Calendar – Blog of Noah Greenstein

Rutgers-Columbia Undergraduate Philosophy Conference @ Rutgers Philosophy Dept

Tickets

Apr 6 all-day

Rutgers-Columbia Undergraduate Philosophy Conference

Saturday, April 06, 2019, 09:30am – 06:00pm

TBA

Location Rutgers Philosophy Department, 106 Somerset St, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA

Categories: Rutgers Tags: conference

May

3

Fri

Rutgers Epistemology Conference 2019 @ Hyatt Regency, Conference rm. BC

Tickets

May 3 – May 4 all-day

The REC is a pre-read conference. The papers will be made available on April 15.

Friday, May 3, 2019

1:30 – 3:15 pm

Alex Byrne (MIT)

Chair: TBD

Coffee Break

3:45 – 5:30 pm

Susanna Rinard (Harvard)

Chair: TBD

Dinner

7:30 – 9:15 pm

Jonathan Kvanvig (Washington University St Louis)

Chair: TBD

Reception 9:30 – 11:00 PM

Saturday, May 4, 2019

9:30 – 11:15 am

Anil Gupta (University of Pittsburgh)

Chair: TBD

Coffee Break

11:45 – 1:30 pm Winner of the Young Epistemologist Prize

TBD

Chair: TBD

Lunch

2:45 – 4:30 pm

Maria Lasonen-Aarnio (University of Helsinki)

Chair: TBD

Discussants

Heather Battaly (University of Connecticut)

John Bengson (University of Wisconsin-Madison)

Annalisa Coliva (University of California Irvine)

Thomas Kelly (Princeton)

Participants

Chris Copan, Andy Egan, Megan Feeney, Peter Klein, Matthew McGrath, Susanna Schellenberg, Ernie Sosa

The REC is a pre-read conference, so papers are to be read in advance. There is no registration fee for the conference, but please notify Megan Feeney, the conference manager, if you plan to attend by sending an email to rutgersepistemologyconference@gmail.com. If you wish to participate in the meals, please send a check made out to “Rutgers University” to Megan Feeney by April 15 ($80 if you are a faculty member or a postdoc; $60 if you are a graduate student or an undergraduate): Megan Feeney; Rutgers Epistemology Conference; 106 Somerset St, 5th Floor; New Brunswick, NJ 08901.

Categories: Rutgers Tags: conference epistemology

May

16

Thu

Conference in Honor of Jerry Fodor @ Academic Building, Room 1180, Rutgers

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May 16 – May 17 all-day

Thursday, May 16th

9:00-9:30 am	Breakfast (Provided)
9:30-9:45 am	Opening Remarks, James Swenson, Vice Provost for Academic Affairs
9:45-10:45 am	Session 1 – Tom Bever, “Foundational cognitive science themes that Jerry explored”
10:45-11:00 am	Coffee Break
11:00 am – Noon	Session 2 – Rochel Gelman, “Innate learning and beyond: The case of number”
Noon – 2:30 pm	Lunch (Not provided, see below for options)
2:30-3:30 pm	Session 3 – Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, “What Jerry and I got right about what Darwin got wrong”
3:30-3:45 pm	Coffee Break
3:45-4:45 pm	Session 4 – David Rosenthal, “Fodor’s Representationalism”
4:45-5:45 pm	Session 5 – Terry Horgan, “Morphological content and chromatic illumination in belief fixation”
6:00 pm	Dinner Reception Open to All (6th Floor WEST Wing of the Academic Building)

Friday, May 17th

9:00-9:15 am	Breakfast (Provided)
9:15-10:15 am	Session 6 – Louise Antony, “Not psychological, but not brutely causal either”
10:15-10:30 am	Coffee Break
10:30-11:30 am	Session 7 – Kevan Edwards, “Fodor on concepts, Frege’s Problem, and the division of explanatory labor”*
11:30 am – 12:30 pm	Session 8 – Eric Margolis, “Understanding concept nativism”
12:30-3:00 pm	Lunch (Not provided, see below for options)
3:00-4:00 pm	Session 9 – Susan Schneider, “Conscious machines? A sober-minded approach”
4:00-4:15 pm	Coffee Break
4:15-5:15 pm	Session 10 – Georges Rey, “Fodor’s mis-guided Quineanism”
5:15-6:15 pm	Session 11 – Randy Gallistel, “It’s numbers all the way down”
6:15-6:30 pm	Closing Remarks

Space is limited, so if you plan to attend, please click here to RSVP.

