Annual Lecture Series (in-person)
Lunchtime Talks (in-person)
Conferences (in-person)
Online-Only Events
Joe McCaffrey (University of Nebraska, Omaha), Atlas of the Mind: Neural Degeneracy and Pluralistic Ontologies Part of our ongoing online seminar series. See the full list of talks here. Register using this link: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KMNKu4fmQ9Wh5ZjvXJ3qQA Please note, registration will be for the entire seminar series. ABSTRACT: The recent debate on "Cognitive […]
Carl Craver (Washington University), “Remembering: Epistemic and Empirical” Part of our ongoing online seminar series. See the full list of talks here. Register using this link: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_KMNKu4fmQ9Wh5ZjvXJ3qQA Please note, registration will be for the entire seminar series. ABSTRACT: The effort to unify philosophical and scientific theories of remembering is hampered […]
Episode 2: COVID-19 Jonathan Fuller, University of Pittsburgh Dept. of HPS Marc Lipsitch, Harvard University, Dept. of Epidemiology The second installment of Center Debates, Center Debates: COVID-19, will provide philosophical and epidemiological perspectives on the current pandemic by examining several scientific controversies, including lockdowns, facemasks, and vaccine allocation and dosing schedules. Jonathan Fuller MD, […]
Art courtesy of Lynn Fellman* The aim of this virtual conference is to bring together anthropologists, biologists, historians, and philosophers of science to address the concept of ancestry in relation to scientific inferences about the evolutionary history of humans. In the past 50 years, ancestry and the inference thereof have become molecularized, automated, and commodified. […]
Wayne Wu, Carnegie Mellon University Dept of Philosophy (& Peter Lush, University of Sussex) Reassessing the Empirical Argument for Ownership in the Rubber Hand Illusion This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_7xWYT1kYQDOxRBmCwNtV2Q ABSTRACT: The Rubber Hand Illusion, published in a one page report in […]
Melissa Jacquart, University of Cincinnati Idealization and Representation in Astrophysical Computer Simulations This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Q3M6SodYQVWUcRmZbUo9mA ABSTRACT: Scientific models and computer simulations are indispensable to scientific practice. Through their use, scientists are able to effectively learn about how the world works, and to […]
Laws for Nowhere Abstract: The standard concept of law is, I suggest, significantly spatiotemporal, posing the question of how there can be laws in non-spatiotemporal theories, and most pointedly how laws could hold in non-spatiotemporal regions of spacetime. I describe a couple of quantum gravity models of the Big Bang (in string theory and group […]
Nick Byrd, Carnegie Mellon University and the Stevens Institute of Technology Your Health vs. My Liberty: Philosophical Beliefs Dominated Reflection and Identifiable Victim Effects when Predicting Public Health Recommendation Compliance during COVID-19 Pandemic This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_LCTU5Oi8SjCLu4CC5pgNqQ ABSTRACT: Philosophers and scientists have emphasized […]
Laws Beyond Spacetime Abstract: Quantum gravity's suggestion that spacetime may be emergent and so only exist contingently would force a radical reconception of extant analyses of laws of nature. Humeanism presupposes a spatiotemporal mosaic of particular matters of fact on which laws supervene. I will show how the Humean supervenience basis of non-modal facts can […]
John D. Norton, University of Pittsburgh Dept of HPS How to Make Possibility Safe for Empiricists This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_wijbswi3T-Cvz5HQOrBY6Q ABSTRACT: What is possible, according to the empiricist conception, is what our evidence positively allows; and what is necessary is what it […]
Kevin Zollman, Carnegie Mellon University Conformity, Social Networks, and the Emergence of Pluralistic Ignorance This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_qhw1ZPEMQIyOriVzFfxTGg ABSTRACT: Occasionally, people refuse to publicly state their beliefs because they think others disagree. Others do in fact share their belief, but are also afraid […]
Quantum Gravity in Practice Abstract: I present a recent concrete calculation in Spinfoam Cosmology -the application of the covariant LQG techniques to the cosmos- as an example to discuss a number of conceptual issues that are at the core of quantum gravity and cosmology. These include: What are the observables when localization does not rely […]
Paolo Palmieri, Pitt HPS Thermodynamic Myths This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_HDxPfvXgS7WJoOByiQiVwQ ABSTRACT: Tricksters, sorting demons and anthropomorphism in thermodynamics... or how myth and science must needs cross their paths. And how is thought experimenting at the joints of macro- and microscopic nature? Are physicists […]
Subrena Smith, University of New Hampshire Turning Race Inside Out This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-pAsFsJ6QI62VKdTFx3o5w ABSTRACT: Suppose you were to look at me and say of me that I am a Black person. Suppose, further, that you proceed to treat me as a Black […]
Temporal Naturalism ABSTRACT: I discuss the progress of a research program called temporal naturalism, whose aim is to reframe naturalism and relationalism based on the hypotheses that time is fundamental, while space is emergent. By the fundamentality of time we mean that all that is real are causal processes that continually make definite facts out of […]
