Annual Lecture Series (in-person)
Lunchtime Talks (in-person)
Conferences (in-person)
Online-Only Events
Somogy Varga, Aarhus University, Center Visiting Scholar The Aim of Medicine ABSTRACT: Recent debates about the scope and societal role of medicine raise fundamental questions about its aim. The main task of the talk is to contribute to clarifying this issue. I start by outlining the idea medicine deploys a particular kind of understanding. Then, […]
Nick Huggett, LAS Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Chicago Quantum Gravity on a Tabletop? ABSTRACT: The characteristic – Planck – energy scale of quantum gravity is utterly beyond current technology, making experimental access to the relevant physics apparently impossible. Nevertheless, low energy experiments linking gravity and the quantum have been undertaken: the […]
Matthew Parker, University of Western Ontario, Center Visiting Fellow What Counts as Evidence in a Vast Universe? ABSTRACT: Ziv has a psychological theory and claims that an experiment has confirmed it. Nick says this is irrelevant; the universe is so big that someone was bound to make the same observation even if the theory is […]
Simon DeDeo, Carnegie Mellon/Santa Fe Institute Consilience and Epistemic Values in the Royal Society ABSTRACT: Consilience, the idea that scientific knowledge should draw together disparate phenomena into common frameworks, is a widely accepted value in contemporary science. Little is known, however, about how and when this value first appeared in practice. Using the full-text archives […]
This talk has been moved to online-only. Anthony Beavers, University of Evansville, Center Visiting Fellow Concerning a Machine Command Theory of Ethics ABSTRACT: In this presentation on meta-ethics, I will consider the possibility of a Machine Command Theory (MCT) of ethics that may allow an artificial intelligence to outperform conventional moral theories in determining and […]
Featured Former Fellow Lunchtime Talk: Erik Curiel, Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy This will be an online event. Math Does Not Represent ABSTRACT: On the standard---almost universally (albeit often only implicitly) accepted---picture of the relation of mathematics in a physical theory to the world, mathematical entities represent physical entities, mathematical structures represent physical structures, and […]