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::: center home >> news >> 2013-14 annual review

Director's 2013-14 Annual Review
November 2014

   

In This Review

This Past Year

People
     Officers 
       Staff
            
     The Center Community                          

Events
    Conferences
    Annual Lecture Series
     
Lunchtime Colloquium

Other Business
     


This Past Year

People and the Office
••••••••••••••••••••

Yoichi and Joe

In addition to our permanent staff—Karen, Joyce and Cheryl—each year we also have a half-time graduate student working in the Center. This past year, that graduate student was Yoichi Ishida.

 

Center Fellows might reasonably have thought that he was fully occupied looking after them. However he was also busy with other things. He was completing his doctoral dissertation in the Department of HPS. He successfully defended his dissertation, "Models in Scientific Practice," just this August. It was a busy year for him since he was also making plans for his career. He accepted a position in the Department of Philosophy at Ohio University and begins there this year. This is welcome news since it means that he will not be far away. Athens, Ohio, is a mere 3 hours and 8 minutes as the Google drives. We've done our best to encourage him to make the trip.

He has been replaced this year by Joe McCaffrey, who is also a graduate student in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

The Facilities Plan

I reported last year about an ambitious plan to rework the Center offices. The planning proceeded through the Fall into early Spring and we ended up with a detailed, promising plan. The main idea is to open up our lounge into a central meeting area with the offices opening onto it. We'll also put in some glass here and there so that the hallways borrow light from outside and the Center as a whole has a brighter, more open feeling. In was all proceeding so well in the early Spring. However, as anyone who has been involved in construction at a university knows, even modest plans grow expensive quite quickly. Our plans had outgrown the funds available for the summer, so the plan is halted, temporarily we hope.

Finally, we have made a small effort to brighten our hallways and bring in some of the creativity and personality of the people in the offices at the Center. We have installed small glassboards outside each office and have given everyone a set of markers. What happens next is up to them. I'm wondering how it will work out.

Here's what appeared on the glassboard outside my office.

 

Fellows (and ducks)

Each year, the Fellows who visit form the core of the human community that is the Center. This past year, as with other years, that community had a strongly international flavor. We had three Italians, a Greek, a Frenchman, an Israeli-American, a New Zealand-American and three Americans.

If there was a theme to the year, it was "duck." It had started quietly as an inside joke. Allan Franklin was our Senior Visiting Fellow. Allan and I have been running into each other at conferences for many years. Ahead of one, in the late 1990's, he had let slip that he planned to use the "duck argument." It's simple enough. "If it waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck, ... then it likely is a duck."

I made sure to seat myself at the front ahead of Allan's talk, within arm's reach of the overhead projectors we still used in those days. When Allan began the duck argument, I was ready. Seizing a moment during which he turned away, I reached into my pocket and quickly placed a small, yellow rubber duck on the platten of the projector.

In preparation for Allan's visit, I procured a small collection of rubber ducks. One was discretely placed in Allan's office and the plan was that they would silently multiply in the course of the year. For the longest time, Allan seemed not to notice the duck.

Then, one day, he burst into my office brandishing it.

I did not know that episode was merely a warm up for a year of ducks. In late September, a 40 foot rubber duck was moored on the rivers at Pittsburgh's Point. It was irresistible. In a moment of manic passion, I shepherded some Fellows and a visiting speaker down to see it. See "Newton and the Duck".

After that, ducks became the unavoidable theme of the year and they began to pop up everywhere. See "...without his duck."

 

Conferences & Events
••••••••••••••••••••

Our full schedule of events is listed below.

It was a busy year. We hosted four conferences, two named lecture series and more lunchtime talks than I have patience to count. Each of us found excitement and illumination in different parts, so I can do no better than refer you to more thorough reports elsewhere, such as our "donuts" pages.

My interest was drawn especially to the workshop on quantum time. Our goal with workshops is to assemble communities of thinkers who need to meet and talk but otherwise would not do so. The topic of time in quantum mechanics is now starting to emerge from the philosophical shadows. I hope our quantum time workshop will be the beginning of something greater. See here for more.

The conference, Philosophy of Scientific Experimentation 4, represents what can happen when something new is started. We first held a conference in scientific experimentation in October 2010. That became the seed that sprouted into more conferences on the topic. They became the "PSX" series: Our 2010 conference was PSX1. This past year, our Senior Visiting Fellow, Allan Franklin, organized PSX4, and PSX returned to its roots in the Center.

See here for more.


People

Click on names in blue to visit each scholar's web page.


Officers
••••••••••••••••••••
The Board of Officers is the central decision-making body of the Center. Its composition remains the same as last year's: Adolf Grünbaum and Nicholas Rescher (co-Chairs); John D. Norton (Director); and Robert Batterman, Peter Machamer, James Woodward (Associate Directors). These Officers are responsible for the major planning and decision making in the Center.

