One of Woodward’s most important contributions to the study of causation is his introduction of the notion of invariance across background conditions. Woodward’s ideas on this topic have had a major influence on experimental research in causal cognition (including on my own work), and I thought it might be helpful to do …
Back when I was in graduate school, all students were required to take a course in logic. People had a vague understanding that there were also various other formal methods that used in philosophy – probability theory, decision theory, game theory, statistics – but courses in those topics did not …
Of all the many topics explored by experimental philosophers, the one that has received perhaps the most attention in the meta-philosophical literature is the issue of demographic effects. Work on this topic asks whether people’s intuitions about philosophical questions differ across demographic variables such as culture, gender and age. As many of you will …
There seems to be a widely shared sense these days that the philosophical study of mind has been undergoing some pretty dramatic changes. Back in the twentieth century, the field was dominated by a very specific sort of research program, but it seems like less and less work is being done …
Yale just created a new program in which graduate students can get a single degree that counts as a PhD in both philosophy and psychology. The basic idea is that students take courses in both departments and then write a single interdisciplinary dissertation. On completing the degree, students should be in …
Just a quick note to let you know that Mark Phelan is coordinating the second annual Experiment Month initiative and that the deadline for submissions is June 15th. The basic idea of the initiative is simple. If you are interested in running an experiment to address a philosophical question, you submit the …
The Review of Philosophy and Psychology has just released a call for papers for a special issue on Consciousness and Moral Cognition. In essence, the editors are interested in questions about how people’s attributions of consciousness affect their moral judgments. Do people think that they have a greater obligation to …
