The David Braybrooke Memorial Lecture in the Austin and Hempel Series
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Weekly Colloquium
SUBJECT: This week’s colloquium (note unusual location)
Here are the details about this week’s Philosophy Colloquium. The colloquium will be held from 3:00-5:00 pm (Atlantic time) on Friday, April 25 both in person, in Room 2132 of the Marion McCain Arts and Social Science Building, and online via zoom (details below).
Speaker: Mark Fortney (Dalhousie)
The Attention Economy and The Right to Attention:
Some Lessons from Theravāda and Mahāyāna Thought
In the transactions of the attention economy, users exchange their attention for access to various digital services and the providers of those services auction off users’ attention to the highest bidding advertiser. In a reflection on these transactions, Bartek Chomanski has argued that there is a right to attention that has two aspects: a right to be free from distraction and a right to direct one’s attention as one pleases. He does this with the goal of setting the stage for future thought about whether the attention economy is ever a part of violations of the right to attention, but doesn’t take a firm stance on that question.
Drawing my inspiration from some Buddhist texts, I argue that there is a third aspect to the right to attention that Chomanski overlooked. This paper of mine was recently published at the Journal of Buddhist Ethics (https://philpapers.org/rec/FORTAE-8). In the presentation, I’ll discuss my paper, but also go a bit beyond the paper in terms of discussing the current philosophical literature on the attention economy and some thoughts about future directions that my paper may point towards.
Zoom:
Dal Philosophy is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Colloquium
Time: April 25, 2025 03:00 PM Atlantic Time (Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84856149363?pwd=8rrsEjSjzjDcRTbLIU6NNZbparyuMF.1
Meeting ID: 848 5614 9363
Passcode: 022845
Our Department
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ACADEMIC INTEGRITY
All Philosophy courses at Dalhousie emphasize the importance of academic integrity. Students are responsible for ensuring that all work they submit is their own, and, unless otherwise explicitly indicated by the instructor, AI-driven tools and generative AI models (including language models like the GPT suite, translation models like Google Translate or DeepL, editing tools like QuillBot, GrammaryGo, etc.) should not be used to generate ideas or written materials for any class offered by the Philosophy department.
AFFILIATED GROUPS
- Atlantic Canada Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy
- Minorities and Philosophy
- Dalhousie Women Around Philosophy
- Evolutionary Studies Group
- Animal Studies Group
- The Canadian Philosophical Association - see the CPA's Good Equity Practices
- The Dalhousie Philosophy Equity Committee
DEPARTMENT KUDOS
- Clarisse Paron’s paper, “Eugenic Logics and the Pathologization of Children’s Bodies: Evaluating the American Pediatric Obesity Guidelines for Harmful Scientific and Medical Conduct” is the winner of the 2025 Irving and Jeanne Glovin Award. Congratulations Clarisse!
- Congratulations to Tom Vinci on the eve of publication of his chapter ‘Sensibility and Intellect in Descartes’, to appear in the forthcoming book The Cartesian Mind, Edited By Jorge Secada, Travis Tanner, Cecilia Wee (Routledge, 2026). Tom’s chapter marks 51 years since his first publication in 1971 in the Journal of the History of Philosophy!
- Congratulations to Dr. Erik Nelson (who defended his dissertation last summer) on winning a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship under the supervision of Dr. Kristin Andrews at York University.
- Congratulations to Erik Nelson who defended his PhD dissertation, The Nonlinguistic Mind: Nonlinguistic Concepts, Normativity and Animal Cognition, this June.
- Congratulations to our PhD student, Clarisse Paron, for being awarded the Hadden Prize by the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science for presenting on of the best two student papers at the Annual Meeting, June 2024. The title of her paper is “Are the New American Pediatric Obesity Guidelines Eugenic? Eugenic Logics and the Medicalization and Pathologization of Children’s Bodies.”
- Congratulations to our PhD students, Lara Millman and Clarisse Paron, for being awarded Dalhousie’s President’s Graduate/Undergraduate Student Teaching Award (2 of 3 available university-wide awards!)
- Congratulations to Dr. Travis LaCroix, who has accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy, Durham University, starting in the fall of 2024.
- Congratulations to Dr. Travis LaCroix, who has been award an Insight Development Grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council! Travis’s research project is entitled “Philosophy on the Spectrum: The Philosophy of Autism and Autistic Philosophy.”
- Tyler Hildebrand’s paper “Inductive Reasoning Involving Social Kinds” (with Barrett Emerick) has been published in the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. https://philpapers.org/rec/EMEIRI
- Congratulations to Kayla Beals, who is the 2024 recipient of the F. Hilton Page Memorial Prize, awarded to a graduating student whose thesis is judged to be outstanding.
- Congratulations to George Arnott, who is the 2024 recipient of the Roland Puccetti Memorial Award for the best essay submitted by a student in a 3000- or 4000-level class. George’s essay is entitled "The Virtuous Cohort" Habituation and Character-Friendship as Rational Motivators for Aristotelian Courage.