On 27 November, join us for a meeting with Błażej Skrzypulec, a philosopher from the Jagiellonian University and winner of the 2024 NCN Award for Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, who will give a talk in a series organised by the NCN and the Copernicus Center.
Dr hab. Błażej Skrzypulec, professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the Jagiellonian University, specialises in the philosophy of perception, and in particular, the structural aspects of sensory experience, non-visual perceptual modalities and multimodal perception. He won this year’s NCN Award for his work on the structural aspects of perceptual experience.
Next Wednesday, he will talk about his research in the “Science in the Center” series, organized by the Copernicus Center and the NCN. His lecture will start at 6 pm and will be livestreamed on the YouTube channel of the Copernicus Center. Viewers are encouraged to ask questions in the chat window!
This is how Błażej Skrzypulec describes the subject of his talk:
Intuitively, it seems like our senses present things as situated in space. For example, I can see that the mug is to my left, I can hear a voice coming from a close distance, I can feel something touch a spot near my left wrist. However, the matter becomes less straightforward when we think of our sense of smell. Does it really present smells as located in space, standing in spatial relations, or having spatial properties such as shapes and dimensions?
Some authors argue that, at most, it presents smells as being “here” or “outside”. Others, however, maintain that what we experience are “smellscapes”, or spatially ordered clouds of chemical substances. In my lecture, I will talk about the spatial nature of smell, addressing contemporary philosophical conceptions and available empirical data on the smell modality. In particular, I will present the principal models of the spatiality of smell, discussing the arguments in their favour, the assumptions they require and the consequences they entail for our understanding of the sense of smell.
We kickstarted this year’s edition of “Science in the Center” with a talk by Wiktor Lewandowski. Marcin Magierowski will meet the followers of the Copernicus channel on 4 December.
You can also hear Wiktor Lewandowski in the NCN podcast.