As the month of September ends, we have officially welcomed the start of fall and two additional postdoctoral fellows to the institute. Please join us in welcoming Mike Cuffaro and Kyoko Wada. For a chance to learn more about their backgrounds and research interests, stay tuned for the series of postdoc interviews we’ll begin publishing next month on our blog.
Please also join us in congratulating Charles Weijer (pictured above), who was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. RSC Fellows are peer-elected scholars recognized for their contributions to the arts, humanities, and sciences.
Rotman members have been busy this month, with new publications, conferences, media outreach, and more. September news and updates are listed below in alphabetical order:
- Samantha Brennan and Rotman alumna Jennifer Epp have a forthcoming handbook entry titled, “Sexuality and Childhood,” in The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children by Gideon Calder (Editor), Jurgen De Wispelaere (Editor), Anca Gheaus (Editor).
- Samantha Brennan organized a panel on Shay Welch’s book Existential Eroticism at the Society for Analytical Feminism Conference in Lowell, Massachusetts on September 16-18. Panelists included Western’s Tracy Isaacs, Tempest Henning and Anita Superson.
- A recent story in the New York Times, Chris Bosh’s Desire to Play Leaves Heat at an Ethical Crossroads, included comments from Samantha Brennan on the ethical considerations of whether or not the NBA player should be permitted to play basketball despite his health problems.
- This month, Justin Donhauser began meeting with, and interviewing, representatives from relief organizations and other community outreach organizations around Lake Erie (mostly in London and Buffalo) to get data for a multi-project initiative that examines how to best realize ‘facilitative’ institutional responses to climate change losses and damages in North American citites. These are the first steps in the pilot project of the Facilitative Climate Change Response Working Group, in addition to advancement of the sociopolitical aims of the Geofunctions Project.
- Justin Donhauser attended the 2016 Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference on September 9-10, hosted by the SUNY Buffalo Department of Philosophy.
- Lucas Dunlap participated in the XIX International Summer School in Philosophy of Physics: MANY-WORLDS INTERPRETATIONS: Quantum mechanics, metaphysics and cosmology at University of Urbino on September 5-8.
- Lucas Dunlap gave an invited talk titled “Metaphysics of D-CTCs: On the Underlying Assumptions of Deutsch’s Quantum Solution to the Paradoxes of Time Travel” at the Center for Logic and Analytic Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven in Belgium.
- At the 2nd Annual Society for the Metaphysics of Science conference held September 15-17 at University of Geneva, Lucas Dunlap gave a talk titled, “Information-Theoretic Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics and Ontic Structural Realism”.
- Lucas Dunlap participated in the Grounding the Quantum World workshop at University of Neuchâtel on September 19.
- Erlantz Etxeberria presented a talk titled, “Can Models Explain?” at the 2nd Potuguese Congress of Philosophy celebrated on September 8-9 at the University of Porto (Portugal).
- Jaclyn Lanthier recently published a book review of Outside Color: Perceptual Science and the Puzzle of Color in Philosophy by Mazviita Chirimuuta in Dialogue.
- Stathis Psillos has two new papers on the Philsci-Archive — “The Realist Turn in the Philosophy of Science” and “Tolstoy’s argument: realism and the history of science” were both published this month.
- The Robarts Research Institute is hosting a new speakers series exploring philosophy of science — the Philosophy of Science Café. This month’s talk, “The Replication Crisis in the Mind-Brain Sciences: What’s at Stake?” was given on September 27th by Jackie Sullivan. Previous talks were given this summer by Chris Smeenk and Bill Harper.
- Charles Weijer and Rotman alumnus Andrew Peterson were co-authors on a new publication in the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, Assessing Decision-Making Capacity in Patients with Communication Impairments: A Case Study.
- Tony Weis wrote an article in the Sept/Oct issue of Radical Philosophy titled, Towards 120 billion: Dietary change and animal lives.
- In November, Tony Weis will be appearing as an expert witness — focusing on environmental dimensions of industrial pig farming — in the trial of animal rights activist Anita Krajnc, who tried to give water to pigs in a tractor-trailer bound for a pork processing plant. Krajnc’s legal team intends to use virtual reality headsets during the trial “… to expose the conditions faced by farm animals heading to the slaughter.”
