The Principle of Stability
Samuel C. Fletcher (University of Minnesota & LMU Munich)
Wednesday, 6 December 2017, 18.15-19.45
ETH Zurich, Room RZ F21, Clausiusstrasse 59, Zurich
Abstract: How can inferences from idealized models to the phenomena they represent be justified when those models deliberately distort the phenomena? Pierre Duhem considered just this problem, arguing that inferences and explanations from mathematical models of phenomena to real physical applications must also be demonstrated to be approximately correct when the (idealized) assumptions of the model are only approximately true. Despite being little discussed among philosophers, mathematicians and physicists both contemporaneous with and subsequent to Duhem took up this challenge (if only sometimes implicitly), yielding a novel and rich mathematical theory of stability with epistemological consequences.
Samuel C. Fletcher is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and a Resident Fellow of the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. From 2013-2017 he was affiliated as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP), Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität.
Samuel Fletcher’s research focuses on the foundations of physics and of statistics. He has interests in the conceptual and physical basis of computation, the philosophy of applied mathematics, and the history of physics and philosophy of science.
Friday, 13 January 2017, 17.15-19.00
ETH Zurich, Main Building, Room HG F3
Scenarios of Collapse: Climate Change Denial and the Responsibility of Science
Naomi Oreskes (Harvard University)
Nicolas Gruber (ETH Zurich)
Christoph Kueffer (ETH Zurich / Environmental Humanities Switzerland)
Video of the Talks available here:
www.video.ethz.ch/events/2017/sciphil.html
Abstract: Climate change is a fact. And yet, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, science is facing a strong politically motivated opposition that tries to cast doubt on that evidence. Our guest Naomi Oreskes plays a leading role in the study of the political and rhetorical mechanisms that drive climate change denial, not only through her excellent academic work but also as renowned public advocate for climate action. In our conversation with Dr Oreskes, we will discuss the role of science in the conflict with climate change denialism. Questions like the following will be addressed: How should scientists confront pseudo-scientific statements? How should scientists react when confronted with so-called “facsimile science”? How can trust in science be re-established? Do scientists have a social responsibility that goes beyond the production and communication of scientific knowledge? What role can and should the humanities play in this regard?
Naomi Oreskes is Professor of the History of Science and Affiliated Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University. Her areas of Research are history of environmental sciences, science policy, philosophy of science, science and religion, technology and society, and women and gender studies. Her 2004 Science article about the scientific consensus on climate change has over a thousand citations and gained wide attention far beyond the scientific community. Her 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco to Global warming, that she co-authored with Erik Conway, provides a comprehensive and careful historical analysis of the mechanisms underlying different forms of anti-scientific denialisms. It was shortlisted for the Los Angeles Time Book Prize, and received the 2011 Watson-Davis Prize from the History of Science Society. It was also released as a documentary film in 2014. In her recent book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (also with Erik Conway), she presents a brilliant piece of fact-based fiction that draws attention to the potential consequences of a failure to fight climate change effectively.
Nicolas Gruber is professor for Environmental Physics at the Department of Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich. After his Matura in 1989, he was among the first students to enter the new Environmental Sciences degree program at ETH Zurich. After completing his PhD studies at the University of Berne, he worked for three years as a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University. In 2000, he joined the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences and the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr Gruber’s research focuses on the study of biogeochemical cycles on regional to global scales and on timescales from months to millennia, with a particular focus on the interaction of these cycles with Earth’s climate system.
Christoph Kueffer is Professor for Urban Ecology at the Department of Landscape Architecture of the University of Applied Sciences Eastern Switzerland and senior lecturer (Privatdozent) at ETH Zurich. He studied Environmental Sciences at ETH Zurich, and completed his PhD in plant ecology and habilitation in plant and global change ecology at the same university. He has long experience in collaborating with social scientists, scholars from the humanities and artists; amongst others as a fellow at the Collegium Helveticum and the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) at Bielefeld University, and as a co-chair of Environmental Humanities Switzerland. Dr Kueffer’s research focuses on urban ecology, biodiversity conservation in novel and human-dominated ecosystems, and global change impacts on island and mountain ecosystems.
