Actions: the Mental and the Bodily

Place: Zeeman Building, MS.04
Saturday 6th July 09:30-18:00 and Sunday 7th July 10:00-17:00

Registration: Register for free with Tom McClelland at t.mcclelland@warwick.ac.uk. Registration includes lunch and refreshments but not evening meals. Please specify if you'd like to attend the conference dinner.

Conference Overview

The study of agency has traditionally payed much more attention to the actions we perform with our body than to the actions we perform with our mind. This two-day conference aims to redress that imbalance by revisiting mental action in light of recent work in philosophy and psychology. The programme brings together philosophers and psychologists working on different strands of the topic with the hope of yielding new insights and revealing novel lines of enquiry.

SCHEDULE

Saturday 6 July 2019

0900-0945 Registration

0945-1000 Opening Remarks

1000-1115 Tom Crowther (Warwick) - ‘Dreams, Imagination and the First Person’

1115-1145 Refreshments (provided)

1145-1300 Tom McClelland (Warwick) - ‘Attention and Attendabilia: An Affordance-Based Account of Acts of Attention’

1300-1400 Lunch (provided)

1400-1600 Short Talk Session 1 (Chair, Michael Brent)
Nicolas Alzetta (Antwerp) ‘Attention Skill and Knowledge’
Chiara Brozzo (Tubingen) ‘A Minimal Hierarchical Theory of Bodily Action’
Sam Wilkinson (Exeter) and Max Jones (Bristol) ‘Can the Predictive Processing Framework Explain the Mental Act of Imagining?’
Sophie Keeling (Edinburgh) ‘Agency and Self-Awareness’

1600-1630 Refreshments (provided)

1630-1800 Kath Bicknell (Macquarie) & Wayne Christensen (Warwick) - ‘Cognition, Collaboration, and the Highly Context-sensitive Nature of Affordances’

19:30+ Conference Dinner at Radcliffe (on campus)

Sunday 7 July 2019

10.00-11.15 Lucy Campbell (Warwick) ‘Mental Action and Practical Knowledge’

11.15-11.45 Refreshments (provided)

11.45-12.45 Short Talk Session 2 (Chair: Robyn Waller)
Lilian O’Brien (Helsinki) ‘Control and Attributability’
Juan Pablo Bermudez (Externado University of Colombia) ‘The Upside of Mental Effort’

12.45-13.45 Lunch (provided)

13.45-15.15 Lucy O’Brien (UCL) & Matt Soteriou (KCL) ‘Still and Silent Soliloquy’

15.15-15.45 Refreshments (provided)

15.45-16.45 Short Talk Session 3 (Chair: Robyn Waller)
Antonia Peacocke (NYU) ‘Content Plurality in Mental Action’
Yarran Hominh (Columbia) ‘Habitual Mental Action’

16.45-17.00 Closing Remarks

This conference marks the end of the Leverhulme-funded project 'Mental Action and Cognitive Phenomenology' led by Tom McClelland at the University of Warwick.