Rotman Visiting Speaker: Chris Letheby
Room 3000 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western University, London, Ontario, Canada"Merely Believing and Really Believing: Mental Imagery in Personal Transformation" Talk Description: As a teacher of mine once remarked, when we say that teenagers think they are immortal, we don’t mean that they would fail a biology test. Teenagers believe, truly and justifiably, that they will die, but there is also a sense [...]
Generative Artificial Intelligence & Historiography
Room 3000 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western University, London, Ontario, CanadaEVENT DESCRIPTION BIO: William J. Turkel is Professor of History at the University of Western Ontario and internationally recognized for his innovative work in digital history. He uses machine learning, text mining, and computational techniques in his study of the histories of science, technology and environment, drawing on many decades of programming experience. He [...]
Nerenberg Lecture Series: Francesca Vidotto
Conron Hall, Unversity College, Western University Western University - 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, CanadaThe lecture is open to all members of the public and it is free. To guarantee a place, please register for the 2025 Nerenberg Lecture HERE.
Workshop: Cognition in Social Contexts: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Perth Dr., London, Ontario, CanadaZOOM LINK Workshop Registration Registration is now CLOSED. Thank you for your interest. See below for updated workshop program. In recent decades, many new research fields have emerged at the intersection of the social and cognitive sciences, such as cognitive sociology (e.g., Zerubavel, 1997), cognitive [...]
Research Retreat: Election Interference and Security In A Contested Infosphere
Weldon Library Community Room Western University - 1151 Richmond Street, London, ON, CanadaJoin the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, the Electro-Governance Group (EGG), the Department of Political Science and the Starling Center for Just Technologies for a research retreat bringing together scholars from across disciplines and departments at Western to share research and perspectives on the political and security challenges to democracies arising from technological and political-economic [...]
Research Retreat: Human-AI Relationships
Room 3000 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western University, London, Ontario, CanadaJoin The Rotman Institute of Philosophy for a Research Retreat on Human-AI Relationships. Who: Western University research community When: Thursday, May 08, 2025 Time: 8:30 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. Where: WIRB 3000, Western University The Rotman Institute of Philosophy is excited to host a one-day research retreat on the topic of Human-AI Relationships. Our goal is to bring [...]
2025 Annual Philosophy of Physics Conferences
Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Perth Dr., London, Ontario, CanadaEmpiricism and the Methodology of Modern Physics REGISTRATION LINK ZOOM LINK May 25-26 The structure of theories and how they represent the natural world, through introducing basic principles and asserting the existence of unobserved entities, have been central questions in philosophy of science over the last century. Bill Demopoulos, George Smith, [...]
Rotman Visiting Speaker: Lauren Olin
Room 4190 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western Interdisciplinary Research Building, Room 4190, London, Ontario, Canada"Housing Mirth" Talk Description: Like language and morality, humor is a species universal with evolutionary origins that displays systematic cultural variation. Unlike other distinctively human evaluative capacities, however, humor has been neglected by philosophers and cognitive scientists. Housing Mirth diagnoses some historical reasons behind this pattern of neglect, articulates a methodological framework for humor studies [...]
Rotman Visiting Speaker: Cameron Buckner
Room 1130 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western Interdisciplinary Research Building, London, ON, Canada"LLMs as Models of Reasoning" Abstract: Recent advances in large language models that use self-prompting like GPT’s o1/o3 and DeepSeek have begun to encroach on human-level performance on “higher reasoning” problems in mathematics, planning, and problem-solving tasks. OpenAI in particular has made ambitious claims that these models are reasoning and that by scrutinizing [...]
Rotman Visiting Speaker: Eric Hochstein
Room 4190 - Western Interdisciplinary Research Building Western Interdisciplinary Research Building, Room 4190, London, Ontario, Canada"Why Pan Pancomputationalism?" Abstract: Pancomputationalism is the view that every system in nature (e.g. brains, digestive tracts, rocks, buckets of water, etc.) can be understood as computing or running a program, effectively making everything in nature a kind of computer. In response, an increasing number of philosophers have argued that while we can [...]