Martin Ejsing Christensen, Aalborg University (Denmark)
I am currently teaching at the Department of Applied Philosophy at Aalborg University, Denmark, and applying for postdocs, at the same time that I am working on a project about the romantic roots of Dewey’s philosophy. I did my PhD (entitled Democracy and Inquiry: John Dewey’s Pragmatic Philosophy in Light of Contemporary Pragmatist Criticisms) at Aarhus University, Denmark (2016). As the title of my thesis indicates, my primary focus was Dewey’s philosophy of science in a broad sense (including the role of the sciences in democracy). At the conference I will talk about the way Dewey tried to re-conceptualize the social sciences’ attempt to inquiry into collective experience and take up a recent critique of this attempt developed by the Deleuze-inspired Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers.
Francesco Consiglio, University of Granada (Spain)
I was awarded a Master's Degree in Philosophy at the University of Parma (Italy) in 2014, then I moved to Spain where I enrolled in a PhD program at the Department of Philosophy I of the University of Granada.
My PhD research focuses on the cultural structure (intended as a semiotic system) of a group of human agents as their emergent collective mind, this is why I'm working on social cognition and social ontology too.
My talk is an attempt to propose a new paradigm for collective intentionality phenomena, based on self-organization through sign manipulation.
Academia profile: https://ugr.academia.edu/FrancescoConsiglio
Ulysse Gadiou, Université de Lille, UMR STL 8163 (France)
I am a doctoral scholar at the Lille III University. I’ll be presenting a paper on Whitehead’s philosophy, as it can be seen as a metaphysical ground for a pragmatic view on social interactions. This topic fits in with my doctorate research (dir. Éléonore Le Jallé), which is about “Whitehead on Social Change”
Raffael Joggi, University of Fribourg (Switzerland)
I am a doctoral student at the Université de Fribourg in Switzerland. In my research project I am investigating into verbal disputes, that is, a discursive phenomenon where people seem to be talking past each other. My aim is it to clarify what it is for a dispute to be verbal by providing an inferentalist characterisation of it. At the 2018 Pragmatism Conference I am going to present the developed framework for identifying verbal disputes and other forms of disagreement.
Marie Kerveillant, ESCP Europe (France)
I have defended my PhD in April 2017 at Essec Business School, under the supervision of Philippe Lorino. It was entitled: The role of the public in the French nuclear sector - The case of Local Information Commissions (CLIS) for nuclear activities in the West of France. Then, I started a research project in partnership between ESCP Europe and IRSN (the French Institute for Radioprotection and Nuclear Safety): I am investigating the interactions between civil society and nuclear experts on the CIGEO project, which aims at constructing a deep geological facility for radioactive wastes in the East of France.
At the conference, I will present the first chapter of my thesis, which examines the notion of the public in management research, and more particularly the question of how a public is constructed as a social actor in specific situations where large-scale groups may be affected by organizational or institutional policies requiring consideration of complex issues, for which relevant competence is needed.
Matthias Kramm, University of Utrecht (Netherlands)
I am a PhD-student at the University of Utrecht where I am being supervised by Prof. Dr. Ingrid Robeyns. While my master thesis (Munich School of Philosophy) dealt with metaethics and philosophy of language, I am currently working on the role of cultural tradition in economic development processes. My interests include pragmatist action theory, the capablity approach, and ethics of economics. In my presentation I will speak about the notions of "tradition" and "progress" and how they can be conceptualised within a pragmatist framework.
Christophe Point, University of Lorraine/Laval University (France/Canada)
Christophe Point, doctorant en philosophie de l'éducation en co-tutelle sous la direction d'Eirick Prairat (Université de Lorraine, France) et de Luc Bégin (Université Laval, Québec). Membre du l'équipe NeV (Normes et Valeurs) du laboratoire LISEC (Laboratoire interuniversitaire des Sciences de l'éducation et de la communication). Mon sujet de thèse s'inscrit dans la démarche transdisciplinaire de John Dewey (philosophie politique, philosophie de l'éducation, épistémologie). Il s'agit de comprendre les finalités et enjeux donnés par John Dewey à l'éducation au niveau primaire et secondaire pour se demander si une transposition ou une adaptation de cette pensée serait fertile pour le niveau supérieur de l'éducation. Plus spécifiquement, mon intervention porte sur le rôle du conflit dans la formation du public dans l'oeuvre de Dewey.
Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez, Emory University (United States)
Born in Spain, Belén Pueyo-Ibáñez completed a MA in Philosophy at The New School for Social Research (New York City) under a Fulbright scholarship with a Master’s thesis on John Dewey supervised by Professor Richard Bernstein. She is currently completing a PhD in Philosophy at Emory University (Atlanta) where she works primarily on pragmatism and ethics. Belén has presented papers in the United States, Hungary, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, and Italy and one of her last papers has been published in the journal Pragmatism Today. The paper she is going to present at the Young Scholars Pragmatism Conference is titled "Motives for Consensus: Habermas and Kitcher on Ethical Deliberation.
Ed Quish, Cornell University (United States)
I am a PhD candidate in the Government Department at Cornell University, focusing on democratic theory. My dissertation "Beyond Populism: Social Democracy and the Cooperative Commonwealth" attempts to reconstruct a distinct trajectory of social democratic theory in the United States that emerged after the Civil War in the nexus of agrarian populism and the labor movement, and that shaped some of the United States' major democratic thinkers -- most notably John Dewey and W.E.B Du Bois. I will present my research on Dewey, which connects his social theory to his vision of the democratic state, arguing that like earlier cooperativists, he grasped the extent to which democratizing society requires a qualitative transformation of the social and political relations embedded in the liberal capitalist state. As a theory of democratic transformation rooted in collective experimentation and transformative political education, Dewey's theory has normative and pragmatic value, but needs to be amended with reflections on the self-undermining tendencies of social democratic politics in the 20th century.
Michael Räber, University of Zurich (Switzerland)
I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich. My work broadly speaking focuses on political philosophy (deliberative theory, political epistemology, democratic aesthetics, representation), pragmatism and the history of political thought. In my presentation at the conference I will outline a conception of political judgments that understands them as interpretive judgments, for which I will draw both on Dewey's and Kant’s understanding of judgments im general.
Duygu Uygun Tunc, University of Helsinki/Heidelberg University (Finland/Germany)
I am a cotutelle PhD student at the University of Helsinki and Heidelberg University. My dissertation topic is the nature of the link between intersubjectivity and subjectivity with a focus on psychic development. The talk I will be giving is on the constitutive role of symbolic mediation in the development of the ability for taking and coordinating social perspectives.
Inni Youh, Cornell University (United States)
I am a PhD student in political theory with research interests in radical democratic theory, continental philosophy, and Foucault's late lectures on the care of the self. My current project looks at the ways in which the ethical work on the self is a form of political action against the normalizing power of neoliberal institutions.
