ECOM’s inaugural UConn workshop, “What’s the Point? Pointing and Gestural Communication” was a massive success! Thanks to everyone who attended and participated, and to the UConn Humanities Institute and the UConn Cognitive Science Program for funding.
Read a UConn The Daily Campus article about Professor Laurie Santos’ recent visit to ECOM to kick off our Spring 2015 Speaker Series! It’s available online here.
Marc 28-29: Dorit Bar-On participated in a workshop she co-organized with Mitch Green at U Conn on the Evolution of Syntax. The workshop brought together researchers from linguistics, psychology, and philosophy.
ECOM student member Thomas Pendlebury has accepted an offer of admission to the graduate program at Harvard University. Congratulations, Thomas!
ECOM member Kate Nolfi has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Vermont. Congratulations, Kate!
December 4th – Robert W. Lurz (Philosophy, Brooklyn College)
ECOM will be co-hosting a reading group with the Language Evolution Reading Group (LERG) on pointing, gesturing and grammaticalization. We will be meeting Friday September 12th, Friday September 26th, Thursday October 9th and Thursday October 24th, Thursday November 6th and Thursday December 20th and Thursday December 4th. Check out the Reading Groups page under the Events menu abovefor day, time and room, as well as links to the readings.
ECOM hosted a welcome reception to celebrate its move to UConn on September 5th from 1:30-3:00PM in Oak Hall 106, over light refreshments.
ECOM has now begun to plan its events for AY 2014-15, including a recurring reading group and speaker series, as well as a workshop in the spring of 2015. Please keep on the lookout for more details about these exciting events!
Marc 28-29: Dorit Bar-On participated in a workshop she co-organized with Mitch Green at U Conn on the Evolution of Syntax. The workshop brought together researchers from linguistics, psychology, and philosophy.
ECOM student member Thomas Pendlebury has accepted an offer of admission to the graduate program at Harvard University. Congratulations, Thomas!
ECOM member Kate Nolfi has accepted a tenure-track position at the University of Vermont. Congratulations, Kate!
Conference on Concepts
NC State’s Logic and Cognitive Science Initiative has organized a conference on Concepts for September 20-21. For further information, see http://www.ncsu.edu/chass/philo/phil_activities.html.
Miroslav Losonsky will be replacing Jim Sias (who is now Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College) as ECOM’s new coordinator. Heartfelt thanks to Jim for his work for ECOM in the past three years, and a warm welcome to Miroslav!
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, hosted a “Mind, Language, and Logic” workshop on May 30-31, 2013. Participants included ECOM director Dorit Bar-On, ECOM faculty member Bill Lycan, and ECOM student member Mike Deigan (as well as three other members of UNC’s philosophy department: Keith Simmons, Luke Elson, and Wesley Sauret).
ECOM student member Mike Deigan recently accepted an offer of admission to the graduate program in philosophy at Yale University. He is deferring admission to Yale for two years so that he can complete the B.Phil. program at the University of Oxford. Congratulations, Mike!
The ECOM Reading Group will be meeting this Summer, starting in June. All ECOM members and friends are welcome to participate. Further information about these meetings will likely be shared via the ECOM mailing list. If you are not currently a mailing list member and would like to receive these emails, please contact Jim (sias@live.unc.edu).
ECOM Coordinator Jim Sias recently defended his dissertation “Emotion, Virtue, and Moral Perception: A Defense of Moral Intuitions.” Starting this Fall, he will be an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA. Congratulations x2, Jim!
The “Making Meaning: Origins of Communication” conference was a great success! The conference was held at Duke University on April 18-20, 2013. For more information, see the conference website here.
ECOM director, Dorit Bar-On, ECOM member, Mitchel Green, and Keith Simmons have accepted offers from the University of Connecticut. Green will begin in Fall 2013; Bar-On and Simmons will begin in Fall 2014. U Conn has offered substantial support for ECOM as part of a plan to expand its cognitive science program.
The Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and the Center for Slavic, Eurasian, and East European Studies at UNC Chapel Hill are co-sponsoring a conference entitled “Cognitive Linguistics in the Triangle: Slavic and Beyond.” The conference will be held on Friday, February 22, 2013, and is free and open to anyone interested. For more information (including the conference program), click here.
