Annual Lecture Series (in-person)
Lunchtime Talks (in-person)
Conferences (in-person)
Online-Only Events
Title: Aphantasia, unsymbolized thinking and conscious thoughts Abstract: According to a common view, conscious thoughts necessarily involve mental images. This is alleged to be the case not only when one entertains conscious thoughts about perceptible things like cats or waterfalls, but also when one thinks about more abstract things, like the nature of concepts. In […]
Title: Pattern Finding and Pattern Making Abstract: Human beings are proficient pattern finders (e.g., scientific laws), and pattern makers (e.g., art, architecture, political systems). According to philosophical tradition, going back at least to Aristotle, these different capacities are made possible by fundamentally distinct cognitive competencies: theoretical vs. practical reason. But some of our most effective […]
Title: The Bearable Thinness of Being: A Pragmatist Metaphysics of Affordances Abstract: Taking a pragmatist stance toward the practices and products of science shapes our answers to central philosophical questions. I will explicate how scientists’ conceptual and representational practices work in concert with their observational and experimental ones to stabilize acceptance of claims of scientific […]
Title: A Metaphysical Mapping Problem for Race Theorists and Human Population Geneticists Abstract. In this talk, I identify and clarify a mapping phenomenon that’s almost twenty years old. The phenomenon is that the populations at a fivefold subdivision of humans into biological populations—the so-called human continental populations—correspond one-to-one with the five official races of the […]
Formal and Experimental Philosophy Workshop In recent years there has been an explosion of work in both formal and experimental philosophy, as well as a growing number of researchers who are working at their intersection. This includes a broad tent of topics: the psychology of decision and moral judgment; the rationality of reasoning under uncertainty; the role of […]
Title: Essentially Dynamic Concepts Abstract: Important biological concepts often display unruly behavior: there is consensus that they designate something important, but not how that 'something' should be defined, identified, or theorized—and the set of options changes over time. My talk will present an ongoing effort to make sense of this general phenomenon. First I sketch a […]
GPP Final Conference KNOWLEDGE, WISDOM, AND UNDERSTANDING OCTOBER 13-15, 2022 The Geography of Philosophy Project (GPP) celebrates the conclusion of its investigation into the themes of Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding with a final conference discussing its themes. research, and impact. For the GPP Final Conference, the project PIs Edouard Machery, Stephen Stich, and Clark Barrett […]
Rules Made to be Broken: Calibrating Climate Proxies Abstract: Philosophical analysis of measurement in scientific practice often focuses on the development and use of measurement standards. However, when it comes to proxy measurements in climate science---e.g. indicators such as tree rings that are used to reconstruct past climate variables like temperature---scientists develop measurement standards only […]
Title: Heterodox scientists: A sliver of hope for our increasingly conformist times? Abstract: Nowadays we all face tremendous pressures to conform to domineering narratives. This holds for science as much as for politics. Recent exposés of the silencing of scientific ideas—alternative public health policies during the COVID-19 pandemic and alternatives to the amyloid plaque explanation […]
Title: Discovery in Synthetic Biology: A Call for Doing Philosophy in Science Abstract: The work of synthetic biologists strikes some as strange and foreign (Keller 2009). Synthetic biologists are in the business of exploring a range of biological possibilities rarely sampled by the nature world – or the world outside the lab (Malaterre 2013).  In this talk, I’ll argue that a common logical structure characterizes the mode of discovery adopted by many research […]
Title: Stating structural realism: mathematics-first approaches to physics and metaphysics Abstract: I respond to the frequent objection that structural realism fails to sharply state an alternative to the standard predicate-logic, object / property / relation, way of doing metaphysics. The approach I propose is based on what I call a `math-first' approach to physical theories […]