The Rotman Institute YouTube channel continues to grow, and is currently up to over 4,100 subscribers. With videos from our annual speakers series, Institute hosted academic conferences, and unique events like our Rotman Dialogues, our channel includes content on a range of philosophical topics and areas. We recently started adding subtitles to our videos [...]
2020 brought forth many challenges, but with the academic term coming to an end we'd like to highlight some special achievements from our members this past year. One of our graduate student members successfully defended his doctoral thesis this year: Jiangtian Li (supervised by Rob Stainton) defended his PhD thesis tilted “On Polysemy: A Philosophical, Psycholinguistic, [...]
The institute’s annual public library lecture series took place this month. All talks were given virtually via Zoom. This year’s series, titled "Responsibilities to Others", featured engaging talks by Samir Okasha, Tracy Isaacs, Anthony Skelton, and Maneesha Deckha. The series included discussions about the evolution of altruism, moral responsibilities, how moral philosophy might assist us in thinking about whether we ought to mandate [...]
September marked the start of a new academic year. Faculty and staff worked hard preparing the return to campus and making sure students have the best experience while staying safe and healthy. Faculty and students have been adapting to virtual classes and department staff have been working on putting together virtual events for this year. [...]
Ed Baggs joined the Rotman Institute of Philosophy as a postdoctoral fellow in fall 2019. His work focuses on embodied approaches in cognitive science, including ecological psychology, dynamic systems theory, and enactivism. This virtual interview was conducted by Eric Desjardins & is part of a series of interviews of all of our current postdocs. More [...]
The Rotman Institute of Philosophy is currently inviting graduate students to apply for membership. The Institute’s mission is to catalyze and lead the production of interdisciplinary research by uniting philosophers with scientists, policy makers and the general public. Our open-concept, collaborative work space is housed in the Western Interdisciplinary Research Building, along with the Brain and Mind [...]
We'd like to start off this bi-monthly post with some exciting news from a few of our members. Zelda Blair will be finishing her MA in philosophy at Western and matriculating into medical school at the University of Minnesota in the fall. Paul Istasy will also be starting medical school this fall at the Schulich School [...]
Adam Koberinski has worked as a Postdoctoral Fellow on the New Directions in Philosophy of Cosmology research project, under Chris Smeenk, for the past year. His research focuses on the intersection of particle physics and cosmology. Laura Cardozo conducted this virtual interview with Adam to learn more about his research and what sparked his interest [...]
By Benjamin Hill James Mackey (MA, Western expected 2020) was assigned to me for a Rotman Summer Graduate Research Assistantship. Our project was to create in Zotero an annotated bibliography of recent work (works published since 2015) on 16th century natural philosophy. As many of you know well, the 16th century saw the birth of [...]
This bi-monthly post begins with exciting news from a couple of our members. First off, we are excited to announce that Jess Du Toit received a Varnier Canada Graduate Scholarship, 2020-2023. The Vanier Scholarship recognizes students with outstanding academic achievement, research potential and leadership. In addition to this award, a few of our faculty members [...]