They are sometimes assisted by Resident Fellows who serve in various capacities, often on program committees for conferences. The Annual Lecture Series Committee was chaired by Giovanni Valente, Department of Philosophy and had members:

Sandra Mitchell, Dept. of HPS
Kieran Setiya, Dept. of Philosophy
James Shaw, Dept. of Philosophy
James Woodward, Dept. of HPS
Julia Bursten, Departments HPS & Philosophy graduate student sponsor
John Norton, Department of HPS & Director, Center for Philosophy of Science


News from the Officers

Adolf Grünbaum

1. On September 18, 2013 at the University Club, I was presented with Germany’s Great Federal Merit Cross (“Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz”) by Busso von Alvensleben, Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany in New York City.

2. Also, last September, Oxford University Press published my Collected Works Volume I: Scientific Rationality, the Human Condition, and 20th Century Cosmologies (ed. Thomas Kupka). Volume II will be published later this year, and Volume III in 2015.

3. In November 2013, I received an Honorary Doctorate of Philosophy from the University of Cologne in Germany. The Laudatio was given by my very good friend and esteemed colleague, Professor Dr. Jürgen Mittelstrass, University of Konstanz, Germany.

4. In December 2013, I was interviewed by Tony Sobrado for The Biggest Questions podcast [http://thebiggestquestions.org/questions-topics/why-does-anything-exist-at-all/what-is-reality-professor-adolf-grunbaum ]

5. In 2013, my 1982 Presidential Address “Freud’s Theory: The Perspective of a Philosopher of Science” to the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division) was published online by the Philosophy Documentation Center under Presidential Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 1901-2000.

6. My Freud Encyclopedia article “Critique of Psychoanalysis” will appear in the forthcoming (2014) book Philosophy, Science, and Psychoanalysis (eds. Simon Boag, et. al.) published by Karnac Books in London.


Nicholas Rescher


Rose Huber of News & Publications won the 2012 Golden Quill Award of the Press Club of Western Pennsylvania in the history/culture category with her PITT CHRONICLE article entitled “Nicholas Rescher Resurrects History’s First Sophisticated Wartime Coding Machine.”

For reasons not entirely clear to me, my work has been receiving an enthusiastic reception in the Persian-language orbit, as is evidenced by about a dozen publications in academic journals. (Alas I cannot read them.)

The year also saw the publication of a new book: THE PRAGMATIC VISION (Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).

At present I am bringing to completion a book entitled:” INSIGHTS: A Journey through Philosophy in 101 Anecdotes,” to be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press.


John D. Norton

When I wasn't completely absorbed in events at the Center, I managed to write more chapters for my slowly accreting book on inductive inference. At the moment, I'm rather pleased with a simple illustration of how apparently insurmountable inductive problems can suddenly collapse. Take the challenge of continuing the series 1, 3, 5, 7, ... Insoluble? That's the problem Galileo faced with his law of fall. These are the distances a body falls in successive unit times. Now merely add Galileo's assumption that you have to get these ratios no matter which time unit you use, and the only possible continuation is the odd numbers.

For more, see my website at

http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/jdnorton.html

where you will find papers describing this problem. There is also a draft paper on Curie's principle (which I urge is a truism) and an extension of my exorcism of Maxwell's demon to the quantum case.

My "Waiting for Landauer" continues to be the most cited paper in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, as announced on their website.


Center Staff News
••••••••••••••••••••

Karen Kovalchick, Assistant Director

Spoiler alert!! If you aren’t a “dog person,” you might as well skip to the next entry right now! Because anyone who knows Karen, knows it’s ALL ABOUT THE DOGS in her world. This past year was a life-changer for her. Her beloved Bullmastiff Gabe died in December, just a few days short of what would have been his 10th birthday on Christmas Eve. So, for the first time in 30 years, she was without a Bullmastiff at her side. Meanwhile, Gretel had not spent one day without Gabe in her 8 years of life. The two of them were beyond devastated…their house was no longer home. It was too quiet, too empty. So it was decided that the finest tribute they could pay to Gabe was to rescue someone on death row. Thus, the arrival of Dan da Man!

Dan was confiscated by the authorities when found living on the end of a chain with no shelter during one of Pittsburgh’s worst winters ever. Dan has some serious health issues which would have rendered him “unadoptable” to most people. He is an incredible bundle of high energy, extreme intelligence and powerful willfulness! He is a challenge, one Karen and Gretel welcome (I think). He has a love of life and a great spirit that we all should envy. Their house is once more full of dog!

 

Joyce McDonald, Administrative Assistant/Event Planner

I can't believe it's been 20 years since I first walked into the Center. I arrived on a sunny day in August 1994 for my first interview with Mary Connor. The carpeting and paint was old and dingy and I wasn't sure about working in the old, sooty, gothic-like Cathedral of Learning. When I stepped through the old double glass doors, I felt I was at home. It's been a pleasure to help welcome over 200 Visiting Fellows and host over 1,000 speakers the last two decades. Many updates and changes have been made to the Center, and it is still home to me and many of you tell us you feel you have a home here when you return to Pittsburgh. The Welcome mat is always out.

Cheryl Greer, Administrative Assistant/Technology Manager

As hoped for, Cheryl had a very uneventful year punctuated by a summer trip to British Columbia. Cats and dog are all very well, and home renovations continue sporadically. Cheryl passed much of the year engrossed by the legal wrangling over the Official Reburying Rights to Richard III's remains. The Wars of the Roses, revisited! Alas, York lost out again.

