18 May 2022
Vivienne Brown
Session 3a ‘The market’s mind’
Speaker: Vivienne Brown, Professor of Philosophy & Intellectual History, The Open University.
“Although the Market Mind Hypothesis posits the two-way premise of market-as-mind and mind-as-market, the emphasis of Patrick Schotanus’s ‘Cognitive Economics and the Market Mind Hypothesis’ (2022) is directed to the former because its primary concern is with the analysis of financial markets.”
Vivienne is Emeritus Professor at the Open University, UK. She has written on Adam Smith, John Locke, rights and interpretative methodologies. Her recent and current work proposes a new approach to modelling multiple agents in shared social context, with applications including shared belief/knowledge, game theory and the collective action problem.
Personal reflections from Patrick Schotanus:
“Any symposium like this, held in magnificent Panmure House, has to have at least one Adam Smith scholar. Vivienne is the perfect speaker in that regard. She has written much about Smith in general. What is particularly relevant are Vivienne’s reflections on intersubjectivity which she shared, for example, a couple of years ago at a conference about the connections between Adam Smith and Edmund Husserl. The relevance of intersubjectivity for the MMH is captured well by Yuval Hariri’s description: “The intersubjective is something that exists within the communication network [e.g. the market] linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals”. Vivienne intends to discuss the market mind from that background.”
Session 3b ‘What is it like to be a group?’
Speaker: Søren Overgaard; Professor of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen
“I wish to discuss the idea that groups as such can be conscious, i.e. can have their own consciousness over and above the consciousness of individual group members. In addressing this question, some philosophers invoke Ned Block’s famous distinction between ‘access consciousness’ and ‘phenomenal consciousness’ and argue that groups can have the former, but not the latter.”
Søren is the author of Husserl and Heidegger on Being in the World (2004) and Wittgenstein and Other Minds: (2007). Overgaard’s work straddles the analytic-continental divide. His articles have appeared in analytic journals such as Philosophical Studies, Erkenntnis, and Synthese, as well as in continentally oriented journals such as Continental Philosophy Review. Søren Overgaard is currently president of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology, and along with Komarine Romdenh- Romluc and David Cerbone, he edits the book series Routledge Research in Phenomenology.
Personal reflections from Patrick Schotanus:
“Søren is an expert on Husserl and is thus also familiar with intersubjectivity. Together with Alessandro Salice he wrote an excellent paper about the Group Mind and consciousness which I regularly cite in my own work. He will discuss this exciting topic in more detail at the symposium. Søren is a staff member of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. They have a multidisciplinary team of distinguished academics doing fascinating stuff. Frankly, I’m a bit jealous.”
See the full agenda here | Find the pre-symposium material here
