Latest Past Events
Joel Lexchin: Those Who Have the Gold Make the Evidence: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Clinical Trials
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, LondonABSTRACT Pharmaceutical companies fund the bulk of clinical research and this funding can introduce biases into the research through methods such as influencing the choice of standards of comparison, only publishing positive trials, reinterpreting data submitted to regulatory agencies, ghostwriting, and the use of “seeding” trials. There is no evidence that any of the measures [...]
Bas van Fraassen: The Semantic Approach to Science, After 50 Years
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, LondonABSTRACT The 1960s saw many revolutions, worldwide, and some of that epoch’s revolutionary spirit manifested itself in philosophy of science, with strong reactions against the dominant ‘received view’ of Logical Positivism. Scientific realism emerged to dispute ontology, Kuhn single-handedly turned our eyes back to history of science, and the semantic approach replaced the methodological framework [...]
Bas van Fraassen: The Self, From a Logical Point of View
Great Hall - Somerville House Somerville House, Western University, LondonABSTRACT Our sense of self is readily extrapolated to engender paradoxes, but that sense is not easily dismissed even when the logical aporiai are exposed. What Kant called the illusions of reason beckon here, but their false promises may be shown up if we subject the possibility of ‘objective’ scientific accounts of ourselves to a [...]