 


The Center Community
••••••••••••••••••••

Here I report news from the Center community. To find the specifics of papers and books mentioned, please visit the particular scholar's website elsewhere on this website.


Resident, Visiting, and Postdoctoral Fellows

2013-14 Visiting Fellows

Aristidis Arageorgis, Spring Term
National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Ori Belkind, Fall Term
University of Richmond, USA

Melinda Fagan, Fall Term
Rice University, USA

Carrie Figdor, Academic Year
University of Iowa, USA

Allan Franklin, Senior VF/Academic Year
University of Colorado

Lucia Foglia, Spring Term
McGill University, Canada

Marco Giovanelli, Academic Year
University of Tübingen, Germany

Leah Henderson, Spring Term
Carnegie Mellon University, USA

Douglas Kutach, Fall Term

2013-14 Postdoctoral Fellows

Arnaud Pocheville
Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France

Joshua Rosaler
Pembroke College, Oxford, UK
    

 

News from Resident Fellows

Edouard Machery

Awards:
2013 Senior Fellow of the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (Interdisciplinary program)
2013-15 “Intellectual Humility and Cultural Diversity in Philosophy: An examination of the extent and implications of cultural diversity in philosophical intuition,” awarded by the Fuller Theological Seminary / Thrive Center in concert with the John Templeton Foundation

Edited books:
1. O’Neill, E., and Machery, E. 2014. Current Controversies in Experimental Philosophy. New York: Routledge.
2. Downes, S., and Machery, E. 2013. Arguing About Human Nature. New York: Routledge.

The paperback of the anthology Arguing About Human Nature (Routledge) is now out and can be bought on Amazon, the Routledge website etc.

 

Sandra Mitchell

Sandra Mitchell received the Distinguished Alumni Award from Pitzer College in 2013. In the past year she presented her research at the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, The International Society for History and Philosophy of Biology, at the University of Rome 3, Stanford University, and University of Connecticut. She co-organized a workshop with Holly Andersen on New Directions in Pragmatic Metaphysics for Science at Simon Fraser University. She continues to serve on the Scientific Program Committee, and as member-at-large of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.


News from Past Fellows

Fritz Allhoff

Fritz Allhoff (PI), Developing a Normative Framework for Cyberwarfare. US National Science Foundation; Science, Technology, and Society. Collaborative proposal with Neil Rowe (PI) and Bradley Strawser (co-PI), Naval Postgraduate School and Patrick Lin (PI), California Polytechnic State University. October 2013-September 2016 ($494,465)

Yuichi Amitani

In 2013-14 I did two invited talks:

• "What do biologists do with species,'' The Japan-Taiwan Philosophy of Biology Workshop, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan, March 2014.
• "What a tale of two minds can be,'' The third East-Asia Conference for the Philosophy of Science, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan, October 2013.

I also wrote a book review:

Book Review: "Rationality and the Reflective Mind", (Keith Stanovich, Oxford University Press), PHS Studies, 8: 88-91.

Milos Arsenijevic

“Avoiding Logical Determinism and Retaining the Principle of Bivalence
within Temporal Modal Logic: Time as a Line-In-Drawing”, in: Time and
Tense
(S. Gerogiorgakis ed.), Philosophia; Munich, 2014 (forthcoming)

“Gunkology and Pointilism: Two Mutually Supervening Models of the
Region-Based and the Point-Based Theory of the Infinite
Two-Dimensional Continuum” (with M. Adzic) in: Space and Time: A
Priori and A Posteriori Studies
(Vincenzo Fano, Francesco Orilia, and
Giovanni Macchia eds.), De Gruyter; Berlin, 2014, pp.137-170.

Peter Barker

Here are some publications:

Crowther, K. and Barker, P. (2013) “Training the Intelligent Eye: Understanding Illustrations in Early Modern Astronomy Texts. “ Isis, 104, 429-70.
Barker , P. (2013a) “Why was Copernicus a Copernican?” Metascience, 22, 1-6.
Barker, P. (2013b) “Albert of Brudzewo’s Little Commentary on Peurbach’s New Theorica”, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 44, 1-24.
Barker , P and Vesel, M. (2012) “Goddu’s Copernicus.” Aestimatio, 9, 304-36.

Aaron Ben-Ze’ev

Has several forthcoming articles:
1. "Ain't Love Nothing But Sex Misspelled?" In C. Maurer, T. Milligan, and K. Pacovská, Love and its Objects (forthcoming)
2. “The Comparative Personal Concern in Pleasure-In-Others-Misfortune,” in W. W. van Dijk and J. W. Ouwerkerk (Eds.), Schadenfreude: Understanding Pleasure at the Misfortune of Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
3. “Philosophy of Love,” and “Emotions,” entries in Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Social Sciences (Sage: forthcoming).
More information can be found on his website: http://ben-zeev.haifa.ac.il/

Marta Bertolaso

Marta reports eight papers, three book chapters and a book. For more, see here.

