Workshops (current)

It's an honor and a plasure to welcome L.A. Paul (Yale) aas this year's Rudolf-Carnap Lecturer. From May 27-29, 2026, she will present new work on her important theme of Transformative Experience. 
Lecture 1: The Paradox of Transformation
Lecture 2 (Public): Transformative Change
Lecture 3: The Self in Time
Lecture 4: Varieties of Possibility

Call for Papers
We invite early career researchers from philosophy and cognitive science, both PhD students and Postdocs (PhD completed in 2020 or later) to submit abstracts for presentation at the accompanying Graduate workshop, on topics related to or engaging with L.A. Paul’s work. Please submit abstracts (max. 1000 words), making thesis and argument transparent, by Email to Franziska.Klasen@rub.de, by March 6th, 2026. Further information here.

Join us for our workshop on Neural Computation at Ruhr-Uni Bochum, June 2-3, 2026. It will take place on Campus at Beckmannshof. 

The idea that the brain performs computations is widely accepted in cognitive science and computational neuroscience. However, it is assumed that neural computation differs fundamentally from classical computation which gives rise to questions like the following: Is neural computation medium-independent, or is it tied to the biological substrate of the brain? What is the status of deep learning models in computational neuroscience? What kind of models are they—engineering or scientific—and how do they explain neural phenomena? How does neural computation relate to, or differ from, analog and digital computation as understood in traditional computer science? This workshop brings together philosophers and researchers from other fields to address these questions and develop a clearer understanding of computation in neural systems.

Schedule
Tuesday, June 2nd 
09:30–09:45 Welcome & Coffee
09:45–10:45 Frances Egan (Rutgers): On some alleged computational indeterminacies and how to resolve them
10:45–11:15 Coffee break
11:15–12:15 Adrien Doerig (Berlin): Consciousness without Magic
12:15–13:00 Andreas Pommer (Copenhagen): Beyond single neurons: Population-level representations and computation
13:00–14:15 Lunch break
14:15–15:15 Olivia Guest (Nijmegen, online): How we reason over artificial neural networks
15:15–16:00 Max Jones (Bristol): Ephaptic Coupling and neural computation
16:00–16:30 Coffee break
16:30–17:15 Gerda Mittag (Berlin): What kind of models are neural computations? Neither engineering nor scientific, but didactic objects
17:15–18:15 Albert Newen (Bochum): Neural mechanisms and cognitive phenomena
 
Wednesday, June 3rd 
09:00–09:15 Brief introduction
09:15–10:15 Gualtiero Piccinini (Missouri): Cognition. The extended modern synthesis
10:15–10:45 Coffee break
10:45–11:45 Johannes Brinz (Osnabrück): Marr’s fourth level
11:45–12:30 Johan Largo (Luxembourg): Mental representations in LLMs? 
12:30–13:45 Lunch break
13:45–14:45 Katja Seeliger (Leipzig): Deep Neural Networks in Sensory Neuroscience: Representation, Similarity, and the Irreducibility of Training
14:45–15:30 David Colaço & Philipp Haueis (Munich/Bielefeld): Metabolism and the medium of cognition
15:30–16:00 Coffee break
16:00–17:00 Oron Shagrir (Jerusalem): Computational indeterminacy: Phenomenon or Illusion 

Organized together with Johannes Brinz (M.A.) and Prof. Nikola Kompa from University Osnabrück.

In 1996, David Chalmers' The Conscious Mind. In search of a fundamental theory (OUP) shook the Philosophy of Mind by presenting rigorous philosophical arguments and ingenious thought experiments against the physicalistic mainstream. Chalmers introduced the hard problem of consciousness and offered a range of non-reductive approaches to consciousness. 30 years later, the scientific study of consciousness is thriving with its cornerstone of searching the neural correlates of consciousness, adversarial collaborations testing and comparing major theories of consciousness, and complex considerations of markers and tests for consciousness in infants, non-human animals and artificial systems.

In this workshop, we want to look back by celebrating the massive influence of The Conscious Mind and look forward to the future of the science of consciousness. We look forward to welcoming an exciting number of renowned philosophers and scientists to discuss philosophical and scientific themes from the book: Axel Cleeremans, Keith Frankish, François Kammerer, Johannes Kleiner, Christian List, Lucia Melloni, Hedda Hasssel Mørch, Liad Mudrik, Martine Nida-Rümelin, and Anil Seth.

We also invite Early Career Researchers from Philosophy and Cognitive Science to submit abstracts of max. 700 words on themes from the book for Poster Presentation. Please email to Franziska.Klasen@rub.de by April 1st, 2026.