Monday

March 11

KRISTIAN CAMILLERI  (University of Melbourne)

The Physicist as Philosopher: Philosophical Ambitions in Cultural Context

Abstract

Between 1880 and 1930, a new figure emerged on the European intellectual landscape – the philosopher-physicist. During this period many leading physicists, predominantly in the German-speaking world, cast themselves in the role of philosophers as they sought to come to grips with the transformation in the foundations of their discipline and even with wider questions. Einstein, Weyl, Schrödinger, and Bohr were among the more prominent physicists of this era who saw their work as physicists as deeply interconnected with philosophy. Recent historical scholarship has shed important light on the emergence of this intellectual tradition, which has its origins in the work of Helmholtz and Mach, but much of this has focused on the epistemological debates over the status of space, time and causality that took place in the 1920s and 30s. While this is certainly one important aspect of the kind of philosophical activity that physicists engaged in, it represents only part of a much larger story. In this paper, I argue that a more complete understanding of the philosopher-physicist requires that we pay attention not only to the new developments in physics and the rise of neo-Kantianism and logical positivism, but also to the formation of new societies, journals and institutional arrangements, the emergence of theoretical physics as a sub-discipline, and the wider cultural context in which physicists were forced to reflect on the value of science and its relationship to philosophy.

Monday

March 25

 VICTORIA McGEER (ANU) to be held in the NEW LAW ANNEXE SR 442

"The moral-psychology of blame: some lessons for normative theory"

Monday

April 8

 DR MARIA KON  (University of Sydney) SCIENCE MEETING ROOM 450 CARSLAW (USUAL VENUE)

"Towards a Conceptual Analysis of Time in Rovelli's Approach to Quantum Gravity"

There is a general call for the use of conceptual analysis as a means of unifying general relativity and quantum theory. Certain interpretations of these theories offer conflicting concepts of time and space. Thus, the conceptual clean up and development of such interpretations may help point the direction towards a successful merger of the theories.  Here I go towards answering this call with regard to time by first developing a conceptual analysis that is applicable to time across physical theories.  Then, I explore its applicability to Carlo Rovelli’s approach to quantum gravity, which serves here as a case study.  In particular, I examine the temporal concepts involved in his partial observables and in his account of what he terms ‘the flow of time’.  Finally, I draw some conclusions both for Rovelli’s approach to quantum gravity and for the general applicability of this conceptual analysis to accounts of quantum gravity.

Monday

April 22

 PETER ANSTEY (Sydney)  NEW LAW ANNEX SEMINAR ROOM 105

'Experimental pedagogy and the eclipse of Robert Boyle'

The most important development in early modern natural philosophy was the emergence of the experimental philosophy in the mid-seventeenth century. Robert Boyle was in the vanguard of this development as a practitioner, a theoretician and as an exemplar of an experimental philosopher. However, by the fourth decade of the eighteenth century Boyle’s standing as a natural philosopher, as well as the actual content of his natural philosophy, had very much moved from the centre to the periphery. This paper is an attempt to provide at least a partial answer as to why Boyle was eclipsed in the eighteenth century. What I propose is a broad explanatory hypothesis that I believe goes a long way to clarifying just what forces were at play in Boyle’s shift from centre to the periphery.

Monday

May 6

 IVAN CROZIER (Sydney) NEW LAW ANNEX SEMINAR ROOM 105

"Case Histories and Psychiatric Syndromes: Koro 1895 – present."

Monday

May 20

 PAT FORBER  (Tufts) NEW LAW ANNEX SEMINAR ROOM 442

"Patterns of Evidential Reasoning and the Signatures of Natural Selection"

Monday May 27

GEORGE WEISZ (McGill) NEW LAW ANNEX SEMINAR ROOM 442

"Re-inventing Chronic Disease in the Twentieth Century"

The term “chronic” has existed for many centuries to describe illnesses that unfold slowly, in contrast to acute diseases that either kill or disappear quickly. But in the early 20^th century, “chronic disease” took on an entirely new meaning; it was reframed as a social problem that demanded significant reform of health care institutions. It has been argued that this development was a natural response to what has been called the “demographic transition”—that the decline in infectious diseases, allowed diseases like cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease to assume new significance. While this view has some validity, it ignores the fact that the process occurred almost exclusively in the United States until about 1950s when chronic disease appeared on a limited scale in Britain as part of an effort to deal with the institutionalized elderly. The term did not assume policy significance in France until the 21^st century. In the first part of this talk I shall try to explain why the term emerged as a useful category of thought and action in the American health arena between 1920 and 1960 and how “objective” data was produced that confirmed the existence of a “chronic disease plague”. The second section of the talk will focus on Britain where institutional conditions made the notion of chronic disease synonymous with services for the elderly and a secondary aspect of policy. All this changed in the 21^st century when Britain like almost every developed country began experimenting with managed chronic care.

Monday

June  3

COLIN KLEIN (Illinois)  NEW LAW ANNEX SEMINAR ROOM 105

"What is your brain doing when you're not doing anything?"

Even when you are doing nothing in particular, your brain is active. Brain activity at rest has recently garnered serious scientific and philosophical interest. Most discussions identify neural activity at rest with activity in the so-called 'default mode network.' They then use that identification to hypothesize about the functional role of rest in self-reflection and social reasoning.

  I think we should resist this story. Activity in the resting state does not represent the engagement of a particular type of cognitive process. Rather, we ought to view intrinsic neural activity as providing the long-term context for short-term processes. Doing so sheds light on the distinctive activity of the default mode network, and provides a philosophically satisfying foundation for studying rest. Along the way, I'll examine the physiological correlates of brain activity, sort out some thorny issues involving differential neural activity as a source of data, solve a methodological dilemma first posed by Morcom and Fletcher, and discuss what 'intrinsic' activity in a complex and constantly active system could possibly mean.

FRIDAY

7th JUNE

HPS RESEARCH AFTERNOON 12pm - 6pm

Various presentations by HPS Research Students