Anjan Chakravartty

Anjan had a exhilarating year settling into new surroundings in Philosophy and HPS at Notre Dame. Among other things, a few projects engaging the idea of naturalized metaphysics came to fruition:

* ‘On the Prospects of Naturalized Metaphysics’, in D. Ross, J. Ladyman, & H. Kincaid (eds.), Scientific Metaphysics, Oxford University Press (2013).
* ‘Ontological Priority: The Conceptual Basis of Non-Eliminative, Ontic Structural Realism’, in E. M. Landry & D. P. Rickles (eds.), Structural Realism: Structure, Object, and Causality, pp. 187-206, Western Ontario Series in Philosophy of Science, Springer (2012).
* ‘Dispositions for Scientific Realism’, in R. Groff & J. Greco (eds.), Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism, pp. 113-127 Routledge (2012).

Equal parts exciting and challenging was a book symposium in which A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism was stretched on the rack by Steven French, Michel Ghins, and Stathis Psillos. Anjan's best attempts (you be the judge!) at replies to their searching commentaries are out in:

* ‘Realism in the Desert and in the Jungle: Reply to French, Ghins, and Psillos’, Erkenntnis 78: 39-58 (2013).

Some highlights of the year included the wonderful Virginia Tech Graduate Philosophy of Science Conference, where Anjan spoke on voluntarism and scientific epistemologies, an eye-opening trip to China, and a one-day workshop at Notre Dame on ‘Skepticism, Voluntarism, and Science’, featuring Richard Bett, Otavio Bueno, Casey Perin, and Michael Williams. Watch for the results, forthcoming as a special issue of the International Journal for the Study of Skepticism.

Lindley Darden

Lindley Darden is Professor of Philosophy and a Distinguished Scholar/Teacher at the University of Maryland, College Park. She recently published "Mechanisms versus Causes in Biology and Medicine," in Hsiang-Ke Chao, Szu-Ting Chen, and Roberta L. Millstein (eds.), Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics (Springer, 2013). She and Carl F. Craver published In Search of Mechanisms: Discoveries Across the Life Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In 2013, according to Google Scholar, their paper with Peter Machamer, "Thinking About Mechanisms" (Philosophy of Science 2000) had received over 1000 citations. Her current research is on evolutionary mechanisms and computational methods for discovering molecular biological mechanisms. For more information: http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/people/darden

Werner Diederich

I have completed my book "Der harmonische Aufbau der Welt: Keplers wissenschaftliches und spekulatives Werk" which will appear next month with Meiner Verlag, Hamburg.

Heather Douglas

I organized two workshops, one last June as part of SPSP's annual meeting on Science, Policy, Values: Exploring the Nexus (http://www.philosophy-science-practice.org/en/events/spsp-2013-workshop/) and another upcoming one on Science-Policy Interfaces comparing the US, UK, and Canada (https://uwaterloo.ca/science-technology-society/conferences/science-policy-interface-international-comparisons-workshop).

I also published several articles, including:
"Pure Science and the Problem of Progress," Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368114000132
“The Moral Terrain of Science,” Erkenntnis, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10670-013-9538-0
“The Value of Cognitive Values,” Philosophy of Science (2013), vol. 80, pp. 796-806.

Things are not getting much better with respect to science policy in Canada though, as this recent interview shows:
https://uwaterloo.ca/arts/news/heather-douglas-talks-cbc-about-government-cuts-science

Jon Michael Dunn

Last year I published 3 articles:
“Guide to the Floridi Keys,” Essay Review of Luciano Floridi’s The Philosophy of Information, MetaScience, 22, 93-98.
“The Third Life of Quantum Logic: Quantum Logic Inspired by Quantum Computing” (with Lawrence Moss and Zhenghan Wang), Journal of Philosophical Logic, 42, 443-459 (our editor’s introduction to a special issue: Quantum Logic Inspired by Quantum Computation).
“On the Decidability of Implicational Ticket Entailment” (with Katalin Bimbó), The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 78, 214-236.

This last solved a problem open for 52 years, second on the Typed Lambda Calculus and its Applications Open Problems List. I gave invited lectures at Logica 2013, Workshop on Non-classical Epistemic Logics at the Czech Academy of Sciences Institute of Philosophy, the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, and Carnegie-Mellon University. I was a visiting professor last spring in Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. It was good to remember the way Pittsburgh had been when my wife and I were graduate students in the middle 1960’s (me at Pitt, Sally at Carnegie Tech--now CMU), and when I was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Philosophy of Science (1984). It was also good to see old friends like John Norton.

Philip Erlich

I have established a body of new results on surreal numbers and have given a number of talks on surreal numbers including talks at Cambridge University and University of Évora, Portugal. In addition, my paper "A Re-examination of Zeno’s Paradox of Extension: An Essay in Honor of Adolf Grünbaum on his 90th Birthday" has been accepted by Philosophy of Science.

John Erpenbeck

I was pretty productive last year and in the beginning of 2014. I published - together with other scientists - 4 books. They are listed here.


Melinda Fagan

I was a Visiting Fellow in Pittsburgh in Fall 2013, and returned to Rice University for Spring Semester. I received tenure in April, but accepted an Associate position (the new Sterling McMurrin Chair) at the University of Utah. So I am moving to Salt Lake this summer.

