Conferences, Worskhops, Lectures

Center for the Study of Language, Mind and Society (LMS) was established at Faculty of Arts of University of Hradec Králové in 2009 thanks to support by European Structural Funds. The Center’s goal is support of interdisciplinary research connecting philosophy with neighbouring sciences whose results are relevant to uncovering the nature and principles of the human mind.

Norms in a Natural World (21-23.11. 2019) with keynote speakers including acclaimed developmental psychologists and philosophers (http://lms.ff.uhk.cz/norms/):

• Marco Schmidt (University of Bremen)
• Phillip Rochat (Emory University)
• John Michael (Warwick University)
• Stephen Stich (Rutgers University)

 

Why and How We Give and Ask For Reasons: Philosophical and Scientific Perspective

Philosophers have long recognized that our ability to converse with one another over the reasons we have is part-and-parcel of our capacity to exercise rational thought and agency. In its paradigmatic manifestation, one’s exercise of discursive cognition is to be understood in terms of one’s knowing obedience to the norms that govern what one ought to think and do, and which knowing is expressed in the ability to communicate about these norms. This view is aptly conveyed in Wilfrid Sellars’ dictum that “in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says”. This theme has been developed in some detail in the philosophy of inferentialism, taking the “game of giving and asking for reasons” as our core discursive activity (e.g., in the work of Robert Brandom).

Meanwhile, the topic of why and how humans produce and consume reasons, or why and how we come to grasp their normative force, has become the subject of intense scientific theorizing. Indeed, over the last two decades explicitly Sellarsian positions on human rationality are increasingly showing up in the literature on developmental and social psychology, primatology, neuroscience, and evolutionary anthropology. As a consequence, questions are raised over the relationship between linguistically-mediated discursive cognition, and the non-, pre-, or proto-linguistic forms of cognition antedating discursive cognition in our ontogeny and phylogeny.

This conference is premised on the idea that the time is ripe to bring these different research programs into mutual dialogue, engaging their respective approaches in a fruitful game of giving and asking for reasons.

http://expro.peregrin.cz/conf.html

 

Summer School of Philosophy in the Broumov Monastery

(taking place from 6 to 8 of September 2021)

The Summer School of Philosophy UHK is an annual event organized by the Department of Philosophy and Social Sciences shortly before the start of the new academic year. It is held in the beautiful historical venues of the Benedictine monastery in Broumov. The summer school aims to acquaint the participants with the pedagogical and research activity of the department, offer a space for networking between students and introduce philosophical problems to the general public in an approachable fashion. The summer school program includes academic lectures, panel discussions, workshops and numerous side events (walking trips, excursions, film screenings etc.)