To Online Conferences!
We* were really pleased to organise and host a philosophy conference as postgraduates from the Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method department at the London School of Economics. The conference ran two full days on 11 and 12 September 2020, and was packed with excellent speakers and varied topics. We want to extend a heartfelt thanks to the speakers who made it and were patient with the technical limitations, to those who couldn’t join for different reasons, and to the audience who kept the excellent questions coming.
The purpose of the conference was to bring philosophers together at a time of epistemic isolation — during a global pandemic that had made socialising and meeting new people a thing of scarcity. But with the pandemic came a chance to band together with philosophers from far and wide. Whilst the organisers of the conference had dispersed from London themselves around March 2020, our speakers and audiences also joined from different places across the globe. We had people from Canada, Finland, the US, Thailand, Germany, Spain and the UK (to mention those we know of!). And with these diverse backgrounds came a variety of topics in the talks.
Much like other conferences, we were not too specific in our theme of choice: Science and Society (there is quite some wriggle room there). And whilst the analytic tradition within the LSE’s philosophy department did shine (particularly on the first day), very different approaches to philosophy were shared throughout the conference; from philosophy of science and of the social sciences, to political philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of psychology, ethics and philosophy of literature (or smell, to be more precise!).
What all these topics and approaches showed is both the difficulty of philosophical subjects, and the intersubjective nature of reality: each approach is necessary to make sense of the world around us, and they only benefit from interacting with one another and breaking out of whatever silos they may shelter themselves within. After all, whilst it is important that we question the values underlying our sciences (Perry, Blanco Sequeiros) — given that science is conducted within a conventions-driven society (Profanter) –, there are too many socially significant entities for any one science to make sense of it all. And here we find the need for economics (Lari), psychology (Murphy-Hollies), statistics (Zezulka), linguistics (Schulte), the medical sciences (Saunders)… And through the intertwining of all these fields of study, we might be able to begin to apprehend something that lies at the heart of humankind, whether it is how we enact our moral selves through our senses (Louks), perceive power and exert control (Anttila, Yaemnin), lead the good political life (Hanif Khan), relate with our peers (Chountis), or learn to cheat (Fisher).
But two further directions of philosophical inquiry emerged throughout the conference, and we see these in our superb keynote speakers. On the one hand, Cailin O’Conor introduced us to the application of computational tools to philosophical questions (epistemology and the dynamics of retraction). On the other hand, Chris Burr encouraged us to apply philosophical considerations (such as Toulmin’s method of argument and O’Neill’s talks on trust) to the ethics of machine learning. And yet in this dissonance we find the beauty that is the flexibility of philosophy not only to evolve in itself but to provide tools and frameworks for the most modern of sociotechnical realities.
And that’s what it’s all about: the love of knowledge not for its own sake, but for the good of science and society.
*We are:
