PGSA26: 14TH ANNUAL UNIVERSITY OF CALGARY PHILOSOPHY CONFERENCE
PROGRAM FOR THURSDAY, APRIL 30TH
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09:30-10:00Registration and Morning Coffee
10:00-11:00 Session 1
Commentary:
10:00
Dissociation, Phenomenology, and Responsibility

ABSTRACT. In “Responsibility in Cases of Multiple Personality Disorder” (2000), Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Stephen Behnke argue in favor of the criminal responsibility of persons with dissociative identity disorder (DID) for their wrongful actions provided that the “alter” in control at the time was not behaving unconsciously or automatically. This article has been subject to significant debate and criticism. My objection presents a thought experiment, which I call The Lamentable Discovery. I conclude that it shows that our phenomenology is of great significance when it comes to matters of moral responsibility for many reasons - first among them, that it violates basic free will conceptions housed under the sourcehood umbrella.

11:00-12:00 Session 2
Chair:
Commentary:
11:00
Can AI Medical Assistants Be Epistemic Peers?

ABSTRACT. This paper examines whether AI medical assistants can qualify as epistemic peers to human medical specialists. I argue that AI systems could meet the two widely accepted conditions for epistemic peerhood, evidential equality and cognitive equality, if they (1) pass the relevant medical board exam and (2) undergo residency‑equivalent fine‑tuning. Passing the board exam secures threshold evidential access, while fine‑tuning on real‑world case distributions can approximate the tacit knowledge, practical reasoning, and epistemic virtues cultivated in medical residency. I then address the leading objection that AI systems lack understanding because they cannot provide appropriate causal explanations. Drawing on the granularity problem, I argue that understanding is scalar and context‑dependent, and that clinical contexts typically require mid‑level explanations that AI systems can learn to provide. Thus, the objection is contingent rather than conceptual. If AI systems achieve epistemic peerhood, peer disagreement norms will reshape future models of collaborative human‑AI clinical reasoning.

12:00-13:00Lunch
13:00-14:00 Session 3
Commentary:
13:00
Achievement and Struggle (at a Distance): Irony and Aesthetic Value in Video Games

ABSTRACT. This paper examines “ironic play” as a novel mode of aesthetic engagement with video games and identifies two main varieties of it. Ironic achievement play happens when players formally pursue in–game goals, while treating them as trivial yet aesthetically valuable, given how simple they are to achieve. The main example I’ll discuss is "trivial" trophy hunting, where players are awarded trophies that involve very minimal, if any, difficulty and means-end reasoning to achieve. Ironic striving play, by contrast, happens when players take aesthetic pleasure in struggling to achieve goals, while keeping an ironic distance from that struggle for aesthetic purposes. The main example I’ll discuss is slowrunning, where players savor the experience of a video game by trying to beat all or part of it as slowly as possible. Ironic play reveals an overlooked flexibility in players’ attitudes towards video games' rules and goals, while players remain sincerely engaged with them. I situate these examples alongside Suits’s (2014) account of gameplay, Nguyen’s (2020) distinction between achievement and striving play, and Bartel’s (2025) taxonomy of goal–seeking, narrative, and dollhouse types of play.

14:00-16:00 Session 4

Keynote 

Chair:
14:00
On the Scope, Limits, and Logic of Cheating