There I’ll continue my research from fall, on a collaborative alternative to causal mechanistic explanation. I received an NSF Scholar’s Award for this project in AY2014-2015.

I published several articles, with one more in press. Listed here.

"Philosophy of stem cell biology: an introduction." Philosophy Compass
8:
1147-1158, 2013.

"The stem cell uncertainty principle." Philosophy of Science 80: 945-957, 2013.

"Do groups have scientific knowledge?", In: Sara Chant, Frank Hindriks,
and Gerhard Preyer (eds.) From Individual to Collective Intentionality: New Essays,
Oxford University Press, 163-186, 2014.

"Cell and body: individuals in stem cell biology" To appear in:
Individuals Across the Sciences. (eds, T. Pradeu and A. Guay, Oxford
University Press).

I also co-wrote an article on Evolutionary Systems Biology with philosopher Sara Green and biologist Johannes Jaeger (submitted to Biological Theory), and am currently preparing a paper for a Special Section on explanation and scientific practice in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

I gave invited talks at the Konrad Lorenz Institute (Altenberg, Austria, 9/8/2013), Wesleyan University (Middletown CT, 11/20/2013), and the Eastern APA (Baltimore, MD, 12/29/2013) on Evolutionary Systems Biology, experimental evidence in stem cell research, and collaborative explanation, respectively. I also gave a short invited talk for Rice’s Scientia Institute ‘Power of Ideas’ Speaker Series (2/11/2014), on ‘Collaboration.’

My 2013 book, Philosophy of Stem Cell Biology (Palgrave Macmillan) received a Choice award and was nominated for the Lakatos Prize. I discuss the book (with Carrie Figdor) in a recent New Books in Philosophy podcast.

Carrie Figdor

I continued work on my book project, in part by preparing material for presentations, working some of it into a paper, and finalizing a prospectus. I also progressed on several side projects that I juggle in my spare time. I can report the following fruits of my labors:

"On the Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates." Forthcoming in Synthese.

"Is Free Will Necessary for Moral Responsibility?: A case for rethinking their relationship and the design of experimental studies in moral psychology." With Mark Phelan. Forthcoming in Mind & Language.

"Experimental Philosophy and the Underrepresentation of Women." With Matt L. Drabek. Forthcoming in W. Buckwalter and J. Sytsma, eds., A Companion to Experimental Philosophy, Wiley-Blackwell).

I also presented (different) chunks of the book project in talks at two venues that were wonderful for getting great feedback: at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, 40th annual meeting in Vancouver, BC, in June, and at University of Colorado—Boulder as a keynote speaker at the 30th Annual Boulder 'Conference on the History and Philosophy of Science: Neurons, Mechanisms, and The Mind: The History and Philosophy of Cognitive Neuroscience', in October.


Jon Forge

Forge's long, technical, but exciting book on weapons research, Designed to Kill, was published at the beginning of the year, and, to put on a positive spin, the best one might say is that the reception was muted. So Forge is writing a shorter more accessible version - like to publish exclusively as an ebook, and if any other fellow has advice on this, it would be gratefully received. Aside from that, a super trip to the Kimberly in Western Australia by ship was a highlight, but that's not about philosophy, so I shouldn't mention it...

Allan Franklin

I spent most of the academic year as the Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science at Pittsburgh. It was interesting, informative, and productive. The talks, discussions, conferences, and fellows’ meetings made for a very enjoyable visit. One highlight was the Fourth Conference on the Philosophy of Scientific Experimentation (PSX4). It was a pleasure to see so much good work being done by younger scholars. While at the Center I made considerable progress on a new book manuscript with the working title, What Makes a Good Experiment? An article, “Millikan’s measurement of Planck’s constant,” was published in the European Physics Journal H. My latest book, Shifting Standards: Experiments in Particle Physics in the Twentieth Century was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in December 2013.

Rolf George

Rusnock and I just published an English edition of Bolzano's Wissenschaftslehre. Also, we are working on an edition of my various papers on Kant. Otherwise, not much has happened - after all, I retired in 1996. Ann and I still live in Waterloo in the same house.

James G. Greeno

In March, with a colleague in the Department of Psychology, I presented a webinar in a series organized by the International Society of the Learning Sciences, titled "situative cognition," in which we interacted with students and a colleague at several universities in Europe and the U. S.

Wenceslao Gonzalez

Wencesalao reports three recent books and six recent papers. See here

He organized a conference at the University of A Coruña on 13-14 March 2014. The topic was “Philosophy of Psychology: James Woodward’s Conception.”

Gurol Irzik

Gurol reports two papers.

G. Irzik and A. F. Kurtulmus, "Votes and lab coats: democratizing
scientific research and science policy", Metascience, 22: 45-61, 2013.

G. Irzik, "Introduction: Commercialization of Academic Science and a
New Agenda for Science Education", Science and Education 22:
2375-2384, 2013. (This is the introduction to a special issue of
Science and Education that I guest-edited.)

Kareem Khalifa

• I was promoted from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor at Middlebury College.
• I spent the month of July in Tucson, Arizona, as part of the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on Experimental Philosophy at the University of Arizona.
• I published five articles—many of which were sparked during my time at Pitt. See here.
• I got engaged! Date to be determined.

