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 [...]
This month we were honoured to welcome a new visiting fellow to the Institute, Dr. Diane O’Leary. Diane works on issues related to the mind and body in medicine, and has most recently worked as a Visiting Scholar in Neuroethics at the Pellegrino Center for Clinical Bioethics at Georgetown University Medical Center. She describes her current [...]
This month came with one particularly exciting piece of news--Sarah Gallagher, an associate faculty member of the Institute, was named as the first-ever Science Advisor to the President of the Canadian Space Agency. She will report directly to the CSA President, Sylvain Laporte, to shape Canada's future direction in space science and champion Canadian space research. She will also [...]
In August we were pleased to welcome a new postdoctoral fellow to the Institute, Vicente Raja. His research interests are distributed among philosophy, experimental psychology, and plant science. He will be working on the Neural Reuse, Embodied Cognition, and Dynamic-Systems Approaches to the Brain research project (new project page coming soon!) with Michael Anderson. Please join us [...]
Effective this month, there have been a number of changes to Institute leadership we'd like to recognize. First, Anthony Skelton has officially completed a 4-year term as the Institute's Associate Director. In this role, he has not only served on the Steering Committee, but he has also coordinated our annual speakers series and Rotman lectures. [...]
Conference season is underway, and members of the Institute have been very busy! This month the Institute hosted the Rotman Summer Institute in Philosophy of Cosmology, held in Goderich, Ontario from June 11 - 20. The 10 day workshop was made possible by the recent grant from the Templeton Foundation, New Directions in Philosophy of [...]
On May 4, Rob Corless was invited to give the opening talk at the Southern Ontario Numerical Analysis Day at the University of Toronto. He spoke on "Optimal Backward Error and The Leaky Bucket". Eunice Chan also attended, and gave a talk titled, "Algebraic Linearizations of Matrix Polynomials". Professor Kenyan Wu, of Chongqing U and the Chinese Academy [...]
This year's Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences was held at the University of Regina. Separate sessions for the Canadian Philosophical Association and the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Mathematics will be held at the beginning of June at the Université du Québec à Montréal. Rotman Institute members took part in numerous sessions held in [...]
This month Western celebrated the official opening of our new building, the Western Interdisciplinary Research Building. In addition to the Rotman Institute, the WIRB hosts the Brain and Mind Institute, BrainsCAN, dry laboratories, a public plaza, and teaching & research space. Members of the Western and London communities attended the opening ceremony, including Kate Young, [...]
