Workshops

Forthcoming Workshops

Summer 2010

Psychology, Philosophy, and the Study of the Capacities of Wisdom

Organizer:
Valerie Tiberius (Philosophy, University of Minnesota)

Spring 2011 and Spring 2012

Philosophical Perspectives on Causal Reasoning in Biology

This workshop will consist of two meetings. The first meeting will bring together a small group of biologists, philosophers working in the general area of causation, and philosophers of biology to discuss issues involving causal concepts in biology. Participants will prepare for the meeting by reading classic philosophical works on causation. Biologists will make presentations describing causal phenomena or issues in their research areas that they believe are both important and in need of careful causal analysis. Philosophers of biology will give brief talks describing cases from biology that raise intriguing causal issues. This will stimulate all of those invited to explore these examples and problems in more detail, bringing tools and expertise from their respective backgrounds to bear on them. It should also help shape topics for further research. Project participants will then write papers on these topics to be discussed at the second meeting, which after further revision will be published in Minnesota Studies for the Philosophy of Science.

Organizers:
Ken Waters (Philosophy, University of Minnesota),
Mike Travisano (Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, & BioTechnology Institute, University of Minnesota),
Jim Woodward (Division of Humanities, California Institute of Technology)

Fall 2011

The Language of Nature: Re-Appraising the Mathematization of Natural Philosophy

The influential assumption that science is born with the successful application of mathematics to nature has been largely taken for granted by historians and philosophers of early modern science. The aim of the workshop is to re-evaluate a prominent historiographical orientation of twentieth century research on the Scientific Revolution – the mathematization of nature (Koyré, Dijksterhius, Burtt) – in light of the proliferation of novel methodological orientations and studies in the last generation of scholars. By examining the relation between mathematical and scientific knowledge from a variety of perspectives, including philosophical, social, and rhetorical, the workshop and published volume will shed new light on the complex gestation and nurture of modern science. This workshop will continue in the Center's tradition of inviting leading scholars for workshops, and then publishing the products of these workshops as volumes in Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science.

Organizers:
Edward Slowik (Philosophy, Winona State University)
Geoffrey Gorham (Philosophy, Macalester College)
Ken Waters (Philosophy, University of Minnesota)