Categories: Rutgers Tags: conference

Jun

10

Mon

Rutgers-Bristol Workshop on the Metaphysical Unity of Science @ Rutgers U, Newark. Conklin Hall 455

Tickets

Jun 10 – Jun 11 all-day

Schedule – June 10th

(Talks are aprox. 45 minutes with 30 minutes for Q&A)

9:00 Mazviita Chirimuuta, Emergence in Science & the Unity of Science

10:15 Joyce Havstad, TBA

12:00 Lunch, Marcus P&B. Part of RUN and Newark’s Community Development.

2:00 Ricki Bliss, Fundamentality: From Epistemology to Metaphysics

3:15 Tuomas Tahko, Laws of Metaphysics for Essentialists

Schedule – June 11th

9:00 Kelly Trodgon, Grounding and Explanatory Gaps

10:15 Stuart Glennan, Rethinking Mechanistic Constitution

12:00 Lunch, Mercato Tomato Pie.

2:00 Alex Franklin, How Do Levels Emerge?

3:15 Ken Aizawa, New Directions in Compositional Explanation: Two Cases Studies

Abstracts

Mazviita Chirimuuta – Emergence in Science & the Unity of Science

This paper considers the implications of recent accounts of emergent phenomena for the question of the unity of the sciences. I first offer a historical account of physicalism in its different guises since the mid 19th century. Two threads connecting these otherwise quite different views have been the rejection of emergent phenomena and the commitment to the unity of science. In section two I provide an exposition of emergence as presented in recent philosophy of science, where the key claim is that “parts behave differently in wholes”, based on the empirical finding of what Gillett (2016) calls “differential powers.” Gillett argues that the empirical evidence does not yet support the strong emergentist claim that there is downward causation or any other form of influence from the whole system to its constituent parts, but that such evidence might be obtained. In section 3 I propose instead that the question of whether or not the finding of differential powers is taken to provide overwhelming evidence for strong emergence depends on the further interpretation of differential powers, and ultimately on very broad metaphysical commitments. The interpretation of differential powers that is most resistant to objections from opponents of strong emergence involves a rejection of substance ontology, and hence the rejection of physicalism. Thus, as I conclude in section 4, philosophers should not wait in expectation for empirical results that will settle the question of whether or not there is strong emergence. I offer a preliminary costs/benefits analysis of the different ontologies of differential powers, intended to aid the reader in their decision over the status of strong emergence. On the most radical interpretation, the usual physicalist conception of the unity of science must be rejected, while a different kind of metaphysical wholism stands in its place.

Joyce Havstad, TBC

Ricki Bliss – Fundamentality: from Epistemology to Metaphysics

In this talk, I explore what might follow for the metaphysics of fundamentality if we take seriously certain reasons to believe there is anything fundamental in the first place.

Tuomas Tahko – Laws of Metaphysics for Essentialists

There is a line of thought gathering momentum which suggests that just like causal laws govern causation, there needs to be something in metaphysics that governs metaphysical relations. Such laws of metaphysics would be counterfactual-supporting general principles that are responsible for the explanatory force of metaphysical explanations. There are various suggestions about how such principles could be understood. They could be based on what Kelly Trogdon calls grounding-mechanical explanations, where the role that grounding mechanisms play in certain metaphysical explanations mirrors the role that causal mechanisms play in certain scientific explanations. Another approach, by Jonathan Schaffer, claims to be neutral regarding grounding or essences (although he does commit to the idea that metaphysical explanation is ‘backed’ by grounding relations). In this paper I will assess these suggestions and argue that for those willing to invoke essences, there is a more promising route available: the unificatory role of metaphysical explanation may be accounted for in terms of natural kind essences.

Kelly Trogdon – Grounding and Explanatory Gaps

Physicalism is the thesis that all mental facts are ultimately grounded by physical facts. There is an explanatory gap between the mental and physical, and many see this as posing a challenge to physicalism. Jonathan Schaffer (2017) disagrees, arguing that standard grounding connections involve explanatory gaps as a matter of course. I begin by arguing that Schaffer and others mischaracterize the explanatory gap between the mental and physical—it chiefly concerns what I call cognitive significance rather than priori implication or related notions. The upshot is that standard grounding connections normally don’t involve explanatory gaps. Then I consider two grounding-theoretic proposals about how to close explanatory gaps in the relevant sense, one involving structural equations (Schaffer 2017) and the other mechanisms (Trogdon 2018). While each of these proposals seeks to illuminate grounding connections, I argue that neither is helpful in closing the explanatory gap between the mental and physical.

