Time for a brief report of the second European Philosophy of Science Association Conference, which took place in Amsterdam, 21-24 October. My photos from the conference are available here, but I was quite lazy with the camera this time, and since I’ve been to Amsterdam several times before (and the weather was quite horrible part of the time), there are no touristy photos. There are a few photos from Amsterdam in my gallery from previous trips though.

The EPSA conference was another one in a series of fairly well organised conferences, although they neglected to leave time for transferring from one room to another. An interesting aspect were a number (about 20) of symposia which consisted of about four talks each. Most of the sessions I attended where in fact symposia. However, the content, although it was of a decent standard in general, was not particularly interesting for me.

Where the Metaphysics of Science conference in Nottingham earlier this year had a lot of talks on topics like natural kinds and laws, there was very little of that branch of philosophy of science present at the EPSA conference. The keynotes were also quite uninteresting, mainly due to very thin philosophical content, not to mention that I had never heard of any of them before, with the exception of Elliot Sober. But Sober decided to give the very same paper that he gave at the BSPS conference earlier this year, so I had already seen that, and although the paper was ok, it certainly wasn’t good enough to see twice.

My own symposium, ‘The Structure of Scientific Knowledge’, with Alexander Bird, Robin Hendry and Paul Winstanley, was among the only sessions with more metaphysical content. We had quite a nice audience and some good discussion in any case. My own choice of paper, entitled ‘The A Priori and Scientific Knowledge’, was not a great choice though, mainly because it was much too general to present in 20min for a philosophy of science audience. I gave more or less the same paper earlier this year at the BSPS conference, where it did go down fairly well, but perhaps the extra 10min that I had there contributed to this. I think that a paper which I gave just the other day at out postgraduate seminar in Durham would’ve been much better, as it was more like a case study of the same subject, namely the case of Euclidean geometry. A revised (but still sketchy) version of that paper is available here.

Well, that’s about everything I’ve got to say about the conference, although it could be mentioned that there was an exceptionally great number of Finnish philosophers present, about ten or so.

Some news and perhaps a more philosophical post as well will follow soon…

Since my website has been up for about six months now (and since I haven’t got anything else to post about just now), I thought I’d publicise some statistics about the website, provided by Awstats. Total number of visits since 1 April 2009 is now at just over 13000. For the first four months I had about 300+ unique visitors per month, but in September the figure doubled to just over 600 and looks to be settled around that figure now. The reason is probably that I started posting a bit more frequently on the blog due to the conference season. My stats analyser doesn’t give me an accurate number of unique visitors for the whole period, but it is probably between 1000-2000. The average duration of a visit is a meager 74 seconds, but that has been steadily increasing as well (I’m not sure how it’s calculated).

Here are the primary statistics:
Number of visits: 13033
Pages: 53346
Hits: 121357
Bandwidth: 2.57 GB

Statistics about the origin of the visitors followed by the number of viewed pages:
Great Britain (18541)
United States (11876)
Finland (5548)
European country (4036)
Russian Federation (2338)
France (1965)
Germany (1750)
China (827)
Spain (739)
Canada (633)
Belgium (592)
Italy (495)
Portugal (422)
Switzerland (397)
Luxembourg (366)
Netherlands (332)
Hungary (241)
Estonia (229)
Australia (207)
Japan (194)
Ukraine (134)
Norway (128)
Poland (120)
Czech Republic (89)
Ireland (80)
Others (1067)

My PhD thesis has been downloaded 47 times, and my papers as follows:
The Law of Non-Contradiction as a Metaphysical Principle (155)
The Metaphysical Status of Logic (113)
A New Definition of A Priori Knowledge: In Search of a Modal Basis (108)
On the Modal Content of A Posteriori Necessities (95)
Two-Dimensional Modal Semantics, Conceivability, and Modal Epistemology (82)
The Aristotelian Method and Aristotelian Metaphysics (82)
Against the Vagueness Argument (58)
Against Conventionalism: Boundaries and Realism (42)
Cannabis, the Individual, and the Society (37)
Truthmaking and Realism (34)
Counterfactuals and Modal Epistemology (26)
On the Epistemic Status of Euclidean Geometry (24)

Some other papers have also been online briefly.

45.8% of visitors have been using Mozilla Firefox, 31% Internet Explorer, 11.1% Safari, and the rest are between Google Chrome, Opera and others.

74.5% of visitors have been using Windows, 16.4% Mac, 1.9% Linux, the rest are unknown.

I’ve got a bunch more, but these are the most interesting ones. We’ll see how they develop. If nothing else, I’d hope for a few more comments in the blog!

As promised, here is the report from The fourth meeting of the Portugese society for analytic philosophy (ENFA 4), which took place in Évora, Portugal, 17-19 September 2009. Photos from the conference and from around Évora are available in my gallery.

The conference was well organised — all the ones I have attended this year have been, which is a nice change — and the location, some 160km from Lisbon, was lovely. I have been to Portugal once before, to Lisbon, and I quite like the city. It was good to see a bit more of Portugal, but it would’ve been good to spend some more time in Lisbon as well. Anyway, you can hardly complain about the choice of venue, Évora was also very cheap. I was pleased that there was also a guided tour of Évora included in the program, although the guide loved her own voice a bit too much…

The content of the conference was quite good, especially strong were certain papers on philosophical logic, including the interesting keynote, ‘Primary and Secondary Propositions’ by Oswaldo Chateaubriand. The highlight, without doubt, has to be Kit Fine’s paper, ‘Some Paradoxes of Ground’. The presentation was accessible even for someone who has never heard of the notion of ground, but at the same time insightful and interesting. Personally I would have been more interested to hear a paper specifically on the notion of ground (which does exist, and will be published in a forthcoming CUP volume), but even this paper on certain paradoxes that emerge for the notion was extremely interesting.

I won’t go into the details, but Fine has a series of three papers on ground: the one he presented, the one forthcoming in the CUP volume, and one on the logic of ground. Needless to say, these should be on everyone’s reading list when they come out.

My own paper was entitled ‘Metaphysics Is Not About Existence Questions’, a rather half-baked paper on metaontology and a defence of a more ‘Aristotelian’ (or Finean) conception of metaphysical questions as opposed to the predominant Quinean one. I had quite a nice audience, as I was lucky to be scheduled in the very first session, I was especially pleased to see Oswaldo Chateaubriand and Kit Fine there. Pablo Rychter also gave a paper on metaontology in the same session, so we had a good niche there.

I don’t think I will go to the details of any of the presentations this time. The most interesting thing from my point of view was the opportunity to have a chat with Kit Fine anyway, and to confirm his contribution to a project that I’m working on, more of which in due course!

Next stop, EPSA09 in a couple weeks’ time in Amsterdam.

Ben at (Blog&~Blog) has commented on my recent paper in the Australasian Journal of Logic, namely my ‘The Law of Non-Contradiction as a Metaphysical Principle’. I thought I would link to his post here in case someone is interested, see the comments section for my replies. The post is here.