Fourth European Conference on Computing and Philosophy

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Is there life after ECAP? Yes, because there is always another CAP to go to next.
This year, the European Conference on Computing and Philosophy was in Trondheim, a splendid town in Norway and a great university. The program was rich, challenging and contained a major novelty wrt previous editions: a substantial track on the philosophy of computer science.
We had three keynote speakers, all very well-chosen.
The first day, Raymond Turner forced us to think seriously about the conceptual foundations not only of computing but of that peculiar science and art that is informatics or computer science. He opened up a Pandora box in which we had to look sooner or later.
The second day, Lucas Introna gave an interesting talk that provided an overview of his position in computer ethics. I was grateful to Lucas, for I lacked this synthesis.
The closing day, Vincent Hendricks managed to pack so much into his lecture that we all felt we had been exposed to a mini-course instead. Technically challenging, he showed what we should be doing in epistemology and computing if we were to took the informational/computational turn seriously.
Congratulations to Charles Ess, May Thorseth and Johnny Soraker for having organised and managed a great conference.
The good news? Next ECAP will be in the Netherlands, at Tweente University. Pencil it in your diary.
PS
many thanks to Susan Stuart for the picture.

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