Foundations of Science Sydney

Templeton grant

2011-11-18T09:49:00.001+11:00

Huw Price, Kristie Miller, Dean Rickles and Alex Holcombe have been awarded a Templeton Grant for their project New Agendas for the Study of Time: Connecting the Disciplines. The award will be worth a little over $1.5 million over three years. It will enable the project to advertise four full time research positions at USYD in the Centre for TIme, a small grants program, and three major international conferences in Sydney, Cambridge and Capetown.

SCFS funding success

2011-11-18T09:47:00.001+11:00

Here are the details of the latest ARC successes in the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science (SCFS)

ARC Laureate Fellowship (2011–2016) awarded to

Prof Warwick Anderson for the project Southern Racial Conceptions: Comparative Histories and Contemporary Legacies
($2,120,561)

ARC Future Fellowships (2011–2015) awarded to

Prof Mark Colyvan for the project Mathematical Explanation
($788,424)

Dr Ivan Crozier (currently at the University of Edinburgh) for the project Culture-bound Syndromes, Koro, and the Emergence of 'Cosmopolitan' Psychiatry
($678,914)

ARC Discovery Early Career Research Awards (2012–2014) to

Dr Victor Boantza for the project The Making of the Modern Chemist: Struggles within Enlightenment Science
($375,000)

Dr Eric Cavalcanti (currently at Griffith University) for the project The Structure of Nonclassicality and the Foundations of Quantum Theory
($375,000)

ARC Discovery Grants (2012–2014):

Prof Warwick Anderson (with Ian MacKay)
Disease and the Modern Self: Becoming Autoimmune
($145,000)

Prof Mark Colyvan
Mathematical Notation: A Philosophical Account
($150,000)

Dr Dominic Murphy
The Structure and Function of Self-representation
($122,000)

This all adds up to a grand total of just over $4.7 million ($4,754,899) from the various ARC schemes in the last few months; this figure is over $6 million when we add Prof Huw Price's Templeton grant (see above post). Congratulations to all!

SCFS ARC success

2011-11-04T12:50:00.002+11:00

Congratulations to the following SCFS researchers, who were recently awarded Discovery grant funding from the Australian Research Council.

Prof Warwick Anderson (with Ian MacKay)
Disease and the modern self: becoming autoimmune

Prof Mark Colyvan
Mathematical notation: a philosophical account

Dr Dominic Murphy
The structure and function of self-representation

Total amount awarded is $417,000.00

2012-13 Visiting Fellowships at the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science

2011-08-31T09:44:00.005+10:00

We are currently inviting applications for one-semester visiting fellowships at The University of Sydney, for either second semester (August to November) 2012 or first semester (February to May) 2013. This program is associated with The Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science (SCFS), a research centre sponsoring work into the logical, philosophical, and historical foundations of science (further details below). We are hoping to receive applications from leading historians and philosophers of science (including the special sciences and biomedical sciences) at any post-PhD career stage. This is the fifth round of such fellowships and we anticipate being able to offer them each year.

Up to four fellowships are available, and each fellowship will come with a travelling allowance of up to AUD 6,000. These fellowships will provide opportunities for academics on sabbatical from their home institution to spend a semester in a productive and collegial research environment (in a beautiful city), to work with members of the SCFS and with other visiting fellows. It is important that the applicant has a position at their home institution that extends beyond the term of the intended stay in Sydney and is on salary from their home institution for the duration of their intended stay. The allowance is to help offset some of the travelling and living-away-from-home expenses; it is not a salary. The successful applicants will be expected to work on a specific research project that is of interest to members of the SCFS. One of the aims of the SCFS is to strengthen international links in history and philosophy of science, so expressions of interest from researchers outside Australia are particularly encouraged.

Applications should including a cover letter, a CV, and a brief outline of the proposed research project (including why you wish to pursue the research at the University of Sydney and which members of the SCFS team you anticipate collaborating with). Applications should be sent (preferably electronically) to:

Dr Rodney Taveira
Administrative Officer
Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science
School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry
A14, Main Quadrangle
University of Sydney
Sydney, NSW, 2006
Australia
Email: rodney.taveira@sydney.edu.au

by 14th November 2010. Applicants will be informed of decisions by 19th December 2010.

