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 [...]
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. [...]
