The workshop is funded by the National Science Foundation (SES-1921688) and is aimed at bringing together academics who study the notion of mathematical explanation from philosophical and from educational/psychological perspectives. The idea is to bring together philosophers of mathematics, epistemologists, psychologists, and mathematics educators, to discuss how developments in their own fields could meaningfully contribute to the work on mathematical explanation where their fields intersect. In particular, we want to explore the ways in which mathematical explanation engenders understanding, by focusing on (1) the relationship between different types of philosophical accounts of mathematical explanation, (2) educational approaches to the characterization of effective explanations in the mathematics classroom, and (3) work at the intersection of these two perspectives.
All speakers:
Mark Colyvan
University of Sydney
Matthew Inglis
Loughborough University
Marc Lange
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Tania Lombrozo
Princeton University
Alexander Renkl
University of Freiburg
Keith Weber
Rutgers University – New Brunswick
Orit Zaslavsky
New York University
How can we know what it’s like to be someone else? Classical Indian philosophers found the answer in theater, arguing that it’s not just a form of entertainment, but a source of knowledge of other minds. In this talk, I’ll explore how this theme is developed in Śrī Śaṅkuka (c. 850 CE) and examine the reasons his views were rejected in the later tradition. I’ll argue that those reasons are unsound, and that we can see why by turning to contemporary studies of the relationship between knowledge and luck.
Jonardon Ganeri is the Bimal. K. Matilal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is a philosopher whose work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology. His books include Attention, Not Self (2017), a study of early Buddhist theories of attention; The Concealed Art of the Soul (2012), an analysis of the idea of a search for one’s true self; Virtual Subjects, Fugitive Selves (2020), an analysis of Fernando Pessoa’s philosophy of self; and Inwardness: An Outsiders’ Guide (2021), a review of the concept of inwardness in literature, film, poetry, and philosophy across cultures. He joined the Fellowship of the British Academy in 2015, and won the Infosys Prize in the Humanities the same year, the only philosopher to do so.
This series is curated and co-presented by Brooklyn Public Philosophers, aka Ian Olasov.