Next week (Thursday-Friday, May 21-22) the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest will host the 3rd workshop of the Budapest-Krakow Research Group on Probability, Causality and Determinism.

Speakers: Sam Fletcher, Márton Gömöri, Michał Tomasz Godziszewski, Balázs Gyenis, Gábor Hofer-Szabó, Ferenc Huoranszki, Attila Molnár, Bryan Roberts, Iñaki San Pedro, Slobodan Perović, Tomasz Placek, Leszek Wroński.

The workshop website with schedule and further details is here.
Everyone is welcomed to attend!

Ferenc Hörcher, the director of the Insititue of Philosophy at the HAS, has given a talk on the 6th of May at the John Paul II Catholic University in Lublin on the conference on Elites - their past, now and future, entitled The Communist Destruction of the Middle Classes of Hungary - Is There a Way to Heal It? He was and will be giving lectures in Warsaw on the 7th and 20th of May as a part of the Humane Philosophy Project at the University of Warsaw. His lectures are scheduled within the series of talks on Humane Philosophy and the Idea of the Tragic, where he was and will be talking about Sophocles's "Antigone" and T. S. Eliot's "Murder in the Cathedral".

The Institute of Philosophy of the Research Centre for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences kindly invites you to the upcoming talk of its seminar series:

J. D. Mininger:
Anxiety: Genealogy of a Philosophical Discourse

Date and Venue of the lecture: 11th May 2015, 4.00 pm, Institute of Philosophy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 30. Országház Street, 2. floor, "Pepita" room.

Abstract:
Contrary to the philosophical understanding of anxiety popularized by canonical figures such as Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger, which figures anxiety as a universal and perpetually given human condition, this lecture explores the possibility that anxiety as a philosophical concern is an historically and peculiarly modern preoccupation. The arc of the lecture pursues a kind of genealogy of the philosophical discourse of anxiety, beginning with Kierkegaard and Heidegger, and buoyed further by analysis of Michel Foucault’s lectures on the hermeneutics of the Subject, which implicate the essential historicity of anxiety (e.g. at what point did anxiety become a preoccupation of Western self-understanding?), and reflections by Paulo Virno on the changing nature of how the experience of anxiety is articulated today—publicly and socially as opposed to privately and inwardly.

The History and Philosophy of Science research group of the Institute of Philosophy cordially invites you to Roland Poellinger's (Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU Munich) talk entitled "The Problem of Mental Causation in Non-Markovian Network Models". The talk is scheduled at 4pm on on the 5th of May.

Abstract:
Listing The Non-Reductivist’s Troubles with Mental Causation (1993) Jaegwon Kim suggested that the only remaining alternatives are the eliminativist’s standpoint or plain denial of the mind’s causal powers if we want to uphold the closure of the physical and reject causal overdetermination at the same time. Nevertheless, explaining stock market trends by referring to investors’ fear of loss is a very familiar example of attributing reality to both domains and acknowledging the mind’s interaction with the world: “if you pick a physical event and trace its causal ancestry or posterity, you may run into mental events” (Kim 1993). In this talk I will use the formal framework of Bayes net causal models in an interventionist understanding (as devised, e.g., by Judea Pearl in Causality, 2000) to make the concept of causal influence precise. Investigating structurally similar cases of conflicting causal intuitions will motivate a non-Markovian, yet natural extension of the interventionist Bayes net framework, Causal Knowledge Patterns, in which our intuition that the mind makes a difference finds an expression.

The History and Philosophy of Science research group of the Institute of Philosophy cordially invites you to a talk by Prof. David Pitt (California State University, Los Angeles / CEU IAS) entitled "Phenomenal Sorites and Unconscious Qualia". The talk is scheduled at 4 pm on the 24th of April.