Brad Weslake (NYU-Shanghai) will be giving a talk entitled “Selection, Drift, and Non-Causal Explanation” on Friday, November 7th. The talk will be held from 4:00-6:00pm in Waverly 566B, 24 Waverly Place** (NYU). The abstract for his talk is below. Hope to see you all there!
“Selection, Drift, and Non-Causal Explanation”
Brad Weslake, NYU-Shanghai
Marc Lange has recently argued that selection explanations are causal and drift explanations are non-causal. I argue that the reasons Lange gives for the claim that drift explanations are non-causal also entail that a certain class of selection explanations are non-causal. I then evaluate Lange’s account of the distinction between causal and non-causal explanations, and argue that we should recognise a class of explanations that are partly causal and partly non-causal, in a sense I will describe.
There will be a dinner after the talk. If you are interested, please email nyphilsci@gmail.com as soon as possible so that I can make the reservation for the appropriate number of people (please note that only the speaker’s dinner will be covered). If you have any other questions, please email nyphilsci@gmail.com.
Relativity, Causality and Natural Selection
In this talk I’ll present an alternative causal structure for biological evolution. First the causalist and statisticalist perspectives on evolutionary fitness are analyzed, finding them to implicitly depend on each other, and hence cannot be individually fundamental. I argue that this can be seen as an instance of a relativistic perspective over evolutionary phenomena and, therefore, insoluble. New accounts of fitness, the struggle for life, and Natural Selection are developed under this interpretation. This biological relativism is unique in that it draws from General Relativity in physics, unlike previous theories that drew upon statistical mechanics or Newtonian dynamics. Some consequences of this relativism, like a mathematical law of evolutionary change, as well as new theoretical biological concepts to underpin it, are discussed. The law and theory are then applied to give examples of how cannon and problems within evolutionary theory and biology can be understood using these new methods.
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People from outside NYU: if this is your *first* time coming to the seminar, let them know so we can make sure you will have access to the building.
*~*~* Beer is $2. Bring CHANGE *~*~*
Louise Hanson (Cambridge) “The Real Problem with Evolutionary Debunking Arguments”
Monday February 1st, 1pm Location: 5 Washington Place, Room 202
http://nyip.as.nyu.edu/page/public-events
http://philosophy.fas.nyu.edu/object/2016.02.01.Hanson
Tentative Schedule for MAPS, 2016 Spring (more details soon):
Aprili 12. 4:30-6:30pm @ NYU. Laura Franklin-Hall (NYU). Topic: TBA.
Apr 26. 4:30-6:30pm @ NYU Silver 621. Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv). Topic: Many-Worlds QM.
May 10. 3:00-6:30pm @ NYU. Mini Workshop on Philosophy of Physics: (1) Elizabeth Miller (Yale) & Ned Hall (Harvard), and (2) Angelo Bassi (Trieste). Topics: TBA.
The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present a discussion between Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay, and Frank Ruda which will revolve around Comay and Ruda’s book The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing.
Event information
In The Dash—The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (MIT Press, 2018), the authors present a reading of Hegel’s most reviled concept, absolute knowing. Their book sets out from a counterintuitive premise: the “mystical shell” of Hegel’s system proves to be its most “rational kernel.” Hegel’s radicalism is located precisely at the point where his thought seems to regress most. Most current readings try to update Hegel’s thought by pruning back his grandiose claims to “absolute knowing,” but Comay and Ruda invert this deflationary gesture by inflating what seems to be most trivial: the truth of the absolute is grasped only in the minutiae of its most mundane appearances. What if everything turns out to hinge on the most inconspicuous and trivial detail—a punctuation mark?
About the speakers
Slavoj Žižek, is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a visiting professor at a number of American Universities (Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York University, University of Michigan). He obtained his Ph.D. in Philosophy in Ljubljana studying Psychoanalysis. He also studied at the University of Paris. Slavoj Zizek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and Marxist social analyst. He is the author of The Indivisible Remainder, The Sublime Object of Ideology, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Looking Awry: Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, The Plague of Fantasies, and The Ticklish Subject. His latest publications are Disparities, and Antigone (both at Bloomsbury Press, London).
Rebecca Comay, is Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Other publications include Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, 2011) and Hegel and Resistance, co-ed with Bart Zandtvoort (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Frank Ruda, is Senior Lecturer for Philosophy at the University of Dundee, UK. Other publications include: Reading Marx (with Slavoj Žižek and Agon Hamza)(Polity, 2018); Abolishing Freedom: A Plea for A Contemporary Use of Fatalism (Nebraska UP, 2016); For Badiou: Idealism without Idealism (Northwestern UP, 2015).
Attendance information
Events at Deutsches Haus are free of charge. If you would like to attend this event, please send us an email to deutscheshaus.rsvp@nyu.edu. Space at Deutsches Haus is limited, please arrive ten minutes prior to the event. Thank you!
“A Dash of Hegel: A Discussion with Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay, and Frank Ruda” is a DAAD supported event.