Call for Abstracts: Rule-constituted entities: From Games and Institutions to Artworks and Artifacts
10-12 November 2025, University of Genoa
This conference is organized in collaboration with the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Neuchâtel
In recent years, the notion of rules has garnered significant attention across several domains, including the ontology of art, social ontology, and the ontology of artifacts. Within social ontology, a foundational distinction has been drawn between constitutive rules—which define or create the possibility of certain social phenomena—and regulative rules, which govern behaviors within already established frameworks. This distinction has been instrumental in theorizing institutions, money, and other complex social constructs.
Rules have also played a central role in the study of games, from coordination games to video games, where they shape both the structure and experience of gameplay. More recently, discussions of rules have extended into the fields of aesthetics and the ontology of artifacts, particularly in relation to contemporary art. In such contexts, artists often sanction rules that constitute the artwork and guide how audiences are meant to engage with and interpret it. These rules, whether implicit or explicitly sanctioned by the artist, inform our aesthetic appreciation and are often integral to the identity of the work itself.
This conference seeks to explore entities that are described as rule-constituted across various domains: in the social realm (e.g., institutions: money, marriage, museums), in the artistic realm (e.g., conceptual and contemporary artworks), and in the technological realm (e.g., video games). Special attention will be given to the ways in which rules contribute to the constitution of artworks and influence our aesthetic engagement with them.
Research questions for papers may include but are not limited to:
- What does it mean for an entity to be constituted by rules, and how does this differ across social institutions, artworks, and technological artifacts?
- What impact does rule change have on the identity of the entity it constitutes?
- What are games and how are they constituted by rules?
- How do artworks ontologically compare to games?
- How do artworks ontologically compare to institutions?
- Are there important philosophical differences between rules that constitute social institutions and those that constitute artifacts and artworks?
- What roles do rules play in social reality?
- How do rules exercise their power in the domain of art?
- Can museum policies be considered rules and how do they compare to rules
sanctioned by artists? - How do rules guide our appreciation of conceptual artworks?
- How do rules govern our appreciation and experience of games?
Invited speakers:
- Catharine Abell (University of Oxford)
- Alexandre Declos (University of Neuchâtel)
- Maryam Ebrahimi Dinani (University of Neuchâtel)
- Francesco Guala (University of Milan)
- Sherri Irvin (University of Oklahoma)
- Olivier Massin (University of Neuchâtel)
- Indrek Reiland (University of Vienna)
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Please submit proposals by writing to: pea@unige.it
Submissions should be done as PDF files prepared for blind review.
Please submit abstracts between 500 and 1000 words (references excluded) together
with a title and 3 keywords.
The deadline for receipt is 24 August, 2025.
Speakers will be notified of decisions by 7 September, 2025.
There will be no conference fees. It will be possible to apply for bursaries.
Call for Abstracts: Mental Artifacts and Artifactual Events. A Philosophy Conference on Things like Dreams, Performances, and Conferences
25-27 November 2025, University of Genoa
Concrete objects such as tables, chairs, hammers, or screwdrivers are usually cast as paradigm artifacts. More recently, the philosophy of technology has paid attention also to abstract artifacts such as algorithms or recipes. Yet, little philosophical attention has been paid so far to another interesting kind of artifacts, namely, artefactual events, which differ from both paradigmatic concrete artifacts and abstract artifacts in virtue of their distinctive temporal profile. An interesting species of the artifactual event is the mental artifact, which also has a temporal profile but unfolds in a sort of inner “Cartesian theater”, as it were, instead of in the public space. Hallucinations, dreams and psychedelic experiences arguably are mental artifacts of this sort.
This conference aims to investigate the philosophy of artifactual events, including mental artifacts, both from a metaphysical perspective and from an aesthetic perspective. The focus is not only on how to properly theorize the nature of artifactual events but also on how to account for our experience and appreciation of them. In this sense, the conference encourages submissions on general metaphysical issues about the nature of artifactual events and the specificity of mental artifacts, as well as on aesthetically relevant topics as for example performative arts like theater and dance or artworld events like happenings and festivals, but also—drawing on the growing field of the aesthetics of consciousness—the appreciation of non-paradigmatic aesthetic entities such as dreams, psychedelic experiences and other inner products of the mind.
Research questions for papers may include but are not limited to:
- What are the metaphysical specificities of artifactual events as opposed to paradigm artifacts?
- Are artifactual events better cast as artifacts or as social entities?
- What are the aesthetic specificities of artifactual events as opposed to paradigm works of art?
- Artifactual events and the arts of time
- Performances as artifactual events in theater, dance, music and contemporary art
- Artifactual events and the artworld: the philosophy of festivals, exhibitions and conferences
- Can there be mental artifacts? In case, are they artifactual events?
- Are actions artifactual events? Are they mental artifacts as well?
- Are dreams and hallucinations mental artifacts?
- Do psychedelic experiences involve the creation of mental artifacts?
- If the predictive processing approach is right in casting conscious experience as “controlled hallucination”, should we cast the whole experience as a mental artifact?
- Can mental artifacts be objects of aesthetic appreciation?
- Can the study of mental artifacts contribute to the rising field of the aesthetics of consciousness?
Invited speakers:
Michael Y. Bennett (University of Wisconsin-Whitewater)
Gwen Bradford (University of Toronto)
David Davies (McGill University)
Simon Evnine (University of Miami)
Uriah Kriegel (Rice University)
Aidan Lyon (Leiden University)
Anna Pakes (University of Roehampton)
Giuliano Torrengo (University of Milan)
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Please submit proposals by writing to: pea@unige.it
Submissions should be done as PDF files prepared for blind review.
Please submit abstracts between 500 and 1000 words (references excluded) together with a title and 3 keywords.
The deadline for receipt is August 24, 2025.
Speakers will be notified of decisions by September 7, 2025.
There will be no conference fees. It will be possible to apply for bursaries.