Two of our graduate students successfully defended their theses this August. Please join us in congratulating Adam Koberinski (supervised by Wayne Myrvold) whose thesis, “Theory construction in high-energy particle physics”, was defended on August 1. Eunice Chan (supervised by Robert Corless) defended her thesis, "Algebraic Companions and Linearizations", on August 23. Well done, Adam & [...]
We'd like to begin this month's post by congratulating Marie Gueguen (supervised by Chris Smeenk) who successfully defended her doctoral thesis, "On Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Surplus Structure and Artifacts in Scientific Theories”, on July 23. This September Marie will begin a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University [...]
We'd like to begin this bi-monthly post with news of an exciting addition to the Institute: please join us in welcoming Francesca Vidotto, chosen for the Tier 2 Canada Research Chair (CRC) in Foundations of Physics, a joint position between philosophy and applied mathematics. Francesca's recent research has focused in part on clarifying the phenomenology of [...]
We're very pleased to make the official announcement that Anthony Skelton will be serving as Acting Director of the Institute (effective July 1, 2019) during the next academic year. Anthony previously served as Associate Director of the Institute from 2014-18, and as a member of the steering committee during that time. Please join us in [...]
The Institute hosted three visitors in March: Stathis Psillos, Anjan Chakravartty, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. During his stay, Stathis Psillos taught a graduate seminar titled, "What is a Law of Nature?". He also gave commentary during a Rotman Dialogue with Anjan Chakravartty, based on his book, "Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology”. Chakravartty [...]
During the first week of February, the Institute hosted Erik Angner, who delivered the final lecture of the library series on well-being, in addition to a second talk on campus. Science journalist Kayt Sukel also joined us during that week, and hosted a workshop on science writing for a general audience. Kayt also was the [...]
This month the Institute's annual public lecture series, prepared in partnership with the London Public Library and Western's department of philosophy, began. This year's series, Happiness and Well-Being: Philosophical Perspectives, has been exceptionally successful. Talks by Samantha Brennan, Anthony Skelton, and Rachel Margolis all took place in January. The final talk of the series, by [...]
Rotman members finished off 2018 with a busy December. One exciting piece of news came from Adrian Owen, who has been named an Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (OBE) as part of the 2019 New Year’s Honours list recognising “the achievements of a wide range of extraordinary people” across the [...]
In 2018, four of our graduate student members successfully defended their doctoral theses. Please join us in congratulating each of them on this accomplishment! FRÉDÉRIC-ISMAEL BANVILLE A Practical and Practice-Sensitive Account of Science as Problem-Solving Defense Poster DANIEL BOOTH Empirical Evidence and the Multiple Realization of Mental [...]
We're thrilled to begin our news for this month with two exciting announcements. First, Gillian Barker was the winner of the 2018 PSA Women's Caucus Prize in Feminist Philosophy of Science for her recent book, Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World. The full announcement from the PSA Women's Caucus can be seen here. Please join [...]