Hylarie Kochiras

Hylarie reports seven articles. See here.

Douglas Kutach

I published a book entitled "Causation" which I wrote while at the Center.
http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745659954

I also wrote a paper on quantum ontology that will be published this year.

P.D. Magnus

The book that P.D. wrote while visiting the Center was published in October (Scientific Enquiry and Natural Kinds: From Planets to Mallards, Palgrave Macmillan). A paper that he and Heather Douglas devised when they were officemates at the Center is forthcoming in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science ("Why novel prediction matters"). He also has some published articles which didn't incubate in his semester at the Center. He continues to teach at SUNY Albany, where he will be department chair next year.

Diego Marconi

I have published a short book intended for a general audience, Il mestiere di pensare ("Thinking as a Trade"), on the cultural effects of the professionalization of philosophy and the opposition of professional philosophers vs. media-oriented philosophers. My current research work is on concepts (an invited paper will be published this year in the Kirchberg proceedings for 2013) and the neuropsychology of lexical competence. A paper on reference and theories of meaning as use is coming out in a collection edited by A. Bianchi (Oxford University Press). I have been admitted to the Accademia delle scienze of Turin and the Academia Europaea. I was awarded the medal for Philosophy of the Italian Society for Neuroethics.

Nicholas Maxwell

Nick reports "two especially significant papers," "four further papers" and "three chapters in three books." See here.

He also notes that most ítems are available online at

Jesús Mosterín

Jesús reports a book, three papers and two lectures. See here.

Dan Nesher

I completed my research on the realist Epistemology of Charles Sanders Peirce titled:

‘What Makes A Reasoning Sound’ Is The Proof Of Its Truth: A Reconstruction Of Peirce’s Semiotics As The Epistemic Logic, And Why He Did Not Complete His Realistic Revolution.

Lydia Patton

My title at Virginia Tech is now Associate Professor.

And I have a new textbook out: Philosophy, Science, and History: A Guide and Reader, from Routledge Press.

Cassandra Pinnick

Retired (2008), part-time law practice in Honolulu and have been doing some philosophy instruction distance/online for Western Kentucky University.

Collin Rice

I started a tenure-track job at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about pluralism and how to incorporate various interdisciplinary contributions into our understanding of the human mind. I’ve also been working on several papers on explanation, idealization, and scientific understanding. In addition, I’ve recently completed papers on concepts, models, and realism that are currently under review. New papers published this year include the following—all of which I worked on during my year at the Center. (Find list here.)

Joshua Rosaler

I completed two articles during my time at the Center, both currently under review. The first is titled "Inter-Model Reduction in Physics: The Case of Dynamical Systems" and was delivered in talks this year at the Center’s lunchtime colloquium and at the conference on Reduction and Emergence in Science at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). I also completed a second paper titled "Is de Broglie-Bohm Theory Specially Equipped to Recover Classical Behavior?" which argues against a common strategy for extracting classical behavior from the de Broglie-Bohm interpretation of quantum theory and instead proposes that such an account should follow straightforwardly from results developed in the context of decoherence theory. I currently have a third paper in progress, titled "Interpretation Neutrality in the Classical Domain of Quantum Theory," an embryonic version of which was delivered at the Center’s lunchtime colloquium and which has been invited as a contribution to a special issue of Topoi on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics; I will also be delivering a version of this paper at an associated conference on the Metaphysics of Quantum Mechanics in Oxford this October. In addition, I have been invited to participate in the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science’s Seven Pines conference on the history and foundations of physics in May 2014.

Howard Sankey

This year, I’ll be involved in a summer school at the Rotman Institute at the University of Western Ontario in June/July, and travelling to Hanover to speak at the retirement workshop being organized for Paul Hoyningen-Huene in July. I’m mostly thinking and teaching about epistemology at present, and have brought to an end a series of about ten articles that I have written about the relationship between Pyrrhonian scepticism, epistemic relativism and normative naturalism.

Howard lists 6 publications for 2013 and three for 2014. See here.

Samuel Schindler

Sam lists eight papers. See here.

Kyle Stanford

I've been busy reaping the fruits of my extremely productive time at the Center, including talks in France, the UK, Mexico City, Hong Kong, and later this year, Abu Dhabi. I'll be spending most of this coming July and August as a Fellow at the Australian National University in Canberra. And I have a wide variety of papers in various stages of preparation and/or review that were either written during or significantly influenced by the time I spent as last year's Senior Fellow, including the following. (See here.)

Susan Sterrett

In 2013, I completed a book, Three Views of Logic: Mathematics, Philosophy and Computer Science, co-authored with D. W. Loveland and R. E. Hodel, which was published by Princeton University Press; and a paper "The Morals of Model Making" forthcoming in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. I worked on "Turing on the Integration of Human and Machine Intelligence", since completed and forthcoming in Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing - Turing 100, Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science (Springer Verlag), edited by Alisa Bokulich and Juliet Floyd.

I also accepted an appointment as the Curtis D. Gridley Distinguished Professor of History and Philosophy of Science in the Department of Philosophy at Wichita State University in Wichita, Kansas.

