everyday aesthetics.
2. Asceticism and Poverty: The themed section of this issue will focus on aesthetic practices that are necessitated, constrained, inspired, or otherwise characterized by asceticism or poverty. Suggested topics include, but are not limited to: Aesthetic constraints born of financial ones
Ascetic practices in art, e.g. the deliberate use of stillness, sparseness, the minimal
Aesthetic practices that are unique to those in financial poverty
Philosophies of art outreach
Art that addresses poverty in financial or other forms, e.g. moral poverty
Poverty as an aesthetic and political condition
Aesthetic differences between asceticism and poverty
Aesthetic manifestations of the concepts of lack or dearth
Abject art
The aesthetics of failure
Both categories may be freely interpreted, however all submissions must address philosophical matters.

*

Submissions are still open for the Fall 2013 issue - Animals and Aesthetics

Described in CFP below, the Fall issue will also feature two sections: aesthetics and philosophy (unthemed) and a themed section on Animals. Note that the deadline for the Fall issue is July 15, 2013

Animals and aesthetics: July 15, 2013
Asceticism and poverty: August 31, 2013
General topics on aesthetics: essays may be submitted for either deadline.

University of North Georgia Arts and Letters 2014 conference
28 February - 2 March 2014

From early ideas of a perfect human condition to a more modern conception of technological or social nirvana, visions of utopia have permeated our histories. Their genesis is often in response to social and political struggle, or is a reaction to imperfect reality. They are commentaries on the aspirations of our predecessors and present dreamers for the potential that lives within us all. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to examine how human experience and culture has impacted our idea of utopia in the present, in times and places past, and in the future. What do these visions of utopia tell us about ourselves? How have they been conceived during centuries past, and how have they changed? How has our conception of utopia propelled us and shaped our intellectual activity and creative output? How does it impact what we do today, and what we envision for the future?

The idea of utopia raises interesting interpretive questions about all of the arts and humanities. These questions are investigations into the nature of humankind. They reflect our curiosity about ourselves, and about our place in the whole human enterprise.

Please contact:
George Wrisley
Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Department of History, Anthropology, and Philosophy
University of North Georgia

Workshop with Eckart Förster (Johns Hopkins University)
June 28 & 29, 2013, University of Konstanz
Organizers: Jochen Briesen, Dina Emundts
www.uni-konstanz.de/FuF/Philo/Philosophie/philosophie


This workshop with Eckart Förster (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore) will centre primarily on questions regarding Kant’s theory of beauty in the Critique of Judgement (CoJ). In addition to reading and discussing articles by Eckart Förster on this topic, the following issues will be discussed:
(1) The Analysis of Beauty
(2) Why is there a Dialectic in the CoJ?

(3) Genius and Aesthetic Ideas

(4) Beauty as a Symbol

(5) Why is the Critique of Taste transformed in a Critique of Judgement?

Eckart Förster will also give a lecture the evening before the workshop. (Workshop languages will be German and English.)

Date/Time:
Evening lecture by Eckart Förster – Juni 27, 18:00-20:00
Workshop – June 28-29, 10:00-12:00 & 14:00-18:00

Room:
Senatssaal V 1001

Registration:
Registration is free, but the organisers request that you register ahead of time (by June 10, 2013), as space is limited. Please register by sending an email to Lehrstuhl.Emundts@uni-konstanz.de.

Call for papers:
Certain participants will have the opportunity to present short papers (max. 20 minutes reading
time). Please send your proposal (ca. 3500 words) together with a short CV to:
Lehrstuhl.Emundts@uni-konstanz.de by May 10, 2013. Submissions should concern issues
directly related to Kant's theory of beauty in the Critique of Judgement.

Please direct any questions to: Lehrstuhl.Emundts@uni-konstanz.de.

13-15 September 2013, University of Glasgow

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Robert Audi (University of Notre Dame)
Professor Robert Hopkins (University of Sheffield)
Professor Dominic Lopes (University of British Colombia)
Dr Jack Lyons (University of Arkansas)
Dr Sarah McGrath (Princeton University)
Dr Kathleen Stock, University of Sussex)
Dr Dustin Stokes (University of Toronto)
Dr Pekka Väyrynen (University of Leeds)

The Centre for the Study of Perceptual Experience at the University of Glasgow is convening a conference on the topic of Evaluative Perception, where ‘evaluative’ is being understood so as to include aesthetic, ethical, and normative perception. The central questions to which the conference will be addressed include:

(i) Are there good reasons for thinking that evaluative perception is possible? Is this limited to
any particular sensory modality/ies?
(ii) Is there anything distinctive about evaluative perception, or particular types of evaluative
perception?
(iii) What are the epistemological consequences of evaluative perception?


Submissions should:

(i) be in English
(ii) include an Abstract (no more than 250 words) and a Paper that can be presented in
approximately 45 minutes
(iii) be prepared for blind review
(iv) be sent as a PDF to evaluativeconference@gmail.com no later than July 1 2013

The conference organisers gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Aristotelian Society, British Society of Aesthetics, Mind Association, and Scots Philosophical Association. Any enquiries should be addressed to:

Dr Anna Bergqvist a.bergqvist@mmu.ac.uk
Or,
Dr Robert Cowan robert.cowan@glasgow.ac.uk

The Center for Body, Mind, and Culture at Florida Atlantic University is pleased to announce its second annual Somaesthetics Essay Prize competition. The award for the 2013 prize will be $500. Essays should be academic in style and focus on the interdisciplinary field of somaesthetics from such perspectives as philosophy, aesthetics, art history and theory, literary and cultural studies, dance, design, music, theatre, cognitive science, gender and sexuality studies, sports, movement, and health studies.

Submissions should be between 6,000 and 9,000 words in length including notes and references, and should be emailed in Word format to bodymindculture@fau.edu

The deadline for submissions is September 1, 2013, and the prize winner will be announced in December 2013. Essays will be evaluated by an interdisciplinary panel of judges appointed by the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture.

For more details including bibliographies on somaesthetics, please visit http://www.fau.edu/bodymindculture/Somaesthetics_Essay_Prize.php