Friday, 20 November 2015, 16.oo-18.00
Room: ML E13, Sonneggstrasse 3, 8006 Zürich
Homology and Natural Kinds: Philosophical Approaches to a Biological Concept
Thomas Reydon (Institute of Philosophy, Leibniz University Hannover)
Abstract: The question that I will address in this talk is a conceptual question with metaphilosophical ramifications. On the conceptual side I will explore the biological concept of homology. Homology is one of the core concepts of biological science, but (as is the case for many other biological concepts too, such as the concepts of species, gene, function, or fitness) there is no unequivocal understanding of what homology is. Several homology concepts are available in the literature, some specific to particular areas of investigation, but the relations between these different concepts, their various epistemic roles, and their metaphysical underpinnings remain largely elusive. As Günter Wagner put it in his recent book, Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation: “[B]eyond the most general statement that homology is a hypothesis of descent from a common ancestor, little of substance can be said regarding all of these notions of homology” (p. 1). Hence, conceptual clarification of the sort that is commonly carried out in the philosophy of science is needed to achieve more clarity on the epistemology of homology claims in biological science and on their metaphysical basis. I will focus on one particular aspect of the concept of homology, namely the question whether homology is a kind concept (a concept referring to kinds of things, used in classificatory contexts), as Richard Owen’s original definition of a homologue as “a part or organ in one organism so answering to that in another as to require the same name” (Owen, 1866: xii) suggests. While homology is often treated as a kind concept, I will show that treating homology as a kind concept is difficult to reconcile with standard accounts of kinds in the philosophy of science. On the metaphilosophical side this raises the question whether philosophical work on the issue of kinds and classification can help us achieve more clarity about cases like the homology concept, or rather stand in the way of clarity by imposing unwarranted a priori criteria onto scientific concepts.
Thomas Reydon is a professor of philosophy of biology at the Institute of Philosophy at the Leibniz University Hannover. He obtained his Ph.D. in philosophy of biology in the theoretical biology group at Leiden University’s Institute of Biology with a dissertation on the species problem. His active research interests include: the analysis of core concepts in biology; the foundations of classification in natural and social science and in technology; the epistemology and metaphysics of natural kinds; the explanatory scope of evolutionary theory (which involves asking how widely evolutionary theory can be applied in domains outside of biology proper, as well as critically examining the feasibility of Universal Darwinism); and traditional themes in philosophy of science such as explanation, laws of nature, scientific realism, etc. He teaches courses on philosophy of biology, bioethics, ethics of science, theories of natural kinds, science & religion, and philosophy of technology.
Friday, 23 May 2014, 17.00-19.00
Collegium Helveticum, Schmelzbergstrasse 25, 8006 Zürich
Non-Locality and What to Do With It
Michael Esfeld (Philosophy of Science, University of Lausanne)
Nicolas Gisin (Quantum Optics, University of Geneva)
In 1935, Einstein and others brought up a famous dilemma according to which quantum mechanics must either be incomplete or violate the principle of locality, i.e. the assumption that there can be no causal relations between space-like separated events, or, to put it in other words, no instantaneous actions at a distance. Of course Einstein was not ready to give up the principle of locality, which is of fundamental importance in his own theory of relativity. He therefore concluded that quantum mechanics must be incomplete. In 1964, however, John S. Bell, a physicist at CERN, discovered that also a complete quantum mechanics, in its original or other form, exhibits non-local features. Since the 1980s experiments have confirmed this claim and it became a well-established fact that reality, at least at the microscopic level, is fundamentally non-local. These results have far reaching consequences not only for our understanding of reality in general, but also with respect to technical applications in quantum cryptography and quantum computing. In this lecture, the speakers will explain what non-locality is, what it means for our understanding of reality and discuss possible practical applications that exploit the phenomenon of non-locality.
Michael Esfeld is professor for philosophy of science at the University of Lausanne. He holds a PhD from the University of Munster and a habilitation from the University of Konstanz. Michael Esfeld’s work was awarded with several awards and prizes, among them the award of the cogito foundation for the dialog between humanities and natural sciences and, most recently, the research award of the Alexander-von-Humboldt Foundation. He has an extensive list of publications in the philosophy of mind as well as the philosophy of physics and the foundations of quantum mechanics.
Nicolas Gisin is professor for physics and leader of the Group of Applied Physics (GAP) at the University of Geneva. He is well known for his experiments on long distance quantum entanglement. In 2003, MIT’s Technology Review Magazine rated his discoveries among the ten most seminal of our time. In the recent past, his works on quantum cryptography gained considerable attention. He is the co-founder of “ID Quantique”, a world-leader in the production of single photon detectors and random number generators. Nicolas Gisin was the first to receive the biennial John Stewart Bell Prize for research on fundamental issues in quantum mechanics.