Lukas Schwengerer

Call for Applications: Truth, Lies & Democracy 2025 Call for Experienced Game Developers

Call for Game Developers!
Join the Truth, Lies & Democracy 2025 game jam (Sept 26–28, Vienna) to create interactive video games addressing a big challenge for democracies today — disinformation.
Apply by Aug 15
👉 More info:

This is how the book opens:

RSE awards over £724K to boost Scotland’s vibrant research sector We are pleased to announce that 72 exceptional research projects were selected at the spring 2025 Research Awards open call.

I'm delighted to be able to announce that Crispin Wright, myself, and others at Stirling/Edinburgh have been awarded a Research Collaboration Grant by @royalsoced.bsky.social for a project called 'Responsible Trusting Without Prejudice':

Congrats, Aidan!

In persuasion, ignore style at your peril Exploring the changing nature of public debate

For my birthday, a short piece out on one of my favorite topics: style and persuasion, with a gratuitous dig at astrology queers and so-called rationalists. blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/openfordebat...

How can members of large, complex groups know the group’s attitudes? - Synthese Members of large, complex groups – organizations – often need to know what the group wants. They usually need to know what the group’s goals are to figure out how to best aid the group. But how…

In case you missed it: a new paper by @lschwengerer.bsky.social - “How can members of large, complex groups know the group’s attitudes?” is out now in Synthese!
Read it here:

I'm a bit more optimistic. I could see a journal like 'Social Epistemology' publish this just based on the abstract.

I did the thing you are never supposed to do. I wrote a (rough draft of a) textbook: Theories of Rational Decision

It's technical, but from a philosophical perspective. It focuses on the normative theory but touches on some behavioral issues as well.

raw.githubusercontent.com/kzollman/Rat...

Communications Assistant (f/m/d) Communications Assistant (f/m/d)

We're hiring! Do you have a knack for comms & public engagement? We'd love to hear from you: careers.ceu.edu/job/Vienna-C... @weareceu.bsky.social

Same! Can't be there in person, but I'm planning to join via Zoom for as much of it as possible.

I think I caught a cold at the conference on Monday. Feeling terrible and the heat is killing me. :/

I mostly agree, so this is a bit of playing devil's advocate: different citation practices might indicate a difference in "depth" of engagement. If that is true, then a paper with less citations in philosophy might have more of an influence than a paper with more citations in a (say) law.

The whole project looks really cool to me. The timing doesn't work out for me to apply, but I'll be following the project closely.

Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy Grade 7 Philosophy 095373 £39,355 - £45,413 pa 10-Jul-2025 23:30 The successful candidate will work as a Postdoctoral Research Associate on the AHRC & FNR funded project `The Role of Cognitive Experience in Decision and Action¿ under the supervision of Dr Laura Gow (PI) and Dr Robin McKenna (Co-I). The project aims to deliver a new explanation of belief-discordant behaviour - situations where we fail to act in accordance with what we believe. Our hypothesis is that cognitive experience plays a vital role in our everyday actions and decisions. We propose that our beliefs need to `seem true¿ to us if they are to play a role in our everyday behaviour. Having a belief seem true involves cognitive phenomenology; experientially taking a belief to be true when we first acquire it and if we later entertain it in thought. (For example, whereas the belief that grass is green seems true, the belief that solid objects are mostly empty space does not.). The post is available from 1 September 2025 until 31 August 2028. If you are still awaiting your PhD to be awarded you will be appointed at Grade 6, spine point 30. Upon written confirmation that you have been awarded your PhD, your salary will be increased to Grade 7, spine point 31. If you require a visa to work in the UK, the University of Liverpool may be able to support your application for sponsorship under the Skilled Worker Route. Or there maybe the option to support your application under the Global Talent Visa, Depending on your circumstances you may find you can apply for one independently without University support.

Here is the advert for a postdoc at Liverpool for a project I'm involved in. Please share it with anyone who you think might be interested in applying. A brief project description is below.

tinyurl.com/4f7vw7ra

Come and work with us in Philosophy at Warwick, part II: warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/lang-en-G...

