On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC)

If you are a graduate student or junior faculty (i.e., without tenure), please consider submitting a paper to the first annual On-line Philosophy Conference (OPC).  Thomas Nadelhoffer has put together an outstanding program of "speakers" whose papers will be posted in April along with commentary and then people can post comments and questions, some of which the speakers will address.  The line-up of speakers includes:   Stephen Stich, Jonathan Kvanvig, Julia Driver, Terence Horgan, Graham Priest, R.A. Duff, Thomas Hurka, Susanna Siegel, Brian Weatherson, Uriah Kriegel,  Kit Wellman, Joshua Gert, Joshua Knobe, Brie Gertler, Jessica Wilson, Benj Hellie, Amie Thomasson, Elizabeth Harman, Noa Latham, Andy Egan, and our own Manuel Vargas, John Martin Fischer, Alfred Mele and Neil Levy. 

The deadline for submissions has been extended to January 31.  If you are interested in being a commentator, please let Thomas or I know.  In any case, I hope you will "attend" the conference.  This is a new experiment in philosophy that I think has a lot of potential.

Comments

[Joe Campbell]

Why are you only accepting submissions from graduate students and junior faculty members? I guess -- in one sense -- I know the answer to the question: the aim is to give these folks an opportunity to present conference papers. But what kind of opportunity are you really giving them? Are we supposed to assume that having a paper accepted to a conference which only accepts submissions from graduate students and junior faculty members is as good as having a paper to a conference that accepts papers from everyone? This seems to be an especially bad idea since you don't have the space limitations that other conferences have. I think it would have been better to try to give special consideration to graduate students and junior factulty members by evaluating graduate papers, junior faculty papers, and senior faculty papers separately. At the INPC, for instance, we give special consideration to graduate students, though I have to admit that the grad papers that are accepted turn out to be as good as the professional papers anyway. Perhaps this is what ultimately prevents you from doing things differently.

I'm not trying to be too critical here. The conference is a great idea and I'm sure it will be a huge success. The point that I'm making is minor in that regard. And I'm all for doing things differently. I just worry that, given how you've chosen to handle things, an acceptance to the conference will end up being valued less than it should be. In which case your good intentions will be for naught.

[Eddy Nahmias]

Joe, I understand your concerns. I think this was my idea not Thomas', and I pushed it entirely because of, yes, space (time) limitations. Because this was a brand new idea, Thomas sent out a lot of requests to invited speakers and, very surprisingly to both of us, most of them accepted. As you can see, there are now 24 invited speakers (as opposed to the 4-8 I expected). Though the conference will happen on-line, we don't want to diffuse attention so much that many papers gets minimal attention (there are of course serious time limitations to how many papers "attendees" can read). So, we have spread the conference over 3 weeks so that there will be about 10 papers per week, and we have had to limit the number of accepted contributed papers to just a few. So, I thought it would be better to limit the contributions to grad students and junior faculty. I do see the drawbacks of this decision, but I hope people can see the reasoning behind it. I expect that there will be more of these OPCs, and next time around we will have fewer invited papers and more contributed papers and we will open it up to everyone.

[Joe Campbell]

Thanks for the explanation, Eddy! This sounds like a good course of action!

Joe

[Eddy Nahmias]

My post about the OPC suggests that only graduate students and junior faculty can submit papers. That is not right. Undergraduates and unaffiliated people (and graduate students outside of philosophy) may submit. We have received such submissions. As I explained above, the only people we are excluding are tenured philosophers and that's only because we unexpectedly had 24 invited people accept (and they are mostly tenured philosophers), and thus we need to limit the submissions and acceptances. Sorry for any "exclusion confusion."