Wayne Myrvold About a month ago, I did a guest post over at New APPS that was prompted by philosophers’ responses to Neil de Grasse Tyson’s dismissive remarks about philosophy. Unsurprisingly, attitudes towards philosophy vary widely among physicists, and there are plenty of physicists who have a much more positive attitude towards philosophy. Some of [...]
I've done a guest post, over at New APPS: What Neil deGrasse Tyson got right. Wayne Myrvold.
Rotman's Visiting Fellow, Dr. Douglas Kutach will be presenting a talk on March 26th at 1:30-3:00pm in Somerville House room 3355. For his final talk in his three part series, he will be speaking about Influencing The Past. Further information on Douglas Kutach can be found here: http://sagaciousmatter.org/ Abstract In the final installment of this [...]
by Wayne Myrvold Rotman Institute Post-doctoral Fellow in Philosophy of Science Kerry McKenzie has published a review of Colin McGinn's book, Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics in Mind. To my mind, the review is of interest not only for what it says about the book in question, but for the larger questions it [...]
by Yann Benétreau-Dupin and Chris Smeenk Contemporary cosmology raises a number of philosophical questions, such as the limits of scientific explanations of the origin of the universe and the status of “dark energy” or the “multiverse.” Philosophers have recently turned to these topics, due to their intrinsic interest and the influx of new ideas [...]
Here's the third lecture from the Rotman Summer Institute on Foundations of Statistical Mechanics from July 14-20, 2013. Lots more to come. In this lecture, David Wallace discusses statistical mechanics and its machinery. As he notes, it's easy to get the impression, from looking at philosophical and foundational literature on statistical mechanics, that the primary [...]
Leading scholars in feminist phenomenology are coming to Western University to participate in the Future Directions in Feminist Phenomenology conference, organized by Helen Fielding (Philosophy/Women's Studies) and sponsored in part by the Rotman Institute. The conference opened today, May 23, and will continue until May 25. Prior to the conference start, graduate students in philosophy, [...]
We are beginning to realize that weare more lost than we previously thought. -Harry Martinson, Aniara 13. It is somewhat surprising that two of my favorite books, one being von Wright’s Vetenskapen och förnuftet and the other the Nobel laureate Harry Martinson’s Aniara, both have a very negative view of the future of humankind. Aniara [...]
In 2012, the Rotman Institute of Philosophy provided Rotman Doctoral Entrance Scholarships, valued at $10,000, to two incoming PhD students with a proposed research focus related to philosophy of science. Rotman Doctoral Entrance Scholars are selected on the basis of exceptional academic merit, high research potential, and a record of engaging the public through service and [...]
In March 2013 the German Society for Philosophy of Science/Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP) held its first meeting. It is somewhat of a sociological puzzle why a country with such a rich tradition in philosophy of science did not have (up until now, that is) a society dedicated to the field. The overarching conference theme was How [...]