ABOUT THE SYDNEY CENTRE FOR THE FOUNDATIONS OF SCIENCE

The SCFS is an interdisciplinary research centre at the University of Sydney. We draw together researchers from philosophy, history, history and philosophy of science, science and medicine, with research concentrations in and around foundations of physics, decision theory, history and philosophy of biology, history of early modern science, history of medicine, and decision theory. Senior members of the SCFS include, Warwick Anderson, Stephen Bartlett, Alison Bashford, David Braddon-Mitchell, Mark Colyvan, Clio Cresswell, Ofer Gal, Stephen Garton, Stephen Gaukroger, Paul Griffiths, Ian Kerridge, Dominic Murphy, Maureen O’Malley, Hans Pols, Huw Price, Dean Rickles, Nick Smith, and Karola Stotz. We also have a number of mid-career and junior faculty, as well as several postdoctoral fellows and graduate students associated with the SCFS. Further details can be found on our website: http://sydney.edu.au/foundations_of_science/

Please feel free to pass on this announcement to anyone who might be interested. Thanks.

Congratulations, Warwick!

2011-08-17T08:00:00.003+10:00

Warwick Anderson has received a prestigious and highly competitive Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council for a project looking at, says Warwick, "scientific debates around what it meant to be human in the southern hemisphere in the 20th century, placing Australian racial thought in a new context."

John Wilkins at Scientific American

2011-05-25T17:54:00.001+10:00

John has a guest blog entry on evolution and truth on the Scientific American site. Click here to read.

Blackheath Philosophy Forum lectures by SCFS members

2011-05-19T15:32:00.002+10:00

Recent lectures by SCFS members to the Blackheath Philosophy Forum:

Arthur Eddington and Time's Arrow, Huw Price

How Evolution Selects for truth, Paul Griffiths

Available online at:

http://www.blackheathphilosophy.com.au/2011%20blackheath%20archive.html

2011-05-16T19:54:00.003+10:00

Report on the 4th Sydney-Tilburg Conference on the Philosophy of Science: The Authority of Science
University of Sydney, 8-10 April 2011

The conference brought together scientists and philosophers of science to explore the idea that recent developments in philosophy of science can help with the uptake of scientific ideas in public policy. It opened with a public forum (televised and available here) and ran two days of papers, including several plenaries and a keynote address.

Christian List's plenary address, which opened the conference, examined the very idea of the `voice of science' from the perspective of his recent work on group agency. List emphasised that if the `voice of science' is considered to be the expression of the views of the scientific community then, whatever aggregation procedure is used, the collective judgment of science may lack essential qualities of a `voice' which guides policy, such as consistency of opinion across a range of issues. For science to have a coherent `voice' in this sense, science itself must be a structured institution of the kind that is often regarded as a group agent, such as a corporation or a government. Institutions such as national academies may have adequate structure to count as group agents.

The debate over action on climate change is widely regarded as an example of the failure of science to translate itself into policy. In his plenary address, the distinguished chemist Theodore Brown compared this case to the successful effort to reach international agreement on the control of chlorofluorocarbons to protect the ozone layer. He demonstrated how contingent that outcome was on the timing of events and the interests of particular actors at those times, and how these conditions for successful policy making were absent in the superficially-similar case of international negotiations over greenhouse gas abatement and climate change. Similar themes were explored by academic lawyer Rosemary Lyster, although her focus was on the legal implications. She discussed the recent attempt to bring a case of `civil conspiracy' against ExxonMobil for mis-leading the public about climate change, and the legal and moral responsibilitiesof the media in giving disproportionate coverage to climate-change sceptics.

The keynote address was delivered by Sir Peter Gluckman, who, in his role as the New Zealand Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor, has just released `Towards better use of evidence in policy formation: a discussion paper'. In contrast to much recent discussion engendered by the perceived failure to translate climate science into policy, Gluckman argued that to maintain the efficacy of scientific advice, scientists must scrupulously avoid advocacy and seek to act as honest brokers laying out options and facilitating social choice through the normal democratic process.

A general theme that ran through the conference was that there is a genuine need for engaged philosophy of science to help with both the public acceptance of science and the subsequent translation of science into policy. Indeed, this has been something of a recurring theme in all the Sydney-Tilburg philosophy of science conferences; we hope to see such socially-relevant philosophy of science continue in our future conferences.

Mark Colyvan (University of Sydney), Paul Griffiths (University of Sydney),
Stephan Hartmann (Tilburg University), and Jan Sprenger (Tilburg University)

Ways of Seeing: Reforming the Humanities

2011-03-08T15:48:00.002+11:00

Sydney Ideas Event, copresented with The Griffith Review and SCFS

Thursday April 7th 6.00-7.30 Law School Foyer

A discussion of the future of the humanities. More information here

Alison Gopnik, "The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life"

2011-02-22T15:10:00.000+11:00

A Sydney Ideas lecture

The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life

Alison Gopnik, Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy, University of California , Berkeley

Co-presented with the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, University of Sydney