Come and work with us in Philosophy at Warwick: warwick-careers.tal.net/vx/lang-en-G...

🚨 We are very pleased to invite you to our upcoming GRADUATE CONFERENCE:

🗓️ Dates: July 3–5, 2025
📍 Venue: Lecture Hall 3D, Neues Institutsgebäude (NIG)
University of Vienna, Universitätsstraße 7, 3rd Floor, 1010 Vienna

For more infos, please take a look at our website (link in bio!) 💻

Abstract: What is persuasion and how does it differ from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation? Which persuasive strategies are effective, and which contexts are they effective in? The aim of persuasion is attitude change, but when does a persuasive strategy yield a rational change of attitude? When is it permissible to engage in rational persuasion? In this paper, I address these questions, both in general and with reference to particular examples. The overall aims are (i) to sketch an integrated picture of the psychology, epistemology, and ethics of persuasion and (ii) to argue that there is often a tension between the aim we typically have as would-be persuaders, which is bringing about a rational change of mind, and the ethical constraints which partly distinguish persuasion from coercion, indoctrination, and manipulation.

New paper arguing that sometimes rational persuasion is a bad thing. It's available open access here:

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

How can members of large, complex groups know the group’s attitudes? - Synthese Members of large, complex groups – organizations – often need to know what the group wants. They usually need to know what the group’s goals are to figure out how to best aid the group. But how exactl...

New open access paper on how the members of large organisations can know the organisation's goals and attitudes: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#philosophy #PhilSky

This is experimental for me. I draw on literature and empirical studies from human resource management research and I had no background in this area before. It seemed obviously relevant for the question I wanted to answer, so I tried my best to engage with it. I hope I did a decent job.

I engage with an interesting body of work on alignment of an employee's knowledge and actions with the organisation's goals. I combine that research with ideas from both mindreading and (collective) self-knowledge literature to look into how group members can infer their group's attitudes.

How can members of large, complex groups know the group’s attitudes? - Synthese Members of large, complex groups – organizations – often need to know what the group wants. They usually need to know what the group’s goals are to figure out how to best aid the group. But how exactl...

New open access paper on how the members of large organisations can know the organisation's goals and attitudes: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

#philosophy #PhilSky

Fictional minds extend for real Toon’s (2023) Mind as Metaphor defends a fictionalist view of propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which propositional attitudes are metaphors projecting the use of certain representati...

#philsky #philmind
My paper "Fictional mind extend for real" is finally out in Philosophical Psychology
www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SYIXD...

Call-for-papers: Hypatia Special Issue on Feminist Philosophy of Mind

Guest Editors: Gloria Andrada and Carolina Flores

Deadline for submissions: 15th January 2026

Details and links to submit on the website:

I'm involved in this exciting new project. There will be 2 postdocs, one in Liverpool and one in Luxembourg. The Liverpool ad will be posted soonish. The Luxembourg one is here:

recruitment.uni.lu/en/details.h...

Intellectual Virtues Online – Part 2 Exploring the changing nature of public debate

The second part of my 'Open for Debate' blog contribution was released yesterday. This one is a quick overview of some disadvantages of the virtue approach.
-> blogs.cardiff.ac.uk/openfordebat...

Towards tool-assisted self-knowledge - Synthese Cassam (Self-Knowledge for humans. Oxford University Press, 2014) introduced the term substantial self-knowledge to capture self-knowledge that is difficult to attain and plays a central role in one’s...

New open access paper on using tools (or other people) to gain self-knowledge: link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Frege on the Tolerability of Sense Variation: A Reply to Michaelson and Textor In several passages, Frege suggests that successful communication requires that speaker and audience understand the uttered words and sentences to have the same sense. On the other hand, Frege conc...

My paper on Frege and Sense Variation with @jadamcarter.bsky.social is now out. Synopsis: sense variation is tolerable when---relative to the background beliefs of speaker and audience---the thoughts of speaker and hearer share entailments. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

For 'difficulty' we have potentially a good story with your other graphs that it might nowadays be replaced by 'worry' and 'challenge'.

Thanks!