Vintage Days at an Academic Conference

“Yes, the academic conference has fallen on hard times.”

So begins Martin Center editor Graham Hillard’s recent National Review Online article “Strange Days at the Modern Language Association.” Hillard surveys presentation titles from this year’s MLA conference and concludes that “the nation’s English professors have descended into absurdity.”

It’s important that academics and interested non-academics recognize the existence and work of groups such as ours. We, the authors of this essay, are not English professors. Our first-hand knowledge of academic conferences is rooted in another humanities discipline—philosophy. But Hillard’s article intrigued us. Reviewing the program from this year’s American Philosophical Association (APA) eastern division meeting, we found talk titles by philosophy professors that matched their literature equivalents on the absurdity scale. (“Understanding Organized Violence as a Communicative Act”?!)

The current situation in academia is not as uniformly bleak as some on America’s political right bemoan. We, however, come from the philosophy of science, particularly the “science-in-practice” branch, which, for the past quarter-century, has looked to understand science philosophically by reflecting on what scientists do rather than on what they produce. And while this focus is no cure-all against descending into contemporary absurdities, it’s a big step in the right direction.

We run an academic organization, the Deep South Philosophy and Neuroscience Workgroup (DSPNW). Its name humorously reflects its origins less than a decade ago, despite the fact that we’re now international in scope. We organize one meeting each year, Philosophy & Neuroscience @The Gulf. This September, we’ll proudly put on Annual Meeting IX. (We also organize DSPNW affiliate and cognate group meetings at larger academic conferences.) Our short mission statement succinctly communicates our interdisciplinary purpose:

The Deep South Philosophy and Neuroscience Workgroup provides opportunities for interactions between philosophers with interests in science and mind, and neuroscientists with philosophical interests about their field. We also seek to disseminate opportunities for philosopher-neuroscientist interactions in various media and formats.

Our meetings attract neurophilosophers, philosophers of neuroscience, neuroscientists from a range of contemporary fields, and historians of neuroscience. In both academically and personally meaningful respects, three days of P&N @The Gulf are “vintage” rather than “strange,” in the former term’s connotations of high quality and of harkening back to the academy’s purpose and impact from bygone days. We think it’s important that a broad coalition of academics and interested non-academics recognize the existence and work of groups such as ours. The current situation in academia is not as uniformly bleak as some on America’s political right bemoan—even in a humanities field.

Following Hillard’s approach, consider representative titles of presentations at our most recent (September 2025) meeting, along with each presenter’s discipline and professional status. Neither philosophy of science nor neuroscience is without professional jargon, but the aim of these talks should be comprehensible to most readers.

• “Laughter, common good and neuroscience” (mid-career tenured philosopher)
• “Disentangling cognitive and emotional aspects of fear conditioning” (mid-career tenured neuroscientist)
• “No pain, no gain? Self-control with GLP-1 agonists” (mid-career tenured philosopher)
• “Ethics guidance for neurotechnology research” (mid-career tenured philosopher)
• “Representing experimental stimuli: A limiting factor for neuroscience” (early-career philosopher on first tenure-track appointment)
• “Inference in neuroimaging and the problem of cognitive ontology” (distinguished senior tenured philosopher, American Association for the Advancement of Science fellow)
• “Dynamical systems for the philosopher of neuroscience” (distinguished senior tenured cognitive neuroscientist)
• “Replicability and rigor in neuroscience” (current philosophy Ph.D. student)
• “Experience-dependent neural plasticity: An individual-differences approach” (mid-career tenured neuroscientist)
• “Dissecting perceptual experience: The distributed character of pitch processing” (current history and philosophy of science Ph.D. student)
• “Optimal grip: A hypothesis about the phenomenology of situated perception” (early-career philosopher on first tenure-track appointment)
• “Creativity and underdetermination in scientific practice” (recent philosophy Ph.D. recipient, current philosophy post-doctoral fellow)
• “Explanatory aptness: Justifying model type selection in scientific research” (current philosophy Ph.D. student)
• “Is consciousness a black box?” (senior tenured philosopher, currently a department chair)

One can glean much from these titles and their authors’ backgrounds. First, you don’t find words like those from the MLA titles Hillard highlights—e.g., “goofing,” “radical,” “politics,” or the like. This isn’t due to selection bias on our part. The titles cited here make up about 25 percent of last year’s program, and we invite readers to review this and all archived programs. The academic backgrounds of the presenters are important to the point. The philosophy participants have made a huge time investment in their educations and careers, not only to have (or to soon have) Ph.Ds. in philosophy but, in many cases, especially among our more junior presenters, to have also earned master’s degrees in a brain science. This means that they have not just gotten textbook knowledge but have gained experience in neuroscience research labs. And our neuroscientist presenters have developed a willingness to engage with philosophers, some having done so for many years.

