Summer School on Philosophical Engineering

The summer school took place from August 25–31, 2019.

Instructors

• Eckhart Arnold (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities)
• Elke Brendel (University of Bonn)
• Filippo Ferrari (University of Bonn)
• Simon Huttegger (University of California, Irvine)
• Corina Strößner (DCLPS, University of Duesseldorf)
• Leander Vignero (KU Leuven)

Inclusion

We recognise that philosophical practice requires an inclusive philosophical community. Accessibility is a necessary condition for good philosophical work. It is also a matter of justice within the organisation and the profession.

We aimed to be an inclusive summer school. For this purpose, we invited equally many female as male instructors. As it turned out, we still ended up with an underrepresentation of female instructors. We were doing our best to get a diverse mix of participants.

We also did our best to help with childcare and to lower the barrier of participation for philosophers with disabilities.

Aims & Scope

Contemporary analytic philosophy makes heavy use of formal methods. However, most of the time people engaged in such a formal endeavour are highly specialised, for which reason they quite often focus on one particular branch of formal philosophy. This is also reflected in contemporary philosophical curricula, which typically offer highly specialised courses on particular formal methods, but only rarely cover a broad range of them; and if they do, then these interdisciplinary methods are typically applied to a very particular subject only. This summer school aimed at providing an introductory overview of the main methods applied in formal philosophy or philosophical engineering: logical, probabilistic, and game-theoretical devising, model building, programming and simulating, and employing digital resources in the broader realm of digital humanities. By bringing together international experts in these fields, participants gained competencies in applying a broad range of formal methods in their field of interest; for this purpose, each of the mentioned topics was covered by professional instructions, exercises, interactive group work, and the discussion of results by the participants. Furthermore, participants were provided with opportunities to independently deepen their competencies in a particular topic of interest following completion of the course.

Sponsors & Supporters