In the last thirty years there's been a revolution in our scientific understanding of babies and young children, a revolution that's also transformed our understanding of human nature itself. In this talk, Alison Gopnik will outline some of the new discoveries and their implications for the way we think about young children and ourselves. Human beings have a longer childhood than any other animal - our children are more helpless and dependent than any others. Why make babies so helpless for so long? She shows that childhood - our long period of helplessness - is responsible for our uniquely human consciousness and our ability to learn, imagine and love. Their long protected childhood gives human babies an opportunity to learn and play, and that lets them plan and work as adults. Children not only learn about the world around them, they also learn about other people and themselves. By the time they are three or four they understand love and morality. These remarkable learning abilities reflect special features of babies' brains, features that may actually make babies more conscious than adults.

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley. She is an internationally recognised leader in the study of children's learning and development and was the first to argue that children's minds could help us understand deep philosophical questions.

Date: Thursday 24 February, 2011

Time: 6.00pm to 7.30pm

Venue: Law School Foyer, Eastern Avenue, the University of Sydney

Cost: Free event, no booking or registration required

Web: www.sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas

DOES UNDERSTANDING EVOLUTION HELP US TO UNDERSTAND ETHICS? Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University

2011-02-09T11:13:00.003+11:00

Sydney Ideas talk co-presented with Think Global School

Free event but registration is essential. (Registration is full. It will be audio and visually recorded - recordings will be available from the Sydney Ideas website.)

Evolution is neutral with regard to values. It is a fallacy to try to deduce what we ought to do from our understanding of evolution. But understanding evolution does help us to understand human nature, and since in ethics we are often interested in changing behaviour, evolution gives us valuable clues as to what is, or is not, likely to work. The first part of the lecture will explore this topic. In the second part, I will consider the argument that since our moral sense has evolved, it serves to enhance our reproductive fitness, and hence is not a guide to what is really right or wrong. I shall argue that there is some truth to this claim, but properly understood, it should lead us to scepticism about some ethical views, but not about ethics itself.

Peter Singer was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1946, and educated at the University of Melbourne and the University of Oxford. He has taught at the University of Oxford, La Trobe University and Monash University, and has held several other visiting appointments. Since 1999 he has been Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics in the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. From 2005 on, he has also held the part-time position of Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne, in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics.

Peter Singer first became well-known internationally after the publication of Animal Liberation. His other books include: Democracy and Disobedience; Practical Ethics; The Expanding Circle; Marx; Hegel; Animal Factories (with Jim Mason); The Reproduction Revolution (with Deane Wells), Should the Baby Live? (with Helga Kuhse), How Are We to Live?, Rethinking Life and Death, Ethics into Action, A Darwinian Left, One World, Pushing Time Away, The President of Good and Evil, How Ethical is Australia? (with Tom Gregg), The Way We Eat (with Jim Mason) and The Life You Can Save. He also co-authored The Greens with Bob Brown, founder of the Australian Greens.

Peter was the founding President of the International Association of Bioethics, and with Helga Kuhse, founding co-editor of the journal Bioethics. Outside academic life he is the co-founder, and President of The Great Ape Project, an international effort to obtain basic rights for chimpanzees, gorillas and orangutans. He is also President of Animal Rights International.

Sydney Ideas talk by Professor Michael Hunter, "The Royal Society and the Decline of Magic"

2011-02-07T10:56:00.002+11:00

A Sydney Ideas lecture co-presented with HPS and the SCFS.

The role of the Royal Society in the so-called ‘Decline of Magic’ was paradoxical. In the society’s early years, many of its Fellows were deeply committed to magical pursuits, while some urged the institution actively to investigate their validity. Yet in practice the society simply excluded magic from its corporate activities, for a variety of reasons on which it is possible to speculate. What is important is that, due to the society’s crucial role in defining the proper realm of scientific enquiry, the result was to banish magic from this by default. This proved surprisingly influential, leading to the emergence in the early 18th century of a myth of the society’s positive role in eradicating such beliefs which was erroneous but is significant in itself.

Michael Hunter has been Professor of History at Birkbeck since 1992. He is the principal editor of the Works (14 vols., 1999-2000) and Correspondence (6 vols., 2000) of Robert Boyle, the founder of modern chemistry. In addition, he has written various interpretative works on Boyle, and his biography, Boyle: Between God and Science, was published in 2009. He has also written or edited many books on the history of ideas and their context in late 17th-century Britain, dealing with such themes as the early history of the Royal Society. His current research is on changing attitudes to magical ideas c. 1700. A further interest is in printed images of the period. A major grant from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council from 2006 to 2009 resulted in the construction of the website, British Printed Images to 1700 a digital library of prints and book illustrations from early modern Britain, and the publication of an ancillary interpretive volume.

