We’d like to start off this post by sharing some exciting news from Becky Ellis and John Lehmann. Becky (supervised by Tony Weis) defended her PhD thesis tilted “Pollinator People: an ethnography of bees, bee advocates, and possibilities for multispecies commoning in Toronto and London,ON” on April 15th via Zoom and John (supervised by Robert DiSalle) defended his PhD thesis titled “Theories: Reconsidering Ramsey in the Philosophy of Science” on April 27th via Zoom. Another piece of exciting news this month comes from Angela Mendelovici. Angela was awarded the Graham and Gale Wright Award for 2021-22. This award recognizes the prominent contributions of internationally-recognized researchers in their field, which for Angela includes the publication of her book, “The Phenomenal Basis of Intentionality” Congratulations, Becky, John and Angela on these wonderful achievements!
In April, we had the pleasure of virtually hosting two wonderful speakers. On April 1, Marie Gueguen gave a 30 minute presentation titled “Taming the Uncertainty Monster: Lessons from Astrochemistry” as part of the Emerging Minds Colloquium Series. Later in the month geneticist Eva Jablonka (Tel Aviv University) gave a virtual talk titled “Inheritance Systems and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis”. Thank you to our invited speakers for the thought-provoking talks!
All other news & announcements from our members are listed below in alphabetical order.
Adam Koberinski started a (virtual) visiting fellowship at the University of Bonn. He will be the Heinrich Hertz visiting fellow from April-July. Adam gave a talk titled “How effective is inflation?” at the University of Bonn’s History and Philosophy of Physics Speaker Series and gave another talk titled “Constructing effective field theories in particle physics” at the University of Washington’s Constructing Quantum Theories Workshop.
MAPS Canada has released a new podcast that aims to highlight influential scientists, historians, and other eminent researchers at the front lines of the psychedelic renaissance. Jaipreet Mattu helped with the production of the podcast and it is hosted by Sid Rankaduwa. The podcast is available on Spotify, iTunes and Google Play.
Carlo Rovelli took part in a talk put together by Premio Cosmos alongside Brian Greene, discussing Brian’s book “Until the End of Time”. Carlo was featured on an episode of CBC Ideas discussing that time does not exist and that humans may be the universe’s only real time machine.
Jamie Shaw had two publications come out. “Feyerabend, funding, and the freedom of science: the case of traditional Chinese medicine“, and “Duhem on Good Sense and Theory Pursuit: From Virtue to Social Epistemology“. Jamie also co-organized 3 roundtables. The videos for these roundtables can be found on the Philosophy of Science India Youtube channel.
Anthony Skelton and Lisa Forsberg wrote a blog post arguing that we as a society owe it to children to mandate their vaccination against COVID-19. The post was published on the Practical Ethics blog, of the University of Oxford and cross-posted on our blog.
Chris Smeenk gave a talk titled “Cosmological Constants” as part of the Kinds of Constants workshop organized by the University of Edinburgh. Chris also gave a philosophy department talk titled “Eliminative Reasoning and its Limits”, which was followed by a post-talk for graduate students.
Max Smith was a guest on TVO’s The Agenda discussing Ontario’s vaccine plan and how the province can address inequity in its COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Max also took part in a webinar “Mandating Covid-19 Vaccination Certificates and Passports: Benefits, Risks, and Challenges” organized by Fondation Brocher. Max’s WHO Ethics & COVID-19 Working Group published a new policy brief titled “COVID-19 and mandatory vaccination: Ethical considerations and caveats” discussing if COVID-19 vaccinations should be mandatory and if so, under what conditions and in what contexts.
Charles Weijer gave a talk titled “Ethical Issues Conducting Research in the COVID-19 Pandemic” as part of the CDTRP 2021 webinar series “Diversifying Your Research”. Charles provided commentary on why challenge trials may not speed up vaccine development on an episode of Bloomberg’s Quicktake that debated whether or not it is ethical, or even possible, that deliberately exposing healthy volunteers to harmful pathogens would mean faster vaccine research for everyone.
Pictured above: Eva Jablonka during her talk; Marie Gueguen during her virtual presentation; Charles Weijer during an episode of Bloomberg’s Quicktake.
