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::: center home >> events >> annual lecture series >> salmon memorial lecture

salmon memorial lecture

Wesley C. Salmon joined the Department of Philosophy as Professor and Chair in 1981. He held the rank of University Professor from 1983 until his retirement in 1999. He exerted a profound influence over philosophy of science as it was practiced in Pittsburgh and internationally.  His investigations into scientific explanation, causality, probability and induction and the philosophy of space and time provide a model of insight and clarity, in both thought and word. He set an example personally through his unfailing integrity and kindness. He died in 2001. His memory survives through the scholars who study his work and the many who remember him personally, with respect and admiration.

 The Wesley C. Salmon Memorial Lecture Fund has been established to support an annual lecture by a prominent scholar in philosophy of science in honor of Wesley Salmon. In content and style of analysis, the lecture will be given in the tradition of the work of Wesley Salmon and its natural continuations. The lecture may be devoted to Salmon’s work. However the range of material suitable for the lecture is construed broadly, reflecting Salmon’s devotion to excellence in philosophy of science, however it may arise.

The lecturers are selected after nomination from a committee of scholars familiar with the area in which Salmon worked. The nominating committee is presently chaired by Ken Gemes, Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London. The final selection is made by the Wesley C. Salmon Lecture Committee. It consists of: Director, Center for Philosophy of Science, Chair, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Chair, Department of Philosophy, and Merrilee H. Salmon, Professor Emerita.

lecture schedule

16 September 2011

Screening-off and Causal Incompleteness

 

Elliott Sober, University of Wisconsin-Madison

 

 

19 April 2013

Collective Inquiry

 

Philip Kitcher, Columbia University

 

 

25 October 2013

Grades of Inductive Skepticism

 

Brian Skyrms, University of California Irvine

 

 

12 September 2014

Wes and Me, and Search

 

Clark Glymour, Carnegie Mellon University

 

 

8 April 2016

Causation for Philosophical Applications

 

Christopher Hitchcock, California Institute of Technology

 

 

13 January 2017

After Hempel’s Dilemma: On the Evidence of Things Unseen

 

Bas van Fraassen, San Francisco State University

 

 

23 March 2018

Causal Processes & Causal Interactions: Warranting Causation in the Single Case

 

Nancy Cartwright, UCSD & Durham University

28 March 2019

Explaining Actions

 

Peter Railton, University of Michigan

08 November 2019

Thoroughly Modern Zeno: The Arrow, Quantum Mechanically

 

Laura Ruetsche, University of Michigan

::: click for another photo of Wesley Salmon

 
 
Revised 10/25/19 - Copyright 2010