Date: Tuesday 15 February, 2011
Time: 6 to 7.30pm
Venue: Law School Foyer, Eastern Avenue, the University of Sydney
Cost: Free event, no booking or registration required
Web: sydney.edu.au/sydney_ideas

Workshop - "Constructive Mathematics" - University of Melbourne

2011-01-26T09:19:00.002+11:00

Anyone interested who will be in Melbourne the week of Feb 14 is welcome to attend this interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Melbourne.

"What constructive mathematicians actually do"

Maarten McKubre-Jordens, University of Canterbury, New Zealand

I) Introduction to constructive mathematics

11:00am, 14 February, Old Arts-227 (Cecil Scutt Collaborative Teaching Room)

II) Constructive mathematics in action

11:00am, 16 February, Old Arts-227

III) Strange encounters and the importance of constructive thought; or, the Infinite Monkey Theorem

11:00am, 18 February, Old Quad Moot Court

See http://paraconsistent-mathematics.blogspot.com/ for more information.

John Wilkins on National Radio

2011-01-16T19:19:00.002+11:00

John Wilkins will be doing the 'Ockham's Razor' talk on National Radio this week, on the concept of species:

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/ockhamsrazor/stories/2011/3089886.htm

Ken Wharton: A Constructive Principle for Interpreting Quantum Phenomena

2010-11-22T10:20:00.002+11:00

SCFS Visiting Fellow Ken Wharton is giving a 'current projects' talk at USyd today (Nov 22) at 1pm in the Philosophy Common Room.
"The ongoing efforts to interpret quantum mechanics typically ignore the Feynman path-integral approach, despite the fact that this mathematics most naturally extends to relativistic quantum field theory. While literally interpreting the path-integral mathematics seems untenable, it is notable that this mathematics implies strong symmetries between experiments that are typically assumed to be unrelated. If one adopts the principle that any underlying ontology must respect these same symmetries (the "action duality"), it turns out that quantum interpretations are strongly constrained. Furthermore, one can use this principle to construct new interpretations by considering pairs of experiments related by this symmetry, particularly cases where interpreting one experiment appears straightforward and the other problematic. The results generally support time-symmetric and retrocausal interpretations. (Joint work with Huw Price, David Miller, and Peter Evans.)"

Charles Wolfe public lecture on La Mettrie

2010-09-06T13:55:00.000+10:00

LA METTRIE: MAN A MACHINE
Dr Charles Wolfe, History and Philosophy of Science, Faculty of Science

KEY THINKERS SERIES – 15TH SEPTEMBER 2010

Julien Offray de La Mettrie, a medical doctor and philosopher was born in Saint-Malo (Brittany) in 1709, and died in 1751 in Berlin, where he was an intellectual-in-residence at Frederick II’s court ... of indigestion, food poisoning, or acute peritonitis after having consumed a whole pheasant pasty with truffles. He had been forced to flee from France and then even from Holland because of his writings, and was one of the most scandalous figures of the Enlightenment. I will focus especially on his best-known work, L’Homme-Machine or Man a Machine (1748), one of the greatest examples of materialist philosophy ever written - in which mind and body are explained as belonging to one material substance, which medical and physiological knowledge sheds light on. How is it that a philosopher admired today by all manner of ‘brain scientists’ was also the hero of the Marquis de Sade? Addressing this sort of question gets us to the heart of Enlightenment materialism.

All are welcome to attend this free series.

Venue: Lecture Theatre 101, Sydney Law School Building, Eastern Avenue, Camperdown Campus
Time: 6.00pm to 7.30 (includes Q & A)
Bookings: Free events, no registration or booking required

Evolving the Future: An exploration of how evolutionary thinking can inform public policy

2010-09-04T16:05:00.002+10:00

Tuesday 28 September 2010, University of Sydney

Evolution is an essential theory for understanding the living world–including our own species. With understanding comes the capacity for improvement. This workshop examines three fields in which the understanding offered by contemporary evolutionary theory may offer practical guidance: conservation, public health, and the urban environment.

The workshop will be led by evolutionary biologist Prof. David Sloan Wilson, SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University. Prof. Wilson’s recent books include: Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society and Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin's Theory Can Change the Way We Think About Our Lives

Attendance at the workshop is limited to 50, to ensure that all participants are able to participate in a meaningful way in our discussions. Amongst the key questions to be addressed are:
• Is evolutionary theory genuinely mature enough to guide practical policy formulation on any or all of these three topics?
• What are the steps that evolutionary scientists can take to get their ideas onto the policy agenda?
• What are the potential pitfalls facing evolutionary scientists as they begin to take their ideas out of the academy and into the policy arena?

