Dear all,
The following may be of interest to some of you, especially those wishing to pursue further studies in Philosophy. Anyone interested, please feel free to ask a question in the comments here or drop me a line.
David
CFA: Open Minds XI
A student-led conference in all areas of Philosophy
Friday 4th & Saturday 5th December 2015
University of Manchester
Keynote talks from:
Dr. Fiona Woollard (University of Southampton)
Dr. David Liggins (University of Manchester)
We are pleased to announce our eleventh Open Minds Philosophy Conference. After a very successful decade as a conference for PhD students (and recently awarded PhDs), we are expanding the format this year to include sessions devoted to papers from Undergraduate and Masters students.
Our goal is to provide a forum for discussing work done in analytic philosophy by aspiring philosophers at each of these early stages in their careers. From this, we hope that all who attend develop valuable philosophical skills and working relationships with other early stage philosophers. To this end we will also be running workshop sessions related to pursuing a philosophy as a career path; including guidance on how to apply for graduate courses and how to publish.
Call for Abstracts
We welcome abstracts for papers that are on any topic in analytic philosophy. We particularly encourage submissions from women and other under-represented groups in philosophy. Papers should be suitable for a twenty-minute presentation, followed by ten minutes of discussion.
We request submissions of abstracts of 500 words.
The deadline for receipt of submissions is 5pm on Friday 23rd October 2015.
Please send abstracts in a form suitable for anonymous review. Please send via email to openmindsxi@gmail.com with the subject line ‘Submission’. Attached to the same email, please include a separate cover page that gives the following details:
Title of the paper
Your name
Institutional affiliation
Your ‘level’: e.g. Undergraduate, Masters, PhD
Contact details
Area of the paper: e.g. Philosophy of Mind.
Please send documents in PDF, Word, or Rich Text format. Submissions, and any further enquiries, should be sent to openmindsxi@gmail.com
All speakers will have their attendance at the conference dinner paid for. Lunch and refreshments will also be provided during the conference.
We will endeavour to assist with childcare arrangements if needed; please indicate in your submission if this is something you will require. This will not affect the likelihood of your paper’s being accepted.
All speakers will be invited to submit their paper for publication in a special edition of Manchester’s Praxis Journal of Postgraduate Philosophy, based on the conference proceedings. See http://praxisjp.org for more details.
Committee members (Undergraduate): Samantha Cockerill, Ahmad Jabbar, Beatriz Santos
Committee members (Masters): Jonathan Bebb, Adam Cassidy
Committee members (PhD): Fred Horton, Andrew Kirton
Philosophy at the University of Manchester subscribes to the BPA/SWIP Good Practice Scheme. We also have a policy covering conduct at all of our events; please see http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/subjects/philosophy/events-and-seminars/events-policy/.
Hello,
This conference definitely seems very interesting, although I’m not exactly sure what it is I should do to apply? What exactly are those “abstracts for papers”? Is it supposed to be a summary of some paper that I have written and would like to give a presentation of? Like last year’s project for example?
Or do I choose a topic, write an abstract to specify the points of interest, hope they’re interested and then write the paper and prepare the presentation?
So say I’d like to give a presentation about online piracy, in abstract I would specify a topic, say, “Is piracy an act of theft?” or “Is piracy a threat to intellectual development?” and then write the paper and prepare the presentation while also hoping they will want me to do it?
Or is it something completely different and I totally misunderstood it?
Thank you for your answers.
Sincerely,
Ignas Zemleckas
Good questions and worth thinking about for all of you.
An abstract should ideally be an outline of your paper/argument. A 20 mins talk is normally 10 pages – but you want to put down your original thesis and the argument for it. In you abstract this will be in outline form – usually about 500 words. The two example questions above are really good – the abstract will say something like:
I want to discuss: Is piracy a threat to intellectual development? My main thesis is…X, Y and Z.
Intro: one justification of private property is to protect intellectual development. Piracy is seen as a violation of private property…
But, question: of whom? Who is it protecting?
Is the real/only justification of property in terms of intellectual development?
It is an empirical thesis, so could it be true that open source/non-copyright material would lead to more intellectual property
And so on. Clarity is paramount — the evaluators need to know what you are going to say, but don’t err too much towards simplicity.
If anyone wishes to try, please drop me a line and I’ll give some advice where I can.