Drozdstoj Stoyanov

In January 2014 Dr. Stoyanov was promoted to the academic position of Full Professor of Psychiatry, Medical Psychology and Person Centered Medicine.

On June 26-29th 2014 Professor Stoyanov presided the XVI the International Conference on Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology “Neuroscience, Logics & Mental Development” in Golden Sands, Bulgaria.

Vice President of the European Association for Person Centered Health Care (ESPCH) since 2013. Awarded Bronze medal of ESPCH for Excellence and Innovations in Person Centered Undergraduate Medical Education .

Drossi lists six papers. See here.

Karola Stotz

New book with Paul Griffiths, Genetics and Philosophy: An Introduction, is now available.

David Stump

David Stump published the entry "Henri Poincaré" in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (co-written with Gerhard Heinzmann). He has
finished his book manuscript, responded to reviewers and awaits a contract.

Serife Tekin

During my time at the Center, I finished 5 new articles; 3 of which are accepted for publication, and 2 under review. My article, “How does the Self Adjudicate Narratives?” is published in the March issue of Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology; and my article “Will I be Pretty, Will I be Rich?” The Missing Self in Antidepressant Commercials” is published in the May issue of the American Journal of Bioethics. In addition, my article, “Psychiatric Taxonomy and Self-Narratives: Far From the Madding Grief?” is forthcoming in The Psychiatric Babel: Assessing the DSM-5, edited by P. Singy and S. Demazeux, Springer's Press.

My articles “Are Mental Disorders Natural Kinds: A Plea for an Alternative Approach to Intervention in Pscyhiatry,” and “The Missing Self in Psychiatric Taxonomy” are currently under review.

In addition, 3 encyclopedia entries are currently in press. These are entitled “Mental Health, Meaning of Mental Health,” forthcoming in the 4th Edition of the Encyclopedia of Bioethics, (Bruce Jennings, et. al. eds., MacMillan Reference), “Medical Ethics, History of the Near and Middle East, Turkey,” forthcoming in the same volume, and “Scientific Realism versus Antirealism: The Self” forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology (R. Cautin and S. Lilienfield, eds., Wiley-Blackwell Press.)

I have also given several talks at various conferences, invited lectures, and job talks. I presented my papers “The Missing Self in Psychiatric Taxonomy” at the Philosophy of Science Association Meeting in San Diego, and “Making Mental Disorders Amenable to Scientific Investigation: Beyond Natural Kinds,” at the Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh. I gave an invited lecture at Duke University, entitled “Grief and Depression in the DSM-5,” and another one at a panel on the “DSM-5 Redefinitions Panel” at The International Neuroethics Coneference in Cleveland. I gave “The Missing Self in Psychopathology” as a job talk at Marywood University, Scranton;University of Texas Pan American, Edinburg; and Daemen College, Amherst, USA. Finally I presented a commentary on “ Craniopagus Twins and the Possibility of Introspective Misidentification,” at the Southern Society for Philosophy and
Psychology Meeting in Austin.

The happiest news of the year for me include getting a tenure track job as an Assistant Professor at Daemen College, NY; and making significant progress in my book project –through the articles and the talks I finished -- provisionally entitled “Reclaiming the Self in Pscyhopathology.” I will be submitting my proposal to Oxford University Press in September 2013.I am very excited to be staying as an Associate Member at the Center.

Soshichi Uchii

I have been working on Recorders and Leibniz these two years. I have made fifteen CDs of my performances (more than 100 samples on YouTube). As for academic work, I am writing a book-length paper on Leibniz, "Monadology, Information, and Physics." The draft of Part 1 (Metaphysics and Dynamics) is available at PhilSci Archive, and Part 2 (Space and Time) is in preparation.

Jean Paul Van Bendegem

Our research center obtained a grant of 600,000 euro (approx. 800,000 $) for a project “The Logic and Philosophy of Mathematical Practices”.

He lists four papers related to the topic and also a fifth paper. See here.

Peter Vickers

My book Understanding Inconsistent Science came out with OUP in 2013, and reviews are starting to appear (e.g. NDPR - see here). And a special issue of Synthese has just been published (Online First, May 2014), entitled Is Science Inconsistent, which I co-edited with Otavio Bueno (see here). I have also just been awarded a grant from the AHRC for a 39-month project entitled ‘Contemporary Scientific Realism and the Challenge from the History of Science’, collaborating with Timothy Lyons at IUPUI. This kicks off on 1st July 2014. And my daughter Poppy Olivia Vickers was born on 12th Feb 2014 – busy year!

Ioannis Votsis

Since October 2012 I am a regular visiting fellow at the University of Athens for the EU-Greek Government funded project ‘Aspects and Prospects of Realism in the Philosophy of Science and Mathematics’ headed by Stathis Psillos. In the past year I have also been co-editing two special issues: one on novel predictions (to appear in SHPS), the other on theory-ladenness (to appear in the JGPS). Aside from my editing duties, I have written various papers. Two of these are already published: one is a form of perspectivalist realism (Philosophica, 2012), the other is on structural realism and the caloric (SHPS, 2012) and was co-authored with Gerhard Schurz.
Three other papers are scheduled for publication (subject to final approval). Two of them are contributions to the aforementioned special issues. The third concerns structural realism and phlogiston (to appear in a Springer volume on Linguistics and Philosophy and co-authored with Gerhard Schurz). In terms of talks, I have given a number of contributed (e.g. BSPS2012, PSA2012 [kindly presented by Otavio Bueno in my absence], PSF2013) and invited talks (e.g. Barcelona, Athens, Wuhan) as well as a plenary talk at the 7th Quadrennial International Pittsburgh Fellows Conference in Mugla.

