Leo Kadanoff—renowned physicist and beloved teacher—passed away early this week. Here at the Rotman Institute, we benefited greatly from Dr. Kadanoff’s deep knowledge of physics and extensive academic experience. He was a valued member of the Institute's International Advisory Committee (IAC) from 2008 to 2012. These five years were pivotal for the Institute, and we [...]
During this month, Rotman Institute of Philosophy graduate student, Emma Ryman, is giving two talks. The first talk, given last week at Brock University, was at the symposium, Consuming Intimacies: Bodies, Labour, Care, and Social Justice. She presented a paper entitled, "The Patient Worker: A Model for Transnational Human Subjects Research and Contract Pregnancy", along [...]
Rotman Institute graduate student, Jamie Shaw, has a new publication in Gnosis entitled, "Moderate Moderation: The Mean of Excess". This paper argues that Aristotle's 'doctrine of the mean' should not be interpreted as saying that the mean is purely context dependent but, rather, on considerations of the good life as a whole. This is accomplished [...]
Cross-posted from Dan Hicks' personal blog. Starting in September, I will be an AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow, working in the EPA’s Chemical Safety for Sustainability [CSS] program. I’ve actually known about this for almost two months, but only received the paperwork making things official this week. (I’m taking this as my first introduction [...]
Check out interviews with two members of the Rotman Institute! These interviews were conducted by Rotman Institute PhD student Shawn Bartlet for CHRW Community Radio and aired April 2nd. Andrew Peterson is a PhD student and in this interview he discusses his work on the ethics of research involving patients in vegetative states. Andrew [...]
Charles Weijer of the Faculty of Arts & Humanities has been awarded the 2014 Hellmuth Prize for Achievement in Research. The honour recognizes faculty members with outstanding international reputations for their contributions in research – one of the defining hallmarks of a university. Two prizes are offered annually, one in the area broadly defined as the natural sciences and engineering, one in the [...]
We will be discussing issues concerning embodied and situated accounts of cognition. The plan is to begin with Larry Shapiro's recent book "Embodied Cognition" (2011), following which we will look at other key work in this general area. Shapiro's book offers a good starting point providing the most detailed and up to date overview of [...]
On Wednesday October 17th the Rotman Institute sponsored a pub night at The Morrissey House where we discussed the history of quantification in science. The purpose was to discuss some of the ideas raised atThe Language of Nature Workshop with interested members of the public. The discussion was led by Chris Smeenk and Benjamin Hill [...]
We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Stathis Psillos (University of Athens) has been nominated by Western as the Rotman Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in philosophy of science. His application will now go through the CRC peer review process. Dr. Psillos has made major contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and metaphysics; served [...]
