CANCELLED: Samir Okasha — Evolution, Altruism and Selfishness
Wolf Performance Hall - Central Library 251 Dundas St, London, Ontario, CanadaEVENT CANCELLED DUE TO THE EVOLVING COVID-19 SITUATION. PLEASE VISIT COVID-19 INFORMATION FOR THE CAMPUS COMMUNITY FOR MORE INFORMATION. Are animals altruistic? From eusocial animals like ants & bees, to well-documented cases of humpback whales rescuing seals from orcas, there are numerous examples of what looks like altruism in nature. Among many bird and mammal [...]
CANCELLED: Samir Okasha — The Metaphor of Agency in Biology
Room 1130 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western Interdisciplinary Research Building, London, ON, CanadaEVENT CANCELLED DUE TO THE EVOLVING COVID-19 SITUATION. PLEASE VISIT COVID-19 INFORMATION FOR THE CAMPUS COMMUNITY FOR MORE INFORMATION. It is striking that evolutionary biology often uses the language of intentional psychology to describe the behaviour of evolved organisms, their genes, and the process of natural selection that led to their evolution. Thus a cuckoo [...]
Arthur Sullivan — Wittgenstein, Carnap & Copernicus: adapting the a priori
Join us for a pre-read & virtual discussion with Rotman visiting fellow Arthur Sullivan. Please register below if you plan to attend. The reading for this event will be distributed to registered attendees a week before the event date. A link to the Zoom event will be shared the day before the event. ABSTRACT My point [...]
CANCELLED – Boundaries and Reality: 2020 Annual Philosophy of Physics Conference
Room 3000 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western University, London, Ontario, CanadaIn light of the evolving COVID-19 situation, this year's conference has unfortunately been cancelled. Boundaries between spacetime regions, boundaries between interacting physical systems, and relations across boundaries, play an important role in contemporary physics. Boundary degrees of freedom, in particular, have recently raised much interest in the literature on general relativity, gauge field theories and [...]
CANCELLED – 2020 Philosophy of Logic Math and Physics Graduate Student Conference
Room 1145 - Stevenson Hall Stevenson Hall, Room 1145, London, Ontario, CanadaThe 20th annual Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Physics (LMP) Graduate Conference will take place on Saturday-Sunday, June 25-26th, 2020, at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, Canada.
Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi: Language Development From an Ecological Perspective
Virtual (register for Zoom link)The philosophy of cognitive science reading group will host Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi for a virtual talk on her 2018 paper, Language Development From an Ecological Perspective: Ecologically Valid Ways to Abstract Symbols.
Responsibilities to Others: 2020 Philosophy Lecture Series
Virtual (register for Zoom link)Our attempts to deal with the effects of COVID-19 have revived significant interest in a question of enduring philosophical interest: what do we owe to each other? This series of public lectures will examine our responsibilities (if any) to others. It will include discussions on the evolution of altruism, on the idea that both [...]
Meredith Schwartz: It Takes Two – Trusting the Public in Public Health Messaging and Policy
Virtual (register for Zoom link)ABSTRACT Much of the existing public health literature describes strategies by which health authorities can build and maintain trust from the public. Typically, this relationship is assumed to be one-directional and instrumental: the public should trust health authorities because this will increase public cooperation and compliance. However, trust is a two-way relationship, and I argue [...]
Christopher Preston: Potholes on the Road to a Synthetic Age
Virtual (register for Zoom link)Join our philosophy of synthetic biology reading group as they host Christopher Preston for a virtual talk on his 2018 book, The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World.
Emerging Minds Colloquium Series
Virtual (register for Zoom link)Beginning January 2021, The Rotman Institute of Philosophy will be hosting the 'Emerging Minds' colloquium—a series of virtual talks delivered by members of the Institute and scholars from around the world. We invite you to take part by both presenting and attending, in order to network with others who are completing novel interdisciplinary work [...]
Karen Adolph: Infant Motor development
Virtual (register for Zoom link)The philosophy of cognitive science reading group will host Karen Adolph for a virtual talk on her 2019 paper, Motor development: Embodied, embedded, enculturated, and enabling, co-authored with Justine Hoch. Individuals interested in attending the talk need not participate in the reading group, but will need to register to receive a link to the [...]
Eva Jablonka: Inheritance Systems and the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis
Virtual (register for Zoom link)Join us for a virtual talk by geneticist Eva Jablonka (Tel Aviv University) on inheritance systems and the extended evolutionary synthesis. This event will take place via zoom. REGISTER TO ATTEND ABSTRACT There is a debate among evolutionary biologists today about the need to significantly revise the neo-Darwinian model of evolution that was dominant over [...]
Rotman Graduate Student Conference (RGSC2021): Complexity & Explanation
Virtual (register for Zoom link)The Rotman Institute of Philosophy is excited to announce the inaugural Rotman Graduate Student Conference (RGSC2021), taking place on Saturday, May 15 and Sunday, May 16, 2021 over Zoom. We are pleased to announce biologist, Dr. Daniel McShea (Duke University) and Presidential Professor of Philosophy, Dr. Muhammad Ali Khalidi (City University of New York) as [...]
2021 Philosophy of Logic Math and Physics Graduate Student Conference
Virtual (register for Zoom link)The 20th annual Philosophy of Logic, Mathematics, and Physics Graduate Conference will take place on Thursday-Friday, June 24-25, 2021 over Zoom. We are pleased to announce that James Owen Weatherall (University of California, Irvine) will be giving the keynote address. Advance registration is required in order to attend this conference and must be completed [...]
Emergence in Cosmology Workshop
Virtual (register for Zoom link)The early universe is described extremely well by linear perturbations evolving in a simple expanding universe model, described by classical general relativity. An approximately scale invariant spectrum of nearly Gaussian, adiabatic curvature fluctuations accounts for observed anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background as well as baryon acoustic oscillations. But how does this familiar classical [...]
Self-locating Uncertainty in the Cosmological Multiverse Workshop
Virtual (register for Zoom link)Several issues in cosmology have increasingly raised concerns about self-locating uncertainty. It seems to many that to understand how the universe originated and how it is, we need to better understand how to think about where we are in it, or where we should expect ourselves to be. On one hand, considerations of self-locating [...]
Stewardship of Global Collective Behavior
A cohort of research and knowledge exchange networks are co-hosting a journal club discussion on the proposal that the science of collective human behavior should be considered a "crisis discipline." Read the paper and join us for the conversation. Advance registration is required and can be completed on the CAS Lab event page. Event [...]
Race and Racism
Virtual (register for Zoom link)In the past year and a half, race and racism have been at the forefront of many people’s minds because of widespread Black Lives Matter protests and the disproportionately negative impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on certain racialized communities. But the underlying phenomenon is not only recent. For centuries, racialized communities across [...]
Artificial Intelligence, Harm, and You
Virtual (register for Zoom link)To celebrate the official launch of Western's Interdisciplinary Development Initiative exploring the real-world social impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) in Canada and around the world, join us for a virtual panel discussion on the harms algorithms can cause, and the launch of a poster exploring the impacts of AI on the daily life of [...]
Evan Thompson: Consciousness and Dreamless Sleep
Virtual (register for Zoom link)ABSTRACT New research suggests that deep and dreamless sleep may not be a blackout state in which consciousness is absent, but instead a state in which various kinds of conscious states may occur. This lecture will present an overview of current thinking about sleep and consciousness from the perspectives of cognitive neuroscience, the science [...]