Stuart Glennan – Rethinking Mechanistic Constitution

The relationship between a mechanisms and its working parts is known as mechanistic constitution. In this paper we review the history of the mechanistic constitution debate, starting with Salmon’s original account, and we explain what we take to be the proper lessons to be drawn from the extensive literature surrounding Craver’s mutual manipulability account. Based on our analysis, we argue that much of the difficulty in understanding the mechanistic constitution relation arises from a failure to recognize two different forms of mechanistic constitution — corresponding to two different kinds of relationships between a mechanism and the phenomenon for which it is responsible. First, when mechanisms produce phenomena, the mechanism’s parts are diachronic stages of the process by which entities act to produce the phenomenon. Second, when mechanisms underlie some phenomenon, the phenomenon is a activity of a whole system, and the mechanism’s parts are those of the working entities that synchronically give rise to the phenomenon. Attending to these different kinds of constitutive relations will clarify the circumstances under which mechanistic phenomena can be said to occur at different levels.

Alex Franklin – How Do Levels Emerge?

Levels terminology is employed throughout scientific discourse, and is crucial to the formulation of various debates in the philosophy of science. In this talk, I argue that all levels are, to some degree, autonomous. Building on this, I claim that higher levels may be understood as both emergent from and reducible to lower levels. I cash out this account of levels with a case study. Nerve signals are on a higher level than the individual ionic motions across the neuronal membrane; this is (at least in part) because the nerve signals are autonomous from such motions. In order to understand the instantiation of these levels we ought to identify the mechanisms at the lower level which give rise to such autonomy. In this case we can do so: the gated ion channels and pumps underwrite the autonomy of the higher level.

Ken Aizawa – New Directions in Compositional Explanation: Two Cases Studies

The most familiar approach to scientific compositional explanations is that adopted by the so-called “New Mechanists”. This approach focuses on compositional explanations of processes of wholes in terms of processes of their parts. In addition, the approach focuses on the use of so-called “interlevel interventions” as the means by which compositional relations are investigated. By contrast, on the approach I adopt, we see that there are compositional explanations of individuals in terms of their parts and properties of individuals in terms of the properties of their parts. In addition, I draw attention to the use of abductive methods in investigations of compositional relations. I illustrate my approach by use of Robert Hooke’s microscopic investigations of the cork and the development of the theory of the action potential.

Categories: Rutgers Tags: conference epistemology metaphysics science

Sep

28

Sat

Isaac Levi Conference and Memorial @ Columbia University, Philosophy rm tba

Tickets

Sep 28 all-day

Conference Schedule

10AM Teddy Seidenfeld – Conditional Probability, Conditionalization, and Total Evidence

11AM Eleonora Cresto – Beyond Indeterminate Utilities. The Case of Neurotic Cake-Cutting

11:20AM Ignacio Ojea Quintana – Unawareness and Levi’s Consensus as Common Ground

11:40AM Rush Stewart – Uncertainty, Equality, Fraternity

1PM Nils-Eric Sahlin – Levi’s Decision Theory: Lessons Learned

1:45PM Wilfried Sieg – Scientific Theories as Set-Theoretic Predicates?

2:45PM Panel Discussion – Learning from Levi

Abstracts available in attached documents under “Supporting material.”

Memorial

A memorial service will be held at 5PM at St. Paul’s Chapel on the Columbia campus. Reception to follow on the 7th floor of Philosophy Hall.

https://philevents.org/event/show/75850

Categories: Columbia U Tags: conference epistemology probability science social

Oct

4

Fri

The Moral Imagination of the Novel @ Columbia U Philosophy Dept.

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Oct 4 – Oct 5 all-day

Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy, the Morningside Institute, and the Thomistic Institute invite graduate students in philosophy, theology/religious studies, literature, and related disciplines to submit papers for “The Moral Imagination of the Novel.” The conference will examine the ways in which individual novels and the novel as a literary genre can be understood both to depict the search for moral, philosophical, and religious truth and to engage in this very search themselves. Is the novel a realistic or idealistic genre? Can novels expand our sense of moral possibilities? Can they contract them?

