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News

News: October/November 2024

World Congress: a report from Rome • Morality found to change with weather • Critic & philosopher Fredric Jameson dies — News reports by Anja Steinbauer

World Congress of Philosophy

The 25th World Congress of Philosophy was held August 1-8, 2024 on the campus of Sapienza University in Rome. The theme of this Congress was ‘Philosophy Across Boundaries’ but there were hundreds of topics, as usual for big events like this. Notable plenary sessions and symposia topics included ‘The Boundaries of AI’, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Other Kinds of Minds’, ‘Vulnerability and Knowledge’, ‘Citizenship, Care, and Self-Determination’, ‘Epistemic Injustice, Power, and Struggle’, ‘Embodiment’, and ‘Trust Truth, and Knowledge’. Endowed lecturers included Nancy Tuana, Barbara Herman, Joakim Garff, Zhongjiang Wang, Tae-soo Lee, and Evandro Agazzi. More information is still online at wcprome2024.com.

That this event took place at all was a minor miracle. It was initially planned for 2023 in Melbourne, Australia, five years after the Beijing World Congress in 2018. But those plans were cancelled in the wake of the pandemic. An alternative was organized for 2024 by an Italian team sponsored by the Italian Philosophical Society and Sapiennza University, in cooperation with the International Federation of Philosophical Societies.

This Congress attracted over 5,600 registered participants, far exceeding the expectations of the organizers. This success sometimes overwhelmed the organizers, and organizational challenges were aggravated by the August heat. But the hosts met all problems with charm and patience, and they deserve thanks from the philosophical community for their work on its behalf. The next World Congress, to be held in Tokyo in 2028, will have a longer organizational time-line to prepare for a huge number of participants.

George Leaman, Philosophy Documentation Center

Morality Discovered to be Weather-Dependent

A 10-year study involving surveys of more than 230,000 people in the U.S., has revealed that moral values fluctuate on a seasonal basis, depending on the time of year. It was conducted by researchers at the University of British Columbia and the University of Nottingham. Ian Hohm, a doctoral student in UBC’s psychology department and the study’s first author explains: “People’s endorsement of moral values that promote group cohesion and conformity is stronger in the spring and fall than it is in the summer and winter… Moral values are a fundamental part of how people make decisions and form judgments, so we think this finding might just be the tip of the iceberg in that it has implications for all sorts of other downstream effects.” The researchers also discovered a correlation between the seasonal moral shifts and anxiety levels, using large-scale findings on seasonal anxiety provided by Project Implicit Health: “We noticed that anxiety levels peak in the spring and autumn, which coincides with the periods when people endorse binding values more strongly. This correlation suggests that higher anxiety may drive people to seek comfort in the group norms and traditions upheld by binding values,” said Dr Mark Schaller, a professor of psychology at UBC and senior author of the study.

Carl Hoefer Wins Lakatos Award

The Lakatos Award is given annually by the London School of Economics and endowed by the Latsis Foundation to the value of £10,000 for “an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science.” This year’s laureate is Carl Hoefer, Research Professor at the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and Scientific Director of the Barcelona Institute of Analytic Philosophy, who won the award for his 2019 publication, Chance in the World: A Humean Guide to Objective Chance. The selection committee characterises it as “a terrific book, thorough, detailed, and persuasive… it’s not hard to see that it will become the sort of book that no one working on the interpretation of probability will be able to ignore”, as it “has succeeded in producing the definitive version of the Lewisian theory of chance”, leading “to a number of interesting and original claims about the relation of macroscopic chances and causes to the micro-world.”

Philosophy of Aging and Loneliness Gets Funded

An assistant professor of philosophy at the University at Buffalo (SUNY), has been awarded a $3.8 million research grant by the National Institute on Aging. John Beverly received it for a project focused on philosophically-informed ontology development related to the psychological study of aging,” according to the university’s website. An ontology is an understanding of or classification of what things exist. With an eye on both theoretical insights and practical applications, the research team will “develop ontologies for solitude, gerotranscendence, and healthy aging research”, and use the results to create an ontology-based web interface to which other researchers can then upload data about solitude, gerotranscendence, and healthy aging data. The project will also aim to “train stakeholders to investigate the impact of solitude on successful aging and disseminate results to the broader community.”

Thinking About Infinity

Can you imagine infinity? Does the infinity symbol mean anything to you? A recent study consisting of four main experiments, with 120 participants in total, came to the conclusion that people do not perceive the infinity symbol as representing an endlessness. The idea of the boundless is too elusive. Rather, people often miscomprehend it as a number similar to other numbers, another point on the numerical scale. “Traditional cognitive science has focused on phenomena grounded in sensory experience, but infinity is entirely different. Understanding infinity requires abstract thinking that goes beyond concrete representations and everyday experiences, which I find both puzzling and challenging,” clarifies study author Michal Pinhas of the Quantitative Thinking and Cognition Lab at Ariel University. “In my lab, we explore how people understand and process abstract or nonintuitive mathematical concepts beyond infinity, such as zero and exponential growth. The goal is to gain deeper insights into how the human mind handles concepts that lack direct, concrete connections to everyday experience, and how this influences reasoning and decision-making. I believe that studying these unique and challenging concepts can expand the way we think about numerical representations and processes.”

Fredric Jameson has died

Fredric Jameson, a leading Marxist literary and cultural critic and philosopher, has died at the age of 90. Jameson was Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Duke University, where he taught since 1985. Born in Cleveland in 1934, he studied at Haverford College with the rhetorical theorist Wayne Booth, who coined the term ‘unreliable narrator’. After majoring in French, Jameson earned his PhD at Yale in 1959. He spent his career in the fields of French and Romance studies, or comparative literature programs, first at Harvard, then the University of California, San Diego; Yale; UC Santa Cruz, before joining Duke. His outlook was informed by ideas from both Europe and the US, and he often used the one to critique the other. He theorised about the relationship between Western culture and political economy. He was awarded the 2008 Holberg International Memorial Prize. His many books include Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism; The Cultural Turn; A Singular Modernity; The Modernist Papers; Archaeologies of the Future; Brecht and Method; Ideologies of Theory; Valences of the Dialectic; The Hegel Variations and Representing Capital.