Postdoctoral Fellow Rachael Brown's "Three Kinds of Structuralism" has been accepted for presentation at the Philosophy of Biology at Madison Workshop (POBAM) https://sites.google.com/site/uwpobam/.
Join us this January 24th, for the first talk of the new year at a Rotman special event. Stathis Psillos will revisit this controversy, analyse the wider context in which it took place, examine the role of history of science in the defence of a realist approach to science and draw some significant lessons for the [...]
Check out Michela Massimi's talk on Prespectival Realism: The talk was part of the Rotman Lecture Series (Nov 8th, 2013)
Before the lecture, Professor Oreskes sat for an interview with Martin Vezér. In this video, she discusses topics in the philosophy of climate science, including issues in the epistemology and of science, history of climate science, the politics of climate change, and other subjects related to her (and Eric Conway’s) book, Merchants of Doubt. After [...]
Dr. Oreskes' talk can now be viewed on our youtube page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgKAetJwZjc
“In a modern world where we can travel the globe in hours, connect with one another from wherever we are, achieve remarkable advances in healthcare and physically explore our universe, it is easy to take science for granted,” said Carl Hoefer, the new Director of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy. “But it is essential that [...]
Here's the sixth lecture from the Rotman Summer Institute on Foundations of Statistical Mechanics from July 14-20, 2013. Lots more to come. In this lecture Albert discusses the problems arising from the fact that classical statistical mechanics assumes the time-reversal symmetric Newtonian dynamics. Albert begins with a discussion of how the evolutions of microscopic states [...]
Here's the fifth lecture from the Rotman Summer Institute on Foundations of Statistical Mechanics from July 14-20, 2013. Lots more to come. In this lecture, John Norton presents an analysis of how Einstein came to the argument for light behaving in some contexts as quanta, which Einstein himself calls a "very revolutionary" argument among his [...]
Here's the fourth lecture from the Rotman Summer Institute on Foundations of Statistical Mechanics from July 14-20, 2013. Lots more to come. In this lecture, Jos Uffink continues his earlier discussion of some of the prehistory of the kinetic theory of gases and statistical mechanics. First, Uffink discusses precursors to the kinetic theory of gases, [...]
Here's the second lecture from the Rotman Summer Institute on Foundations of Statistical Mechanics from July 14-20, 2013. Lots more to come. This is the first of three lectures in which Jos Uffink provides a discussion of the development and historical foundations of thermodynamics. This first lecture covers the prehistory, beginning with a discussion of [...]