The conference will begin with four twenty-minute graduate student papers on Friday, October 4, followed by talks that day and the next from faculty. Confirmed speakers include:

Paul Elie (Georgetown)

Ann Astell (Notre Dame)

Thomas Pavel (Chicago)

Lauren Kopajtic (Fordham)

Dhananjay Jagannathan (Columbia)

Limited financial assistance is available to defray the cost of travel for student presenters, but students are encouraged to seek funds from their own institutions as well.

One-page proposals should be emailed to Molly Gurdon at mcg2197@columbia.edu by Saturday, August 31 to be considered. Invitations to present papers will be sent by Friday, September 6. Submissions should not contain any identifying information except for a title, but the author’s institution and program, along with the title of their proposed submission, should be noted in the e-mail submission.

https://philevents.org/event/show/74726

Categories: Columbia U Tags: cfp conference ethics literature religion

Oct

19

Sat

New Materialist Approaches to Sound @ Music Department, Columbia U

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Oct 19 – Oct 20 all-day

Scholars working under the broad umbrella of New Materialism have offered compelling reappraisals of the ways in which we know, interact with, and exist in the world. This scholarship also intersects with recent work on music and sound, which raises rich sets of questions regarding human agency, material, ethics, aesthetics, embodiment, and the subject/object dichotomy, among other issues.

We invite scholars working in the humanities, arts and sciences to submit proposals for papers and performances that engage with the themes of sound and new materialism, broadly construed. We welcome work that adopts historical, technological, analytical, philosophical, materialist, and creative vantage points, among others. Overall, this conference will direct these diverse disciplinary and methodological perspectives towards convergent and critical issues, creating new, interdisciplinary lines of enquiry and generating original research.

The one-day conference will consist of panels that comprise of papers with short reflections by a moderator, as well as an evening concert that includes opportunities for discussion. The concluding concert of work that engages with these themes from creative perspectives will afford attendees with an opportunity to consider and discuss issues concerning sound, material, and agency in a forum that contrasts with, but also complements, our events during the day. Conference participants are strongly encouraged to attend both the daytime and evening portions of the conference.

Proposals are called for:

Paper presentations of 20 minutes with 10 minutes of Q&A.

Artistic presentation of 20 minutes with 10 minutes of discussion

Submission: Proposals of no more than 500 words (300 words for artistic presentation) should be submitted as a PDF by August 14th 2019 to jc5036@columbia.edu

and include “NMAS Submission” in the subject line. If you’re applying for an artistic presentation please include three representative 2 minute audio/video examples. Please also include the title of your proposed paper and anonymize your submission. Include your name, affiliation, and contact information in the body of the email, and also nominate any audio/visual requirements for your paper or performance.

https://philevents.org/event/show/74950

Categories: Columbia U Tags: aesthetics agency body cfp conference ethics ontology

Oct

24

Thu

Philosophy of Probability Conference (Loewer) @ Seminar Room at Gateway Transit Building

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Oct 24 – Oct 26 all-day

Ian Hacking wrote that probability is a Janus-faced concept with one face looking toward the world and the other toward the mind. The face looking toward the world is central to laws and explanations in physics (especially quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics) and the special sciences. The face looking toward the mind is central to epistemology and decision theory. This conference concerns both aspects and especially their relation to each other. What is probability that it possesses both aspects? This three-day conference will focus on answering this and related questions.

There is no registration fee and attendance is open to all; however, RSVP is required. Please RSVP here before Oct 15, if you plan to attend. All are welcome!

General information is available here.

Conference Organizers

Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
Denise Dykstra (Rutgers)

Invited Participants

David Albert (Columbia)
Valia Allori (NIU)
Katie Elliott (UCLA)
Ned Hall (Harvard)
Carl Hoefer (Barcelona)
Jenann Ismael (Columbia)
Christopher Meacham (Amherst)
Wayne Myrvold (Western)
Richard Pettigrew (Bristol)
Jack Spencer (MIT)

Schedule Overview

(A detailed schedule is available here.)

Thursday, October 24

3:00 – 6:00: Metaphysics of Objective Probability: Ned Hall (Harvard); Jenann Ismael (Columbia).

