War (Forum for Philosophy)
War scars human history and continues to mar lives across the globe. Is war part of human nature? Is it ever morally justified? And with the development of advanced weapon technologies, will future wars be more destructive than ever before? We bring together philosophers, a historian, and a cultural evolutionist to discuss the […]
Liam Kofi Bright (LSE): “The Scientists Qua Scientist Makes No Assertion”
Assertions are, speaking roughly, descriptive statements which purport to describe some fact about the world. Philosophers have given a lot of attention to the idea that assertions come with special norms governing their behaviour. Frequently, in fact, philosophers claim that for something to count as an […]
Catrin Campbell Moore (Bristol): “Imprecise probabilities and undermining scenarios”
Sometimes one ends up in an unfortunate situation when you cannot come to a stable opinion: whatever belief you adopt makes you want to change your mind. I suggest that in such scenarios you should adopt imprecise probabilities.
Sabina Leonelli (Exeter): “Understanding Science from the Data Up”
We live in a data-rich world, and yet diverse views on what constitutes reliable knowledge are proliferating and science is losing credibility as a source of verifiable, empirically grounded understanding of the world. I argue that both the overriding importance attributed to big data and the increasing contestation of […]
Craig Callender (UC, San Diego): “The Flow of Time: Stitching the World Together”
As we navigate through life, we employ a model of time as flowing. Despite its importance to us, physics suggests that this conception of time is fundamentally flawed, dismissing it as an illusion. Before we can dismiss the flow, however, we need to explain the […]
Imagination in Science (Forum for Philosophy)
Science is often mistakenly thought to involved nothing but cold reason. In reality, very human acts of creativity appear everywhere. We explore the role of imaginative thinking in science. Are thought experiments sources of knowledge or just hypotheses? Can a story or narrative also be a scientific explanation? And how should a scientist balance creative […]
John Worrall (LSE): “Evidence-Based Everything (but let’s do the basing properly)” (Exaugural Lecture)
Statements can be significant despite being “statements of the bleedin’ obvious”. The philosopher David Hume’s remark that “The rational man adjusts his beliefs to the evidence” falls exactly into this category. It is surely “bleedin’ obvious” that our views (and hence our policies) ought to be based […]
Matthew Adler (Duke) “The structure of luck prioritarianism”
Matthew D. Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University, and is the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy.
Glen Weyl (Yale/Microsoft): “Radical Markets: Uprooting Capitalism and Democracy for a Just Society”
Many blame today’s economic inequality, stagnation, and political instability on the free market. The solution is to rein in the market, right? We challenge this thinking— as well as most arguments in favor of and against markets. We offer new, but historically rooted, ways to […]
Simon Beard (Cambridge): “Risk, Relevance and the Aggregation of Competing Claims View”
Alex Voorhoeve has developed his Competing Claims view as a way of mediating between, and quantifying, our pro and anti-segregationist leanings concerning the evaluating of consequences, especially in relation to distributive fairness. Voorhoeve however has declined to consider the implications of this view for how we […]
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