Philosophy of Science

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    Jonathan Livengood (University of Illinois): “Back to the Rubbish Bin: Experimental Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Causation”

Jonathan Livengood (University of Illinois): “Back to the Rubbish Bin: Experimental Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Causation”

12 March 2019|

 

Jonathan Livengood (University of Illinois): “Back to the Rubbish Bin: Experimental Philosophy and the Metaphysics of Causation”
For at least the last fifty years, philosophical research on causation has relied heavily on judgments about cases. We are asked to consider cases such as when Billy and Suzy throw rocks—one right after another—at a window and the window breaks, […]

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    Liam Kofi Bright (LSE): “The Scientists Qua Scientist Makes No Assertion”

Liam Kofi Bright (LSE): “The Scientists Qua Scientist Makes No Assertion”

15 January 2019|

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 […]

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    Sabina Leonelli (Exeter): “Understanding Science from the Data Up”

Sabina Leonelli (Exeter): “Understanding Science from the Data Up”

26 October 2018|

 

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 […]

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    Craig Callender (UC, San Diego): “The Flow of Time: Stitching the World Together”

Craig Callender (UC, San Diego): “The Flow of Time: Stitching the World Together”

26 October 2018|

 

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 […]

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Imagination in Science (Forum for Philosophy)

24 October 2018|

 

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 […]

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    John Worrall (LSE): “Evidence-Based Everything (but let’s do the basing properly)” (Exaugural Lecture)

John Worrall (LSE): “Evidence-Based Everything (but let’s do the basing properly)” (Exaugural Lecture)

19 October 2018|

 

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 […]

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Matt Farr (Cambridge): “The C Theory of Time”

30 April 2018|

 

Matt Farr (Cambridge): “The C Theory of Time”

Does time have a direction? Intuitively, it does. After all, our experiences, our thoughts, even our scientific explanations of phenomena are time-directed: things evolve from earlier to later, and it would seem unnecessary and indeed odd to try to expunge such talk from our philosophical lexicon. Nevertheless, in this talk […]

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John D. Norton (Pittsburgh): “The Infinite Lottery”

24 April 2018|

 

John D. Norton (Pittsburgh): “The Infinite Lottery”

An infinite lottery machine induces a non-standard inductive logic that turns out to be the same logic appropriate to a problem in inductive inference arising in present theories of eternal inflation.

John D. Norton is Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh, and author of the […]

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    Tudor M Baetu (Bristol): “Pain in Psychology, Biology and Medicine. Implications for Eliminativist and Physicalist Accounts” (BSPS Lecture)

Tudor M Baetu (Bristol): “Pain in Psychology, Biology and Medicine. Implications for Eliminativist and Physicalist Accounts” (BSPS Lecture)

12 March 2018|

 

Tudor M Baetu (Bristol): “Pain in Psychology, Biology and Medicine. Implications for Eliminativist and Physicalist Accounts” (BSPS Lecture)

An analysis of arguments for pain eliminativism reveals two significant points of divergence between assumptions underlying scientific research on pain and assumptions typically endorsed by physicalist accounts. The first concerns the status of the term ‘pain’, which is an […]

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The Evolution of Altruism (Forum for Philosophy)

24 February 2018|

 

The Evolution of Altruism (Forum for Philosophy))

If evolution is a ‘struggle for existence’, why do we witness so much altruism in nature? From bacteria to baboons, the natural world is full of spectacular examples of organisms cooperating with one another. In the early 1960s, W. D. Hamilton changed the way we think about how such behaviour […]

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