Consciousness and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Convenor: Diana Stanciu (ICUB, University of Bucharest)

The seminar Consciousness and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Approach is designed as an opportunity for interdisciplinary discussions between specialists in neuroscience, medicine, biology, physics, anthropology, linguistics, metaphysics, applied philosophy and the history of philosophy on largely debated themes such as consciousness and physicalism (Alter, Walter 2007, Alter, Nagasawa 2015), emergence, embodied cognition and quantum consciousness (Clayton 2004), consciousness and the self (Liu, Perry 2012), the neurophysiology of consciousness (Laureys, Gosseries, Tononi 2015), the cognitive limits of consciousness – the ‘explanatory gap’ (Levine 1983) and the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ (Chalmers 2010), epistemic subjectivity and the limits it imposes on ‘knowability’ and ‘understandability’ of various facts about consciousness (Nagel 1974, Van Gulick 1985, Lycan 1996), consciousness, attention, and conscious attention (Montemayor, Haladjian 2015), mind, self and person (O’Hear 2015), consciousness as a self-creating and self-organising system (Varela, Maturana 1980), the unity and organisation of consciousness – the causal unity of consciousness (the integration of affection and control into a unified focus of agency) and the representational and intentional forms of unity (Cleeremans 2003), higher-order theories of consciousness – the analysis of conscious meta-mental states in terms of reflexive (meta-mental) self-awareness (Armstrong 1981, Rosenthal 1986, 1993, Lycan 1987, 1996, Van Gulick 2004, 2006, Kriegel 2009, Gennaro 2004, 2012), the phenomenal consciousness (Miller 2015) and the representational consciousness (Speaks 2015,Pennartz 2015).

Contact: Diana Stanciu – diana.stanciu(at)gmail.com

Tuesday, 3 December 2019, 17h – Diana Stanciu (University of Bucharest/ Gerda Henkel Fellow at the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities – 2018-2020), A View on Consciousness from the Perspective of Epistemic Structural Realism