Meetings

The Society has biennial meetings (in odd years) as well as off-year workshops (in even years), and offers student travel support for both types of events. For more information about the upcoming 2023 biennial meeting, 9–15 July in Toronto, visit the conference website.

Biennial Meetings

The biennial gathering of the ISHPSSB is its main raison d'être: The Society was founded with the aim of organising a conference bringing together current research on biology as a discipline. In the year before a general meeting, bids are sought for hosting the next edition, and the Site Selection Committee announces the winning bid during the General Assembly of the Meeting.

Scroll further down, for the archival articles on previous meetings.

ISHPSSB 2023: July 9–15 in Toronto, Canada

Go to: conference website

After a four-year hiatus, the ISHPSSB is excited to return to an in-person meeting, this time in Toronto, the capital of the Province of Ontario, and the largest city in Canada.

We want to celebrate the opportunity to reconnect in person as well as continue to offer online participation, allowing us to expand on our commitment to inclusivity and equity. We also want to connect the conference with the place and the community. We will do so by organizing public events on topics of high local interest, such as indigenous knowledge and environmental and health histories related to the Great Lakes.

The local committee is a collaboration between the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario, and Guelph University. While Western is managing the online side of the meeting, the conference venue will be located on the St. George campus of the University of Toronto, located in the heart of the downtown area.

Eric Desjardins
on behalf of the Local Organizing Committee

Off-Year Workshops

Given the two-year ISHPSSB cycle, in even-numbered years a small number of events may carry the ISHPSSB name. The general parameters of, and how to submit proposals for, such events are detailed in the article on the Off-year Workshop Committee. The deadline for such proposals usually falls before Christmas following each biennial Meeting.

Given the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, workshops (just like the 2022 deadline) may have to adapt or be postponed, as happened in the previous cycle; so be sure to check the listed websites for any relevant updates. A thank you goes out to all of the organizing committees for their hard and creative work, and to the members of the ISHPSSB off-year workshop committee for evaluating the proposals.

Scroll down for the archive of past Off-Year Workshops.

The Call for Proposals can be found here. The deadline for funded workshops is now passed, but unfunded ones are still accepted on a rolling basis.

Accepted off-year workshops (2022)

  • EASPLS 2022 (European Advanced School in Philosophy of the Life Sciences): “Dealing with Complexity in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences”

    Institute for Philosophy in Biology & Medicine, ImmunoConcEpT lab, and University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France, Sept. 5-9, 2022.
    Website https://www.philinbiomed.org/event/easpls-bordeaux-2022/

    Complexity, from genomes to ecosystems, is a fundamental characteristic of living systems. In dealing with complexity, the life and medical sciences have developed over the centuries a wide range of epistemological and methodological approaches as well as social and institutional configurations to organize and perform scientific work. The goal of this summer school is to bring together senior and junior researchers in the philosophy of life sciences to jointly reflect on and discuss:

    • Epistemological and methodological issues in relation to complexity. We will look into the many practices developed in the biological, biomedical, and environmental sciences, in order to deal with the complexity of life. For instance, we will address the many roles that experiments, data, theories, models as well as heuristics, explanations or visualizations have played in the development of the life and medical sciences.
    • Ontological and metaphysical issues in relation to complexity. We will discuss issues related with complex causation in living systems, mechanistic constitution, process thinking as well as modularity and robustness as ways to understand the main characteristics of living systems in the biological, biomedical, and environmental sciences.
    • Institutional, societal, and political dimensions of scientific work dealing with complexity. We will discuss social-organizational issues that emerge in relation to scientists’ various approaches to deal with complexity in the biological, biomedical, and environmental sciences. For instance, we will talk about the emergence of inter and transdisciplinary research centers and consortia; the different -omics;
    • Different configurations of sharing research materials and results; real-world laboratories at the science-society interface or big-data labs from medicine to sustainability science.
    • The role that historians and philosophers of the life sciences can play in critically contributing to support scientific attempts to deal with complexity in the biological, biomedical, and environmental sciences.

    Using examples from past and current science, during the summer school, we will analyze and reflect together on experimental, conceptual, and theoretical practices and strategies that scientists from different disciplines in the life and medical sciences have created when dealing with complex living systems. The organizers aim to assemble a community of scholars addressing these issues from a wide variety of perspectives and whose research focuses on wide diversity of topics in the life sciences broadly conceived. The mentioned areas of work serve to illustrate the sorts of issues that are in focus for the summer school, but it should be emphasized that EASPLS 2022 welcomes inputs and ideas that are not limited to the issues mentioned above.

  • Sustainable Practices Workshop

    University of Minnesota, June 10, 2022
    Contact Information: Amanda Corris (acorris@umn.edu)
    Website:  https://sites.google.com/umn.edu/sustainable-practices-workshop

    Philosophers for Sustainability is organizing an ongoing series of local Sustainable Practices in Philosophy Workshops for philosophical communities. With this ISHPSSB workshop, we aim to expand the practices we have refined in the philosophical community and bring them to a wider audience.

    In our workshops, we facilitate discussions about how to incorporate sustainability initiatives and goals into our everyday lives as researchers and instructors. Our structured discussions provide an opportunity for participants to identify and discuss next steps toward sustainable practices, both individually and collectively.