Our friends at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences (DIBS) have announced a conference to be held at Duke University on April 18-20, 2013. The title of the conference will be “Making Meaning: Origins of Communication,” and it is being co-organized by ECOM director Dorit Bar-On. Registration is now open (and free!).
Registration is now open for the conference on “Mindreading, Understanding, and Emotion” (January 11-12, 2013). To visit the conference website, click here. (Attendance at the conference requires that you register. Registration is free for students, and $15 for everyone else.)
ECOM has been awarded a grant from the Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) to support a conferenceon “Mindreading, Understanding, and Emotion” to be held at UNC on January 11-12, 2013. To visit the conference website, click here.
UNC’s Institute for the Arts & Humanities (IAH) recently awarded ECOM a grant to support a speaker series for the upcoming 2012-2013 academic year. Check the Events page for details about the speaker series.
ECOM director Dorit Bar-On is co-organizing a conference on language evolution for the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, to be held on April 18-20, 2013. The keynote speaker will be Robert Seyfarth (Penn).
ECOM director Dorit Bar-On recently gave a talk entitled “Gricean Intentions, Expressive Communication, and Origins of Meaning” at both the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and St. Andrews Psychology.
ECOM director Dorit Bar-On and Senior RA Jim Sias (along with UNC alum Matthew Chrisman) recently gave a talk entitled “(How) Is Ethical Neo-Expressivism a Hybrid View?” at a conference on “Hybrid Theories in Metaethics” at the University of Edinburgh (co-organized by another UNC alum, Mike Ridge), July 2-4, 2012.
ECOM director Dorit Bar-On recently gave a talk entitled “Mind: the Gap” at the Fifth British Wittgenstein Society (BWS) Conference on “Wittgenstein, Enactivism, and Animal Minds” at the University of Hertfordshire, July 7-8, 2012. Videos of the conference presentations should soon be available here. ECOM member Kevin Richardson also attended the conference, after being awarded a travel stipend.
Last week, 7 ECOM members and affiliates attended the Protolanguage Workshop at the University of Virginia. The 2-day workshop had 7 speakers (including keynote Ruth Millikan) and 6 commentators from 12 universities. It was a great success. Stay tuned for summaries of talks and commentaries.
ECOM members Jim Sias, Matthew Priselac, and Kevin Richardson are currently involved as RAs for two upcoming talks: Bar-On’s invited talk on neo-expressivism with UNC alum Matthew Chrisman at a conference on “Hybrid Theories in Metaethics” at Edinburgh (co-organized by another UNC alum, Mike Ridge), July 2-4, 2012; and Bar-On’s invited talk at the Fifth British Wittgenstein Society (BWS) Conference on “Wittgenstein, Enactivism, and Animal Minds” at the University of Hertfordshire, July 7-8, 2012.
Senior RA Jim Sias has won the prestigious UNC Tanner Teaching Award. Congratulations, Jim!
ECOM director Dorit Bar-On and affiliated faculty member Mitchell Green have organized a Protolanguage Workshop to be hosted at the University of Virginia on March 30-31, 2012. To learn more, please visit the Protolanguage Workshop page by clicking here. (A new tab has been added to the navigation bar at the top of the ECOM website.)
Maria Cristina Amoretti and Gerhard Preyer’s edited volume Triangulation: From an Epistemological Point of View — which includes a paper by ECOM members Dorit Bar-On and Matthew Priselac entitled “Triangulation and the Beasts” (see the publications page) — was recently reviewed by Nathaniel Goldberg for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. (To see the review, click here.) Of Bar-On and Priselac’s paper in particular, Goldberg writes, “This is one of the more original essays in the collection. … [T]heir ideas are worth a close look.”
The Secretary of the British Wittgenstein Society (BWS), Dr. Ian Ground, has expressed interest in supporting ECOM. Dr. Ground has done work on expressive behavior and animal minds. (For information on the BWS’s upcoming conference on “Enactivism and Animal Minds,” click here.)
ECOM will be hosting a Speaker Series during the upcoming academic year! We have invited researchers from Linguistics, Philosophy, and Evolutionary Biology to speak on the nature and origins of meaning. For more information, click here.