Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) public lecture

Materiality and Computer Art Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science (CPNSS) public lecture Date: Thursday 29 January 2015 Time: 6.30-8pm Venue: Old Theatre, Old Building Speaker: Professor Margaret Boden Professor Boden will explore philosophical issues about art. Are computer artworks physical objects? Do they really qualify as art? Margaret Boden is Research Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Sussex.…

An evolutionary understanding of our bodies throws new light on why we get ill and how to cure disease. Jeremy Taylor reveals compelling insights from the rapidly developing field of Darwinian medicine. Jeremy Taylor has enjoyed a long career in BBC public broadcasting, specialising in science. Now a science writer, this lecture is based on his second book Body by…

This event has been postponed and will no longer take place as advertised.

Abstract: Models are ubiquitous tools in economics and many other fields, though their epistemic status has raised puzzles, such as how models that apparently misrepresent the world can serve our explanatory purposes. Such puzzles seem largely to be an artifact of a misconception of what it means for a model to represent the truth and what it means to acquire knowledge.…

In this lecture Dr Perkins argues that welfare policies which increase the number of children born into disadvantaged households risk proliferating dysfunctional, employment-resistant personality characteristics, due to the damaging effect on personality development of exposure to childhood disadvantage. Adam Perkins is a Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at King’s College London. Kitty Stewart is Associate Professor in the Department of Social…

The modal epistemology I develop aims to describe how scientific models and target systems are related by comparing theoretical properties with world-lines, that is to say to epistemic constructions across possible situations. I suggest that what must be considered as remaining the same from models to real systems is the properties, rather than the structures.

Abstract: Is it possible to revise logic? A number of arguments can be raised that challenge the possibility of such a revision. Some of these arguments rely on the unchanging structure of the world to support the unchanging nature of logic. Other arguments insist that changes in logic would amount to changes in the meaning of the logical constants, with…

Karl Popper, born in 1902, lived and wrote his first texts in Vienna from 1925 to 1935, preceding Logik der Forschung (The Logic of Scientific Discovery) that would make him famous. His youth writings display the setting of this genesis (what the German language designates as a genre per se, an Entstehungsgeschichte). They help retrace the matrixes of new modes of learning and discovery of knowledge in the context of “Red Vienna” school reform, neo-psychological schools of thinkers like his mentor Karl Bühler and, albeit later, the Vienna Circle. Set upon the background of this often studied cosmopolitan and progressive milieu of the end-of-Empire and Interwar Vienna, Popper’s early texts surprisingly remained quite unknown even today. They were accessible only in German. As the translator, editor and commentator of the French version, I will show how the young Popper evolved in his environment, how he was an enthusiastic young thinker preoccupied with social reform, the relationship between pupils and school-masters (as he himself practiced as one of them), the process of memorizing and how to cope with ideas like nation/homeland (one text is about Heimatgedanke) or “rule-learning” through personal experience. The Press of the École Normale Supérieure rue d’Ulm (Paris) thus offered the last stage of publishing Popper’s Works into French and, in my Postface, I strove to set Popper in his original setting and true mindset.