Feb
4
Tue
Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems. Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) @ NYU Philosophy Dept. rm 302
Feb 4 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science

Spring 2020 Schedule:

Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) – “Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems”
6:30-8:30pm Tuesday Feb 4; NYU Philosophy Department (5 Washington Place), 3rd floor seminar room.

David Papineau (King’s College London & CUNY) – “The Nature of Representation”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday March 3; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.

Jim Holt (Author of Why Does the World Exist?) – “Here, Now, Photon: Why Newton was closer to EM than Maudlin is”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 7; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.

Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech)
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 28; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.

Apr
7
Tue
Here, Now, Photon: Why Newton was closer to EM than Maudlin is. Jim Holt (Author of Why Does the World Exist?) @ CUNY Grad Center, rm 5307
Apr 7 @ 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm

Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science

Spring 2020 Schedule:

Anthony Aguirre (UCSC) – “Entropy in long-lived genuinely closed quantum systems”
6:30-8:30pm Tuesday Feb 4; NYU Philosophy Department (5 Washington Place), 3rd floor seminar room.

David Papineau (King’s College London & CUNY) – “The Nature of Representation”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday March 3; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.

Jim Holt (Author of Why Does the World Exist?) – “Here, Now, Photon: Why Newton was closer to EM than Maudlin is”
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 7; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.

Deborah Mayo (Virginia Tech)
4:30-6:30pm Tuesday April 28; CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, NYC), room 5307.

May
11
Wed
Free Will Workshop: Implications from Physics and Metaphysics @ Rutgers & Zoom
May 11 – May 12 all-day

Free Will
Implications from Physics and Metaphysics

The workshop will be hybrid, and anyone interested can participate through Zoom, although there will be limited spots for in-person participants. If you are interested in attending in-person, please reply to this email or write to loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu.


Barry Loewer (loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu) Assistant: Diego Arana (diego.arana@rutgers.edu)
Program (All times are EST)

Zoom Link: https://tinyurl.com/freewillzoom

iCal: https://tinyurl.com/freewillical


May 11
10:00am Peter van Inwagen (Notre Dame, Duke)
Ginet’s Principle: Our freedom is the freedom to add to the
given past.
11:30am John Perry (Stanford)
Causation, Entailment and Freedom
3:00pm Barry Loewer (Rutgers)
The Consequence Argument Meets the Mentaculus
4:30pm Carlo Rovelli (Aix-Marseille, UWO)
Free will: Back to Reichenbach


May 12
10:00am Kadri Vihvelin (USC)
Why We can’t Change the Past
11:30am Valia Allori (NIU)
Freedom from the Quantum?
3:00pm Tim O’Connor (Indiana, Baylor)
Top-Down and Indeterministic Agency: Why?
4:30pm Jessica Wilson (Toronto)
Two Routes to the Emergence of Free Will

Feb
13
Mon
Sexual and Reproductive Justice: Vehicle for Global Progress @ Forum, Columbia University
Feb 13 @ 10:00 am – 11:00 am

This event will feature a thought-provoking panel discussion with sexual and reproductive justice experts on the value of the sexual and reproductive justice framework and how it can be applied to diverse stakeholders, settings, and contexts. Panelists will also highlight examples from around the world of momentum towards sexual and reproductive justice.

Event Information

Free and open to the public; registration is required for both in-person and online attendance. For additional information, please visit the event webpage. Please email Malia Maier at mm5352@cumc.columbia.edu with any questions. All in-person attendees must follow Columbia’s COVID-19 policies.

Hosted by the Global Health Justice and Governance Program at Columbia University.

Mar
24
Fri
An Afternoon with Judith Butler: On the Pandemic and Our Shared World @ Jerome Greene Hall (Law School) Rm 101
Mar 24 @ 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind?

In What World Is This? A Pandemic Phenomenology, Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities.

Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world.

Speaker

Judith Butler is a Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School at the University of California, Berkeley. They are the author of several books, most recently The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (2020). Butler’s previous Columbia University Press books include Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012), Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death (2000), and Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).

Respondents

Mia Florin-Sefton is a Ph.D. candidate and University Writing Instructor in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University, where she specializes in 20th and 21st-century transatlantic anglophone literatures and culture. She is also working on a project that looks at the history of sex glands and early history of hormone replacement therapy in the context of theories of racial degeneration and eugenics post-World War I.

