Key speakers and Guests of Special Symposia

• Daniel Dennett (Tufts University, USA, book promotion)

is an American naturalist philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist. He is currently University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. His areas of professional interest are philosophy of mind, of science, and of biology, with special emphasis on their relation to cognitive science. Apart from his research within the above disciplines, he has become a prominent figure in the New Atheism movement, and continues to publish in this capacity as well. He is the author of numerous academic articles and a number of books, including such titles as Consciousness Explained (1992), Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (2007, co-author), or From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (2017). Laureate of many awards and fellowships, he continues to play a central role in contemporary philosophy and science.

• Morana Alač (University of California San Diego, USA)

is an associate professor of communication and science studies at the University of California San Diego. She deals with distributed cognition, perception and sensation from the perspective of multimodal and multisensory interaction in everyday life.

• Him Cheung (The Chinese University of Hong Kong)

holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Kansas, USA. He is a professor at the Department of Psychology at Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research areas include adults’ and children's mentalizing, the curse of knowledge, children’s lie-telling, infants’ early mentalizing, and music perception. He is a consulting editor for the Journal of Psychology. His work has been published in British Journal of Developmental Psychology , Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and Developmental Psychology.

• Stephen Cowley (University of Southern Denmark)

is a member of the Department of Language and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. In his professional investigations he focuses on the beginnings of language, cognition and communication. He developed a concept of distributed language defined as a constitutive part of action and perception. In his empirical work he address the question of how problem solving and coordination help to balance emotions and relationships.

He co-edited numerous volumes: Biosemitic. Perspectives in Language and Linguistics (2015), Signifying Bodies (2010), Cognition Beyond the Brain (2013), Distributed Language (2009), and more. He is co-founder of Distributed Language Group which recently evolved into International Society for the Study of Interactivity, Language and Cognition.

• Arkadiusz Gut (Catholic University of Lublin, Poland)

holds a PhD in philosophy and psychology. He is a professor and the coordinator of the cognitive science program at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland. He has received a number of scholarships from the Foundation for Polish Science, Fulbright Program, and Stefan Batory Foundation. He has had a number of internships in various academic centers across the world: Karl-Franzens University, Graz (Austria); University of Sheffield (Great Britain); University of Wisconsin (USA); Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium). His last five projects have received financial support from the National Science Centre and Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education. Currently, his research investigates the involvement of language, culture-specific factors and folk intuitions in mindreading activity and social cognition. His work has been published in a wide array of Polish and international journals. He presides over Pro Liberis et Arte foundation.

• Robert Rupert (University of Colorado Boulder, USA)

is a professor of philosophy at the University of Boulder, Colorado. He focuses his works in the realm of philosophy of mind, the philosophical foundations of cognitive science, and in related areas of philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of language. His research focuses particularly on mental representation, concept acquisition, mental causation, cognitive architecture, situated cognition, group cognition, natural laws, and properties. He has held visiting research positions at the University of Edinburgh, the Australian National University, and the Ruhr-Universität, Bochum. He is an associate editor of the “British Journal for the Philosophy of Mind” and author of Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (2009).

• Judith Simon (University of Hamburg, Germany)

Judith Simon holds a PhD in philosophy and currently works as a Professor for Ethics in Information Technologies at the University of Hamburg. She used to hold positions at the University of Copenhagen, the University of Vienna, the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris and the Jülich Research Centre. She conducts research on epistemological and ethical issues raised by information and computation technologies from the perspective of social epistemology, STS and feminist theory. She is a member of the editorial boards of "Philosophy & Technology", "Big Data & Society", "Open Library of Humanities" and the book series "Philosophy, Technology and Society". In 2013 she won the Herbert A. Simon Award, funded by the International Association for Computing and Philosophy (IACAP), for outstanding research on the intersection of philosophy and computing.

• Robert Wilson (University of Alberta, Canada)

is a professor of philosophy at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada. His areas of professional interest are the philosophy of the mind, the foundations of cognitive science, and the philosophy of biology, in particular he has been focused on the issue of eugenics, the contemporary uses of biotechnology, disability, and the philosophy of psychiatry. He used to hold positions at Queen's University, Canada, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign,. He is the editor-in-chief (with Frank Keil) of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (1999) and author of Boundaries of the Mind (2004).

• Francisco Pons (University of Oslo, Norway)

Relevant topics include (but are not limited to):

• Socially situated and scaffolded individual cognition
• Social cognition from an evolutionary, cultural-historical, and ontogenetic perspective
• Psychological underpinnings of social interaction (joint, multi-agent, collective)
• Collective intentionality and social ontology
• Technologically vs. socially extended cognition
• Distributed cognition and group minds
• Current debates on mindreading, empathy, social affordances, and the cognitive bases for intersubjectivity

Relevant disciplines: cognitive science, philosophy, psychology, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, political science, legal theory, economics, animal cognition