John Ioannidis Stanford University Reproducible and Useful Research: Changing Research Practices ABSTRACT: Multiple lines of evidence suggest that a substantial segment of published research yields results that are not credible and that among the results that are credible a large share are not useful. The lecture will assess the scope of this evidence, it will […]
Erica Shumener, University of Pittsburgh The Power to Govern This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_dg09CwNYS3GcOJQCekkivg ABSTRACT: I offer a new account of what it is for the laws of nature to govern. Deterministic laws govern when law propositions productively necessitate which events occur. I […]
Decoupling from the Initial State? ABSTRACT: According to inflationary cosmology, the universe passed through a transient phase of exponential expansion that leaves several characteristic imprints in the universe’s post-inflationary state. This paradigm has enjoyed considerable phenomenological success, as a wide range of inflationary models are compatible with observations. The extent to which this success lends […]
Kevin Dorst, University of Pittsburgh Rational Polarization This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_uX_6LEVoQu-WLuGBpQCAjA Abstract: Predictable polarization is everywhere. When we make decisions about what college to attend, or what books to read, or which friends to hang out with, we can usually predict—not with […]
If Time Had No Beginning ABSTRACT: Could the universe have had no beginning? I don’t mean, in raising this question, to deny or throw doubt on Big Bang cosmology and the existence in the past of a hot, dense state of Planckian curvature and temperature. But, in that case, how is the question to be […]
Kate Stanton, University of Pittsburgh Contrastive Coordination and Multiphase Semantics This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_G6NZukgfS_WIKiMtu0CfBw ABSTRACT: A common assumption in linguistics and philosophy is that semantic interpretation, i.e. conventional assignment of meaning to structure, is monophasic, i.e. features in speaker meaning recovery only […]
Nick Huggett, University of Illinois at Chicago / Center Senior Visiting Fellow Missing the Point in Non-Commutative Field Theory This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8cIVYSN0RfywEh4uJOp0MA ABSTRACT: A non-commutative field theory (for scalar fields in this talk) introduces a fundamental area, as the measure of […]
Ryan Nefdt, University of Cape Town / Center Visiting Fellow Structures and the Special Sciences: The Case of Linguistics This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please regsier here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_mG3Kp9SKQVmd8RqCsIC4ww ABSTRACT: In many ways the successes of theoretical linguistics in the mid-twentieth century ushered in a cognitive revolution in […]
Riet Van Bork, Center Visiting Post-Doc Fellow A Causal Interpretation of Measurement Models in Psychology This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_zgbFzOAiT1CC89_seYnapg ABSTRACT: Psychometrics -the field that is concerned with measurement in psychology- heavily relies on the use of statistical models to measure psychological attributes […]
Elaine Landry University of California, Davis, Department of Philosophy As-ifism: Mathematics and Method without Metaphysics Zoom webinar. Pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iYWEBu-gRMCVQwzUtfYIDg ABSTRACT: I aim to carve out an as-if interpretation of mathematical structuralism by disentangling methodological considerations from metaphysical ones. I begin first with Plato and draw important lessons from his account […]
Danielle Wenner, Carnegie Mellon University Clinical Research as Basic Structure & the Ethics of Health Research Priority-Setting This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EQ1VBg6oSqq__ooSZd4NNA ABSTRACT: Much work in research ethics treats clinical research as largely comprised of discrete interactions between research sponsors, investigators, and research […]
Christopher Weaver, Center Fellow Hamilton, Hamiltonian Mechanics, and Causation This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_myf5wRdyQvagFkxPfKkSIg ABSTRACT: I show how Hamilton’s philosophical commitments led him to a causal interpretation of classical mechanics. I argue that Hamilton’s metaphysics of causation was injected into his dynamics by way […]
Hannah Rubin, Center Fellow Structural Causes of Citation Gaps This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_-eIqsXAFSH-dGiGGk34bbg ABSTRACT: In many fields, members of underrepresented or minority groups are less likely to be cited, leading to citation gaps. Though this phenomenon has been well-studied, one limitation of empirical work […]
Adolf Grünbaum 2021 Memorial Lecture Michela Massimi The University of Edinburgh, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences Natural Kinds on Neurath’s Boat This talk will be held as a Zoom webinar. Pre-registration ins required. Please register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_28l1C2NRRkGqi8Hbxhwsjw ABSTRACT: In this 2021 Adolf Grünbaum Memorial Lecture, I present a perspectival realist view on natural […]
Mike Schneider, Center Post-Doc Fellow Empty Space and the (positive) Cosmological Constant This will be an online lecture held via Zoom, and pre-registration is required. Register here: https://pitt.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_D-4dbauiT82yJBqWzPWywA ABSTRACT: I will discuss empty space, as it appears in the physical foundations of relativistic field theories. Of particular interest is the popular idea that there is […]