Professor Goyal is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine at the Columbia University Medical Center and founding director of the major in Medical Humanities. Professor Goyal completed his residency in Emergency Medicine as Chief Resident while finishing his PhD in English and Comparative Literature. His research interests include the health humanities, the study of the novel, and medical epistemology. His writing has appeared in The Living Handbook of Narratology, Aktuel Forskning, Litteratur, Kultur og Medier, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, among other places. He is a Co-Founding Editor of the online journal, Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal

Marianne Hirsch is the William Peterfield Trent Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Professor in the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former President of the Modern Language Association of America. Along with a group of local scholars, artists and activists, Hirsch is currently co-directing the Zip Code Memory Project, an initiative that seeks to find art and community-based ways to repair the devastating losses resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic while also acknowledging its radically differential effects on Upper New York City neighborhoods.

Apr
25
Tue
Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics @ NYU room 307
Apr 25 @ 3:00 pm – 7:00 pm

We are excited to announce the upcoming MAPS Symposium on the Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics, taking place at NYU on April 25th from 3pm-7pm. The event will feature talks from Eddy Chen, Emily Adlam, and Tim Maudlin. Further details can be found below.

Talks:

  • Eddy Chen (UCSD): “The Wentaculus”
  • Emily Adlam (Rotman Institute UWO): “The Temporal Asymmetry of Influence is Not Statistical.”
  • Tim Maudlin (NYU): “Nonlocality”

Please note that while all are welcome to attend, non-NYU attendees must RSVP by emailing Diego Arana (da689@rutgers.edu) and Barry Loewer (loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu) to ensure their names are added to the entry list for the NYU building. For any further information, please contact us through the emails just provided.

May
8
Mon
Conception and Its Discontents @ Heyman Center, 2nd floor common room
May 8 – May 9 all-day

A conference hosted by the Motherhood and Technology Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference on the theme of “Conception and Its Discontents.”

Medical technologies have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood. Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites mark this emerging constellation.

Technological advancements have in particular impacted not just the understanding of conception, but the very process by which a human embryo is created, implanted, and matured. Egg freezing, embryo storage, IVF, and surrogacy afford women new freedoms in choosing when and how to become mothers, while also raising troubling questions about the pressures of capitalism and the extension of worklife, as well as the global inequalities present in the experience of motherhood. In addition, technologies have arisen allowing for unprecedented control over not just who becomes a mother, but what kind of embryo is allowed to be implanted and to grow. Technologies such as CRISPR and NIPT have re-introduced the question of eugenics, radically shifting the very epistemology of motherhood and what it means to be “expecting.” And contemporary abortion debates draw on technology in order to make arguments both for and against access, with imaging technologies being instrumentalized in the building of a sympathetic case for the unborn, and the very notion of a “heartbeat bill” reliant on the misreading of technologies for measuring fetal activity.

While these problems are urgent today, questions of conception and technology are by no means recent developments. The 18th century saw a flourishing of philosophical and scientific theories regarding the start of human life and its formation within the womb. Such theories relied on modern technologies, such as autopsy, to atomize and visualize the body. In the 19th and 20th centuries, eugenic medical science produced theories of reproductive difference between differing racial and social groups, leading to forced sterilization laws in both the US and in Germany. This long history of racializing the rhetoric of fertility and motherhood continues to influence political debates on immigration and demographic changes in the present.

Full conference details and schedule to come.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs

May
9
Tue
Why de Broglie-Bohm and only de Broglie-Bohm? Or, Towards a Nosology of Quantum Interpretations. Jean Bricmont (UCLouvain) @ 202 NYU Philosophy Dept.
May 9 @ 3:30 pm – 6:30 pm

Presented by Metro Area Philosophers of Science

Directions: Enter the Philosophy building at 5 Washington Place, and have a university ID and vaccination card ready. For any questions, please contact Diego Arana (da689@rutgers.edu), Barry Loewer (loewer@philosophy.rutgers.edu) and Jack Mikuszewski (jhm378@nyu.edu).

 

Nov
7
Tue
Transfer of quantum information in teleportation. Lev Vaidman @ NYU room 302
Nov 7 @ 4:00 pm – 6:00 pm

The controversial issue of information transfer in quantum teleportation procedure is analyzed in the framework of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. In contrast to the claims of Deutsch & Hayden 2000, it is argued that quantum information, considered as a measurable property for an observer in a particular world, is transferred in a nonlocal way in the teleportation process. This, however, does not lead to action at a distance on the level of the universe which includes all parallel worlds. Preprint: https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/21447/