Friday, October 25

9:00 – 9:50: Breakfast in the philosophy department
9:50 – 10:00: Welcome & Introductory Remarks (Barry Loewer)
10:00 – 1:00: Chance: Katie Elliott (UCLA); Christopher Meacham (Amherst).
1:00 – 2:30: Lunch
2:30 – 5:30: Probabilities in the Special Sciences: Carl Hoefer (Barcelona); Wayne Myrvold (Western Ontario).

Saturday, October 26

9:00 – 10:00: Breakfast in the philosophy department
10:00 – 1:00: Chance-Credence Principles: Richard Pettigrew (Bristol); Jack Spencer (MIT).
1:00 – 2:30: Lunch
2:30 – 5:30: Typicality and the Statistical Postulate: David Albert (Columbia); Valia Allori (NIU).

Please contact the conference organizers (LawsAndChanceProject@gmail.com) if you have any questions.

Conference Poster

Categories: Rutgers Tags: conference probability

Nov

15

Fri

Foundations of Physics Workshop, In Celebration of David Albert’s Birthday @ Columbia U Hamilton Hall 717

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Nov 15 – Nov 16 all-day

David Albert’s work has been of seminal importance to the foundations of physics, exerting central influence on the direction the field and laying foundations for much of its ongoing development. In celebration of David’s many past and continuing contributions, we will be hosting a conference at Columbia University on the foundations of physics. We expect talks on a range of topics, including the foundations of quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, the possible emergence of space and time, the metaphysics of science, and the nature of agency.

Confirmed Speakers

Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine)

Gordon Belot (Michigan)

Craig Callender (UC San Diego)

Sean Carroll (Caltech)

Eddy Chen (UC San Diego)

Sidney Felder (Rutgers)

Alison Fernandes (Dublin)

Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers)

Ned Hall (Harvard)

Barry Loewer (Rutgers)

Tim Maudlin (NYU)

Michael Miller (Toronto)

Alyssa Ney (UC Davis)

Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv)

David Wallace (Pittsburgh)

Nino Zanghi (Genoa)

Organizing Committee

Alison Fernandes (alison.fernandes@tcd.ie)

Michael Miller (mike.miller@utoronto.ca)

Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu)

.

The conference is open to the public. Please direct any questions to Porter Williams (porterwi@usc.edu).

Friday, November 15

8:45 am: Breakfast

9:30 am: Jeff Barrett (UC Irvine): Quantum Randomness and Empirical Underdetermination

10:15 am: Shelly Goldstein (Rutgers): Typicality, Humean Probability, and the Mentaculus

11:00: Coffee Break

11:20 am: Craig Callender (UC San Diego): No Time for Time from No-Time

12:05 pm: Alyssa Ney (UC Davis): WFR or QFT?

12:50: Lunch

2:20 pm: Gordon Belot (Michigan): The Mach-Einstein Principle of 1917-1918

3:05 pm: Sean Carroll (Caltech): The Mentaculus as a Causal Network

3:50: Coffee Break

4:10 pm: David Wallace (Pittsburgh): TBA

4:55 pm: Ned Hall (Harvard): Respectful Deflationism

5:45 pm: Adjourn

Saturday, November 16

8:45 am: Breakfast

9:30 am: Lev Vaidman (Tel Aviv): The many-worlds interpretation and the Born rule

10:15 am: Eddy Chen (UC San Diego): Nomic Vagueness

11:00: Coffee Break

11:20 am: Michael Miller (Toronto): Infrared Cancellation and Measurement

12:05 pm: Alison Fernandes (Trinity College Dublin): The Direction of Records

12:50: Lunch

2:20 pm: Sidney Felder (Rutgers): Gödel’s Rotating Solutions, Bilking, and Natural Laws

3:05 pm: Nino Zanghi (INFN Genova): TBA

3:50: Coffee Break

4:10 pm: Tim Maudlin (NYU): S = k ln(B(W)): Boltzmann entropy, the Second Law, and the Architecture of Hell

4:55 pm: Barry Loewer (Rutgers): The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus

5:45 pm: Adjourn

Categories: Columbia U Tags: conference physics science

Feb

14

Fri

Meditations Conference @ Columbia U, tba

Tickets

Feb 14 all-day

Contact Professor Mercer for details.

Categories: Columbia U Tags: conference