Rotman members kicked off the new year with a busy month of activities. New publications, conference presentations, media appearances, and other news are all listed below in alphabetical order.

An article on sports ethics, Competing Interests: The team doctor’s dual loyalty problem, published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal included commentary by Samantha Brennan.

Samantha Brennan presented her talk “The Structure of Thresholds for Options,” at the Eighth Annual Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics in Tucson, Arizona, on January 13th.

Samantha Brennan participated in a reddit AMA (ask me anything) on January 25th as part of a series of AMAs by professional philosophers. She answered questions on normative ethics and feminist ethics during the very busy session — there were a total of 531 comments. The AMA session is now closed, but you can view the comments here.

Samantha Brennan’s Ethics at Noon talk,“Ethics and Our Early Years: Making Decisions for Children as if Childhood Really Mattered,” will take place at 12:00pm on Wednesday, February 1st at the University of Toronto Centre for Ethics.

Louis Charland and Kyoko Wada presented a talk titled, “Capacity to Consent to MAID” at the conference Medical Aid in Dying (MAID) for Persons Living with Mental Illness at the University of Toronto on January 29th.

Mike Cuffaro will be giving a talk titled “Quantum Reflections on Computational Complexity,” for the Inter-University Workshop on History and Philosophy of Mathematics, in Montreal, on February 13th.

Justin Donhauser presented a paper, “Adapting to Climate Change in the City: On Building Facilitative Institutions,” at the 2017 American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting (Baltimore). He also chaired two International Society for Environmental Ethics sessions at the APA meeting.

A recent blog post written by Nicole Fice, Cory Goldstein, and Austin Horn was re-printed in the latest issue of Western News. See Forgotten role of reproductive justice in Zika crisis in Western News.

Molly Kao was interviewed in the latest issue of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science (CSHPS) Communiqué. (Note this interview is in French.)

A new online course on Scientific Realism featuring Rotman member Stathis Psillos is now available on YouTube. The videos are presented by Eidyn, an advanced research centre at the University of Edinburgh, based in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences.

A paper by Emma Ryman and Rotman alumna Katy Fuller, “The Patient-Worker: A Model for Human Research Subjects and Gestational Surrogates” was recently published in Developing World Bioethics.

Emma Ryman will be a visiting scholar this semester at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University.

Chris Smeenk was a guest speaker at the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada London Centre monthly meeting at the Cronyn Observatory on January 20th. He delivered a talk titled, “Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity”.

Chris Smeenk delivered an invited talk at the University of Cincinnati titled, “Measurement and Content” on January 27th.

A CBC News article on the relationship between science and government, Trump’s moves against science raise fears of damage to economy, included commentary from Chris Smeenk.

Valerie Lynn Therrien gave a presentation titled, “Wittgenstein and the Labyrinth of ‘Actual Infinity’: The Critique of Transfinite Set Theory” at Entia et Nomina at the University of Warsaw, Poland on 5-9 September 2016.

Valerie Lynn Therrien gave a talk titled, “Inventing Logic: The Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem and First- and Second-Order Logic” at the 2016 Western Canadian Philosophical Association at the University of Alberta, Canada on 28-30 October 2016.

Valerie Lynn Therrien gave a talk titled, “Wittgenstein and ἄπειρον in mathematics” at the International Conference 2400 Aristotle, University of Bucharest, Romania on 25-26 November 2016.

Pictured above (clockwise): Samantha Brennan prepares for her reddit AMA, a photo from Tucson Samantha Brennan took during her trip to attend the Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics, Stathis Psillos in the video series on scientific realism, and an illustration of the Zika virus (by Grace Hsu) that accompanied the Western news article by Nicole Fice, Cory Goldstein, and Austin Horn.