Annual Lecture Series (in-person)
Lunchtime Talks (in-person)
Conferences (in-person)
Online-Only Events
Nicholas Shea (Institute of Philosophy, University of London) and John Krakauer (The Johns Hopkins Hospital Department of Neurology) will participate as our debaters. Abstracts: Nicholas Shea John Krakauer This will be an online only event and will be available live streamed on Zoom & YouTube: https://pitt.zoom.us/j/91614621442 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrRp47ZMXD7NXO3a9Gyh2sg.
Title: An Understanding-First view of Explanation Abstract: Jaegwon Kim wrote once that “the idea of explaining something is inseparable from the idea of making it intelligible; to seek an explanation of something is to seek to understand it, to render it intelligible. These are simple conceptual points, and I take them to be untendentious and […]
Title: True Believers: The Incredulity Hypothesis and the Enduring Legacy of the Obedience Experiments Abstract: Stanley Milgram’s “obedience experiments” are among the most famous studies in social psychology, and perhaps, in all the human sciences. While the experiments have always been controversial, lately, more than 60 years after they were conducted, their place in the […]
Title: Is It the Same Experimental Result? Replication in Physics Abstract: One of the interesting issues in the philosophy of experiment is that of the replicability of experimental results. The scientific community enthusiastically endorses the idea that “Replication – the confirmation of results and conclusions from one study obtained independently in another is considered the […]
Title: What Does Quantum Mechanics Tell Us about Reality? Abstract: Quantum mechanics is admittedly the most difficult subject to understand. Physicists and philosophers, let alone students and laymen, are still puzzled by it today. As Richard Feynman once famously claimed, nobody understood quantum mechanics. The crux of the matter lies in the meaning of the […]
Title: Field notes on the second law of thermodynamics from a quantum physicist Abstract: Thermodynamics reigns as queen of the physical theories, governing everything from biophysics to cosmology. The second law of thermodynamics heads her court, stipulating that time appears to flow in only one direction and limiting engines’ efficiencies. However, idealizations curtail the original […]
Title: On Causal Locality in a Deflationary Account of Quantum Theory Abstract: Quantum theory can be reformulated in terms of old-fashioned configuration spaces and ‘indivisible’ stochastic laws, without a fundamental role for Hilbert spaces, wave functions, density matrices, or even the complex numbers. After reviewing this axiomatically simpler and more transparent formulation, I will argue […]
Title: The Physics of Memory Abstract: Much of the mystery of time arises from the asymmetry of past versus future: not only asymmetries themselves, such as the apparent ‘openness’ of the future and ‘settledness’ of the past, but the ‘passage’ of time – ‘turning’ open future into settled past. In turn, much of the difference […]