June 2016 Member News and Updates

During this past month, Rotman members have organised, and taken part in many conferences. Those that included participation by more than one member are listed chronologically below:

• The Rotman Institute was a co-sponsor of the fifteenth annual Philosophy of Logic, Math and Physics (LMP) graduate student conference, held on June 9-10, here at Western University. This year’s keynote speaker was James Ladyman (University of Bristol), and the winner of the 2016 Clifton Memorial book prize was Neil Dewar (Oxford University). Conference organizers included Adam Koberinski (chair), Melissa Jacquart, Nathan Moore, Tom De Saegher, Philippos Papagiannopoulos, Marie Gueguen, Yousuf Hasan, and Peter Verveniotis (from Western’s Department of Philosophy). Congratulations to all of the organisers on a wonderful conference!

• Information-Theoretic Interpretations of Quantum Mechanics, the 20th annual UWO philosophy of physics conference, was held in conjunction with LMP, on June 11-12. The workshop was inspired by Jeffrey Bub’s recently published book Bananaworld: Quantum Mechanics for Primates (Oxford University Press); it brought together diverse views on issues raised by and related to Professor Bub’s work on developing an information-theoretic interpretation of quantum theory. Conference organizers included Markus Müller, Lucas Dunlap, Michael Cuffaro, and Wayne Myrvold (from Western’s Department of Philosophy).

• The International Network on Feminist Approaches to Bioethics (FAB) held the FAB 2016 World Congress in Edinburgh on June 13-15. Two Rotman members, and one alumna gave talks at the conference:

  Nicole Fice Health Care Inequalities Faced by Indigenous Canadians.

  Carolyn McLeod Conscientious refusals: a feminist fiduciary analysis.

  Angel Petropanagos The care conundrum: a personal support worker’s reflections on caring for persons with dementia and Frozen hope: understanding the role of hope in fertility preservation.

• Three Rotman members, and two alumni, participated in the Society for Philosophy of Science in Practice (SPSP) 2016 Conference, held June 17-19 in Glassboro, New Jersey.

  Spencer Hey and James Overton Disease and Diagnosis in Psychiatry and Medicine Explanatory Agnosticism In Translational Medicine

  Jamie Shaw Grappling with History The Search For Kuhn-loss: A New Strategy For HPS

  Jessey Wright Meta-analyses In Neuroimaging: Integrating Data To Achieve Construct Stability

  Derek Oswick Ensuring Objective Validity: Functional Triangulation In Neuroscience And The Effects Of Social Biases

• HOPOS 2016, the eleventh biennial meeting of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, was held in Minneapolis on June 22-25. It included talks from seven members of the Rotman Institute: Justin Bzovy, Michael Cuffaro, Craig Fox, Yousuf Hasan, Benjamin Hill, Henrik Lagerlund, and Jamie Shaw. (Further details about their talks can be found here.)

In addition to these conferences, we have announcements of publications and other activities of individual Rotman members, listed alphabetically below.

• Samantha Brennan wrote a blog post about her time in Vadstena, Sweden on June 7-9 at the Children’s Rights: origins, normativity, transformations and prospects conference where she delivered a talk titled “Wellbeing and Autonomy: The Balancing Act of Children’s Rights“.

• An article by Craig Fox titled “The Newtonian Equivalence Principle: How the relativity of acceleration led Newton to the equivalence of inertial and gravitational mass” was published in Philosophy of Science.

• Yousuf Hasan gave a talk titled “Quine’s Flight from ‘Analyticity’: Reassessing his Empirical Challenge to Carnap” at the Society for Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy 2016 Annual Meeting on June 18 in Denver. (Video of the discussion period from this talk can be seen here.)

• An article by Joshua Luczak titled “On How to Approach the Approach to Equilibrium” was published in Philosophy of Science.

• David Hakim will give a talk titled “Kant on Moral Appraisal and Illusion” at the 9th Annual St Andrews Kant Reading Party on July 3-6.

• Stathis Psillos was a keynote speaker at The Inaugural Conference of the East European Network for Philosophy of Science (EENPS 2016), held June 24-26 at the New Bulgarian University in Sofia. His talk was titled, “From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence: Re-thinking the Pessimistic Induction“.

• Jamie Shaw will present a talk titled “The Search for Kuhn-loss: A New Strategy for HPS” at the 2016 British Society for the Philosophy of Science Annual Conference on July 7-8 at Cardiff University.

• An article by Jacqueline Sullivan titled “Stabilizing Constructs through Collaboration across Different Research Fields as a Way to Foster the Integrative Approach of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Project” was published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

• Another article by Jacqueline Sullivan titled “Construct Stabilization and the Unity of the Mind-Brain Sciences” was published in Philosophy of Science.

• Jacqueline Sullivan was a keynote speaker at the Causality and the Mind-Brain Sciences conference held on June 27-29 at Aarhus University in Denmark. She delivered a talk titled “Experimentation and Explanation in the Mind-Brain Sciences“.

Pictured above (clockwise): Lion statue in Vadstena, Sweden taken by Samantha Brennan, reception at the LMP conference, ITIQM swag, Rotman members at HOPOS 2016 (left to right: Justin Bzovy, Jamie Shaw, Henrik Lagerlund, Benjamin Hill) , Stathis Psillos at EENPS 2016, Jackie Sullivan at CitS.