Events

Social Events and Workshops

Philosophy Speaker Series

A series of academic talks by guests and local faculty. Information from past talks are in the Events Archive and some recordings are available on our Youtube channel. 

February 6th, 2026: Daphne Martschenko (Stanford)

February 27th, 2026: Brennan McDavid (Chapman) 

March 6th, 2026: Harald Wiltsche (Linkoping)

April 9th and 10th, 2026: Jelle Bruineberg (Copenhagen)

Thursday, April 9th 5:30 p.m. at 1635 M. Street (public talk)

Embodied cognition meets the attention economy

Herbert Simon’s credo that “A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention” is generally taken to be foundational for the attention economy, the economic system in which human attention is the scarce commodity: it is because there is too much information in our environment that attending has become so difficult. My aims in this talk are twofold: first I want to show that the attention economy rests on shaky conceptual foundations that are untenable in the light of contemporary cognitive science of attention. Second, I draw on principles from embodied cognition to provide an alternative diagnosis of our current situation. The problem is not so much an abundance of information, but an abundance of always available action possibilities, making selecting the relevant course of action much more difficult. 

Friday, April 10th 3:30 p.m. COB1 265 (academic talk)

Attention’s relevance problem

Intuitively, attention serves to attune an agent to what is relevant. A distracted agent is one that attends to things that are not, in fact, relevant. But what is the standard by which something is relevant? Answers often point to specific internal states, such as goals or intentions, or to specific external states, such as tasks or settings. The story cannot be so simple: something task-, or goal-unrelated can be highly relevant, and staying “on task” in the face of such events is seen as an attentional failure: a hungry bunny that fails to notice the arrival of a bird of prey is missing something relevant. This suggests that what is relevant is not just dependent on an agent’s occurrent goals or tasks, but is dependent on a wide set of interests.

My aim in this talk is first to motivate that this is the right way to think about relevance.  My second aim is to spell out a number of consequences for attention. If what is relevant is dependent on a whole array of interests, then attuning an agent to what is relevant becomes much more complicated. I will argue that the problem at hand is one of unencapsulation, similar to the more familiar relevance problem for belief fixation. I will try to show that many activities that are typically labeled as distractions can actually be thought of as “relevance-checking” behaviors.

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Examined Life 

Examined Life is an informal group that comes together on a weekly basis to brainstorm philosophical questions or topics. We choose a question/topic from participants' suggestions in the following four categories:

  • What I have been thinking about,
  • What everyone is talking about,
  • What no one is talking about,
  • and A bold idea.

Our goal with Examined Life is to create a space where individuals from any major and background can come together to discuss philosophical topics of their choice.

Minorities and Philosophy

Minorities and Philosophy at University of California Merced is an undergraduate led chapter of MAP International that is committed to examining and addressing issues of minority participation within academic philosophy. MAP at UC Merced facilitates conversations on issues in philosophy pertaining to gender, race, minorities, sexual orientation, class, and disability. If you would like to be added to the mailing list (this is separate from the philosophy program mailing list), register here. Contact Devyn Williams <dwilliams55@ucmerced.edu> for more information.

Information for Visitors

All of our department events are open to students, faculty, and members of the public, both here at UC Merced and in our extended community.