In June 2026, Dr Tomasz Szubart from the Institute of Philosophy and Cognitive Science was a European Philosophy of Science Association Visiting Fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Klosterneuburg, near Vienna.
During his one-month stay, he worked on the project “Music as Natural Content: A Teleosemantic Account of Musical Meaning Across Biological, Cognitive and Cultural Levels,” devoted to a functional account of musical meaning and, more specifically, to the relations between music, representation, and biological and cultural functions.
Dr Szubart also participated in the third Vienna Reading Group in Music Cognition conference at Central European University in Vienna, where he presented a teleofunctional account of musical representation. He also attended the 45th Altenberg Workshop in Theoretical Biology, “The Developmental Origins of Evolvability,” devoted to evolvability and contemporary developments in evolutionary theory.
At the invitation of Professor Barbara Fischer, Dr Szubart also delivered a talk as part of the KLI Brown Bag Seminar, extending his account of music in light of recent developments in evolutionary theory. His stay at the KLI also provided an opportunity to discuss his work with leading scholars in theoretical biology and the philosophy of biology.
We hope that Dr Szubart’s stay in Klosterneuburg will positively shape the cultural niche of our research group and provide further inspiration for research on the theoretical foundations of evolutionary musicology. More information: https://www.kli.ac.at/content/en/the_kli/news/view/647