Our participants spend their professional lives exploring how classical philosophical questions about the mind might fruitfully be addressed by neuroscience findings. In short, our participants have training and interest across two fields, one a humanities discipline and the other a STEM. They did not invest this kind of time and energy to talk about “Transcending Embodied Gender Norms” (one of Hillard’s MLA examples). Instead, they spend their professional lives exploring how classical philosophical questions about the mind might fruitfully be addressed by neuroscience findings; they’re thinking hard about the brain sciences’ methodologies and technologies; and they’re exploring how philosophy’s rigor can lead to better neuroscience experiments and analyses. And so are the participating neuroscientists, shoulder to shoulder with the philosophers.

Importantly, their philosophical and scientific interests aren’t beholden to their politics. These professional interests do not mean that our participants are politically conservative! Although we’ve done no systematic survey, informal discussions suggest that most hold left-of-center political views of varying degrees. But, importantly, their philosophical and scientific interests aren’t beholden to their politics. Even those who present on current trendy political issues bring real science into their reflections, not politics thinly veneered with a gloss of scientific terminology.

These aspects are not unique to DSPNW; they’re present in the work of a good proportion of philosophers of science-in-practice and their scientist collaborators. But there are features specific to P&N @The Gulf worth emphasizing. We hold our meeting at a smaller hotel—by comparison to those large enough to host MLA or APA meetings—on the beachfront in Pensacola Beach, Florida. We meet for three days and limit the number of presenters to 50 or so. This size-limit carries communicative advantages. We do not hold concurrent or poster sessions so as not to imply separate classes of presenters. We ask participants to be present all three days. (We have ample morning and afternoon breaks, daily two-hour lunch breaks, and evenings to enjoy the beach and the tiny luminous jellyfish that occasionally drift into the shallows with the Gulf tides.) We do not wear name tags! Instead, we publish all attendees’ photos in the program and instruct all participants that, if you wish to speak with someone during our breaks, regardless of that person’s reputation, you should simply walk up and introduce yourself. (We also ask the stars we attract to speak to all who do so.) All of this actively generates three days (and nights) of lively discussion and fruitful interaction. As one senior neuroscientist commented to us three years ago, “This is how conferences used to, and should, be.” Vintage.

This brings us back to Hillard’s NRO article, which begins with a reference to the 5th Solvay Conference of 1927. For the first seven years of its existence, Mississippi State University’s Department of Philosophy and Religion (Bickle’s home department) financially supported P&N @The Gulf. Due to recent changes in federal external grant funding and overhead costs, beginning in academic year 2025-26 the department rescinded that sponsorship. We went into fundraising mode to pay for 2025 P&N @The Gulf. As part of that effort, we asked for “testimonials” from regular attendees to include in a donor-recruitment packet. One of them, a biochemist with extensive philosophical interests, explicitly likened the accomplishments of the Solvay Conferences to those of P&N @The Gulf. (The full text of this “testimonial” is available with others in the fundraising booklet at our donate page.)

So far, no other conference has achieved this kind of vital contribution from the neuroscience communities or the philosophy of science communities to match the standards set by the Solvay Conferences.

It is important to emphasize that these efforts and accomplishments do not shield our participants from the broader problems that the humanities, and academia in general, currently face. Tenure-track jobs are just as scarce for our junior participants as for their cohorts in more traditional fields of philosophy. All of us have endured the knee-jerk reaction “That’s not real philosophy!” from our benighted colleagues in more traditional areas of the discipline. Too many of our colleagues in the sciences still want nothing to do with interactions with philosophers. Yet we push on, convinced we’re doing something academically novel and relevant—and something whose existence conservative critics of academia need to at least acknowledge before they gleefully fantasize about all contemporary academia burning to the ground.

John Bickle is professor of philosophy at Mississippi State University and founder and president of the Deep South Philosophy and Neuroscience Workgroup. Marica Bernstein lives on a farm in Mississippi and for 30 years has had a front-row seat watching some of the finest philosophers and neuroscientists as they seek to solve the mind-body problem(s).