Paul Weirich

Cambridge University Press will publish in 2015 Paul Weirich’s new book, Models of Decision-Making: Simplifying Choices. Weirich worked on this manuscript while at the Center for Philosophy of Science in spring 2012.

Adrian Wüthrich

Recent publications:

"Local Acausality"

"Feynman’s Struggle and Dyson’s Surprise"

Review of "The Birth of String Theory" in: Isis, 104(3), pp. 639-640, 2013

I unfortunately also lost my Center umbrella.

 

 

Events

The events of the past year are recorded in greater detail in the Center website. For an informal account of some of them, see the "donuts" page and for photos, "photo album."

Major events of the past year included the following conferences and workshops:
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Hobbes & Spinoza
19 October 2013

Salmon Memorial Lecture: Grades of Inductive Skepticism by Brian Skyrms
25 October 2013
Co-sponsored with the Department of Philosophy and the Department of History and Philosophy of Science

Experimentation in Neuroscience
22-23 November 2013

Quantum Time
28-29 March 2014

Philosophy of Scientific Experimentation 4
11-12 April 2014


Speakers in the Annual Lecture Series were:
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Katherine Brading, University of Notre Dame

Paul Griffiths, University of Sydney

Andreas Albrecht, University of California, Davis

John Lyne, University of Pittsburgh

William Goodwin, University of South Florida

Alva Noe, University of California, Berkeley

 

Speakers in the Lunchtime Colloquia were:
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Nicholas Rescher, University Professor, University of Pittsburgh

Peter Gildenhuys, Lafayette College

Allan Franklin, CPS Sr. Visiting Fellow, University of Colorado

Melinda Fagan, CPS Visiting Fellow, Rice University

Ori Belkind, CPS Visiting Fellow, University of Richmond

Marco Giovanelli, CPS Visiting Fellow, University of Tübingen

Doug Kutach, CPS Visiting Fellow

Carrie Figdor, CPS Visiting Fellow, University of Iowa

Josh Rosaler, CPS Postdoc Fellow, Pembroke College, Oxford

Arnaud Pocheville, CPS Postdoctoral Fellow, Ecole Normale Superieure

Mathias Frisch, University of Maryland

Chrys Mantzavinos, University of Athens

Beckett Sterner, Field Museum, Chicago

John D. Norton, University of Pittsburgh

Lucia Foglia, CPS Visiting Fellow, McGill University

Leah Henderson, CPS Visiting Fellow, Carnegie Mellon University

Aristidis Arageorgis, CPS Visiting Fellow, National Technical University of Athens

Maël Montévil, IHPST, CNRS, Paris

William M. Kallfelz, Mississippi State University

Other Business

 

Renewal of Associate Membership of the Center
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May we take this opportunity to remind Center Associates that their appointments are for three years. Re-appointment is not automatic. If your three-year Associate's appointment is expiring or has expired and you would like to renew it, please let us know through email to the Assistant Director, Karen Kovalchick. Your appointment will then be renewed for a further three years. If you choose not to renew your appointment, your name will remain on our mailing list, so you will continue to hear news of the Center's activities, unless you request otherwise. Associates receive no compensation and have no regular duties. However, the Center views acceptance of an appointment as an Associate as a commitment to attend a few of the Center's many activities each year. Annually, these activities include, but are not limited to, the Annual Lecture Series (6 to 8 lectures per year), special lectures, the Lunchtime Colloquium (usually meets twice a week), conferences and workshops (2 or 3), occasional social functions, and occasional study groups.

 

Request for Feedback
••••••••••••••••••••

Dear Reader who has had the fortitude to read through to the end of this review: We would appreciate very much some indication of whether you found this review interesting or helpful in any way--or otherwise. Drop us a short email with any remarks you care to make.

 

Acknowledgements
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This review would be incomplete without thanks to the many people who make the Center possible. Our thanks go to the Center Officers, who take time from their busy academic schedules to serve the Center; to the Office of the Provost of the University of Pittsburgh (including Provost Patricia Beeson, Vice Provost Alberta Sbragia and Vice Provost Carey Balaban), whose support is both visionary and unflagging; to the Visiting Fellows, who populate the Center each year with new energies and new ideas; and to the many who come to give talks, to hear talks, to enliven discussion, and to keep an eye on the donuts.

Finally my thanks go to the staff who worked so hard for the Center last year -- Karen, Joyce, Cheryl and Yoichi. Only someone who has carried the responsibility of an office like the Center's can truly appreciate just how much depends upon the energy and dedication of the staff.

 

 
 
Revised 11/12/14 - Copyright 2012