By: Patrick Clipsham On November 19th 2012, Professor Patricia Churchland (UC San Diego) gave the first lecture in the Neurophilosophy Speaker Series, which is jointly sponsored by Western’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy and Brain and Mind Institute. Churchland is, without doubt, the ideal academic to give such an important lecture, as she has long been [...]
A recent BBC documentary profiles the extraordinary work of Western’s Dr. Adrian M. Owen on detecting unrecognized awareness in individuals diagnosed as being in a vegetative state (VS). Owen and his research team have developed a way for patients who are behaviorally non-responsive, and so incapable of revealing overt signs of awareness, to show that [...]
The Guardian recently ran an article about fraud in the sciences, noting the institutional pressures placed on researchers that play a part in motivating misconduct: "A recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that since 1973, nearly a thousand biomedical papers have been retracted because someone cheated the system. [...]
An Interview with Dr. Lainie Ross Dr. Lainie Ross is the Carolyn and Matthew Bucksbaum Professor of Clinical Ethics; Professor of Pediatrics, Medicine, Surgery and The College; and Associate Director of the Maclean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics, at the University of Chicago. On November 2nd, Dr. Ross joined us at the Rotman Institute as [...]
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 [...]
Image by Mark Smith from Nature, Feb 1st, 2012. In some alternative health publications, the suggestion that sugar is a toxic substance would not be a news story, but when you start suggesting in Nature that sugar should be taxed and regulated like tobacco and alcohol - eyebrows raise. Drs. Robert H. Lustig, Laura [...]
(Image: Quantum Cloud, sculpture by Antony Gormley) Last year two books appeared that will be on the required reading list for philosophers of physics for many years to come: Gordon Belot's Geometric Possibility and Laura Ruetsche's Interpreting Quantum Theories. The Rotman Institute hosted a book bash to celebrate the arrival of publication of these long-awaited [...]
The last talk in the Rotman lecture series, given by George Reisch of Northwestern University, focused on how the political and social climate of the late 1950s influenced Kuhn’s famous book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Reisch claims that Kuhn’s early insistence that paradigms immutably and comprehensively colour the way scientists perceive phenomena and assess [...]
Mohan Matthen has a nice, punchy write up on Plantinga's 'Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism' (EAAN) over at NewAPPS. The EAAN has been influential in some anti-Darwinian circles (Nagel's recent flirtation with teleology in science being one prominent example). I think Mathen is entirely right to suggest that the EAAN relies on an "extraordinarily narrow view [...]
By Katy Fulfer In Friday's Globe and Mail, Preston Manning (CEO of a conservative think-tank in Canada) lamented the Canadian Parliament's decision to not re-open the definition of legal personhood. Many Canadians viewed the attempt to discuss legal personhood (which currently is granted upon birth) as an attack on abortion rights. (Find Manning's commentary at the [...]