    Workshops on sustainable practices serve several aims. They create opportunities for participants to individually and collectively think through next steps toward sustainable practices in research, teaching, service, and governance. They facilitate the sharing and discussion of useful resources. They build a sense of community. They help center issues of concern to marginalized populations in academia, who are mostly also frontline populations with respect to climate change. They offer a chance to discuss and develop positions on recently developed professional guidelines. They further the mission statements of most institutions of higher learning, which often include aims of nurturing the next generation of leaders, building critical thinking skills relevant to contemporary challenges, and/or a commitment to sustainability. And they help interested participants identify each other and, in many cases, form or grow a group that can meet occasionally on a recurring basis. We also provide participants with the tools they will need to host a similar workshop in their own department, should they wish.

  • Philosophy of Biology and Cognitive Sciences XI (PBCS XI)

    University of Salamanca, Spain (in-person), Nov. 3-4, 2022
    Contact information: PBCSXI@usal.es
    Website: https://pbcsxiworkshop.wordpress.com/

    Call for Participation (deadline April 30): https://pbcsxiworkshop.wordpress.com/cfp/

    Since its origins in 2011, this workshop is an annual encounter that aims at bringing together researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds: philosophers, cognitive scientists, and biologists working on issues of common interest. It is addressed to graduate students and early career scholars that have obtained their PhDs within the last three years. Possible topics include (but are not limited to): Consciousness and Cognitive Phenomenology; Animal and non-Animal Cognition; Enactive Approaches to Biology and Cognition; Biological and Cognitive Implications of Transhumanism; Cognition, Adaptation and Evolutionary Theory; Philosophical Issues Concerning the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES); The Ideas of Explanation and Causation in Biology and Cognitive Sciences; Models in Biology and Cognitive Sciences; The Concept of Environment and the Organism-Environment Relationship in Biology and Cognitive Sciences; The Concept of Individuality.

  • A triple helix: metaphor, society, and the science of evolution. A workshop in memory of Richard Lewontin

    UNAM, Mexico (hybrid), Oct. 3-7, 2022
    Contact information: David Suárez Pascal (david.suarez@ciencias.unam.mx)
    Website: https://lewontin.fciencias.unam.mx/?page_id=38

    This workshop will broadly focus on three themes which traverse Richard Lewontin's work: evolutionary biology as a science, metaphors in biology, and biology in society. While Lewontin's work is copious and his interests were certainly broad, we think that rather than centering on just one of the topics that he researched, the best way to pay homage to him is to continue the conversations that he started through discussing related topics in a way that he would have enjoyed.

    To reach this goal, the workshop will invite both early-, mid- and late-stage career researchers in history, philosophy, and social studies of biology, as well as in evolutionary biology, ecology, genetics, and related areas, to engage in the conversation about some of the topics that occupied Lewontin and we consider relevant to contemporary biological science. Some of the questions that this workshop will deal with are the following:

    • What is the role of metaphors in biological science?
    • What new metaphors is contemporary biology grounded on?
    • What kind of science is evolutionary biology?
    • What is the role of history in evolutionary theorizing?
    • How biological thinking can contribute to, or prevent, social justice?

    The workshop will provide an excellent opportunity to discuss in a hybrid and multidisciplinary setting about topics that are relevant to contemporary biological sciences, to science studies, and to the public in general.

  • Echoes of scientific thought in society: the late 19th century-early 20th century ‘race science’ in Argentina and Brazil

    University of São Paulo, Brazil (virtual), Sep. 19-23, 2022
    Website: https://19racialtheoriesla.wixsite.com/racialtheories
    Contact information: Marcelo Monetti Pavani (marcelopavani@alumni.usp.br)

    This workshop discusses the “race sciences” as they appeared in 19th-century literature. The aim is to focus on its appropriation by the South American intellectual landscape in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, emphasizing Argentina and Brazil. The panels highlight its articulation with different sociocultural domains, such as the medical, educational, and literary, and the construction of national identities in both countries. The panelists were invited among prestigious scholars in the field. They will bring the perspective of different areas, such as history and social studies of science, history of medicine, and Latin-American studies.

Matt Haber (chair), on behalf of the ISHPSSB Off-Year Workshop Committee

Meetings archive

The ISHPSSB held its inaugural meeting on 21–25 June 1989 at the University of Western Ontario. Although meetings were envisaged to be annual (see the bylaws), by 1997 biennial meetings were sufficiently established to amend the bylaws to reflect this.

In 2001, the ISHPSSB Council approved the idea of sponsoring Off-Year Workshops or Conferences, and in 2004 student members proposed and organised the very first of these.

Below is all accessible data from past meetings. If you have (more detailed, preferably HTML) programmes not provided there, please contact secretary@ishpssb.org and/or webmaster@ishpssb.org.

Past Biennial Meetings

Off-year workshops from past cycles

Student Travel Support

ISHPSSB supports graduate student participation in our biennial meetings as well as off-year workshops. The Travel Support Committee administers ISHPSSB Travel Awards, which are currently funded by ISHPSSB and, for US citizens and students at US institutions, by the NSF via a grant to the 8 Societies. Any donations to the ISHPSSB travel fund are gratefully received by the next generation of scholars of biology!

The society has the financial means to support only a portion of students' travel costs. Travel costs include transportation expenses such as airfare, gas or mileage, but do not include other types of expenses such as conference registration, lodging and meals. Award amounts will depend on the total amount of funding available to ISHPSSB, the relative cost of travel between the students' locations and conference site, and the ability of applicants to access additional resources. For recent previous meetings, award amounts ranged from US$50 to US$1000, and averaged about US$300. This represented one-half to two-thirds of travel costs that remained for students once their institutional funds had been applied.