To lead the discussion alongside Prof Wilson we have four distinguished Australasian scientists, each with expertise on one of our focal topics:
• Rick Shine, Professor of Evolutionary Biology and ARC Federation Fellow, University of Sydney
• Sir Peter Gluckman, Head, Centre for Human Evolution, Adaptation and Disease, Liggins Institute, University of Auckland and New Zealand Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor
• Stephen Simpson, Professor of Biology and ARC Laureate Fellow, University of Sydney
• Roland Fletcher, Professor of Theoretical and World Archaeology, University of Sydney

For more information and to register, visit the conference website.

Organised by the Centre on the Human Aspects of Science and Technology & the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science, University of Sydney

Whitehead lecture at Sydney Ideas

2010-08-24T17:46:00.000+10:00

25 August
ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD: FROM CAMBRIDGE MATHEMATICIAN TO HARVARD PHILOSOPHER
Peter Farleigh, Physiology, and Centre for Human Aspects of Science and Technology

Venue: Lecture Theatre 101, Sydney Law School Building, Eastern Avenue, Camperdown Campus
Time: 6.00pm to 7.30 (includes Q & A)

What would the consequences be, if rather than substances and structures, we took events and processes to be the primary entities that make up the universe? And what if instead of the traditional mechanistic model we used the concept of the organism, as the key metaphor in our understanding of the world? These are two central questions that Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) wrestled with in his later years. Whitehead of course, was famous for his early collaboration with Bertrand Russell on one of the most important works of mathematics in history—the three volumes of Principia Mathematica. While the two equally shared the work of this heroic attempt to establish a logical foundation for mathematics, it is not commonly known that there had been a fourth volume planned, which Whitehead alone began working on. But what became of the unfinished volume and why was it important for his philosophical development?

Joint Colloquium, USYD-UNSW, Prof Jim Franklin, "Data-free Statistics"

2010-08-17T14:54:00.002+10:00

Date: Friday, 20 August, 2010

Time: 2:30 pm

Venue: Room 175 Carslaw Building, University of Sydney

Abstract: Extreme risks must be evaluated in such contexts as quarantine, terrorism and banking. Unfortunately, an extreme risk is one that hasn't happened yet, so directly relevant data is non-existent. The talk surveys what is done in the Basel II compliance regime in banking and in Australian quarantine risk analysis, where there are formal processes for using small data sets to keep expert opinion honest. The usefulness of Extreme Value Theory is considered. Extreme risks raise in acute form the "reference class problem", of how to decide what is the right class in which to take statistics to bear on an individual case. The views of philosophers and legal theorists on the reference class problem are canvassed.

Enquires to Thomas Britz.

All welcome.

Current Projects seminar: Carlo Martini

2010-07-27T13:50:00.002+10:00

Carlo Martini, who is visiting the SCFS from its partner institution, TiLPS, The Netherlands, will be giving a paper on the problem of disagreement and consensus: "A Puzzle About Belief Updating."

Philosophy Common Room (USYD)
Monday 2 Aug, 1-2.30pm

International Ideas lecture: "Writing Science Lives" with Janet Browne, Harvard History of Science

2010-07-15T13:51:00.002+10:00

What do we learn when we revisit scientists’ past worlds? How might one write a life as famous as Charles Darwin’s? Why is biography the best-selling genre of all? Pre-eminent Darwin scholar and Harvard Professor of the History of Science Janet Browne, talks with Sydney’s prizewinning historian Professor Iain McCalman, about the challenges and delights of the biographical genre for historians. In conversation with Alison Bashford, this is an evening that probes the intellectual life of these keen observers and interpreters of the world of Victorian science

The Seymour Centre, University of Sydney

12 August 2010, 6.30pm

More information here.

2010-07-07T06:12:00.002+10:00

The programs for the AAHPSSS 2010 conference is available here:

AAHPSSS 2010 conference program

"What is HPS for?"

2010-06-15T10:34:00.005+10:00

The program for this workshop later in June is very interesting and worth a look. One theme is the relations between HPS and science policy. This is the fifth in a series of Workshops on 'integrated history and philosophy of science' involving a good part of the UK's HPS community.

AAHPSSS conference

2010-06-01T13:03:00.002+10:00

Last days to submit an abstract for the AAHPSSS conference, which runs 9-11 July, 2010 at the University of Sydney....

More information here.

John Wilkins in the UK media

2010-05-25T10:26:00.002+10:00

Our erstwhile colleague John Wilkins' ever-active blog attracts still more attention in The Guardian newspaper.