Department of History and Philosophy of Science

FALL 2008 Colloquium Series

All talks are on Friday from 4:00 to 6:00 PM in Ballantine Hall 003, unless otherwise noted.

Calendar [click date for details]

Previous semesters' colloquia

Sep 19

Matthew Lund

Department of Philosophy and Religion, Rowan University

Title: Between Tautology and Chronicle

Abstract: In 1960, N.R. Hanson became the founding chair of the University of Indiana’s Graduate Program in the History and Logic of Science, the first program of its kind in the United States. Despite having put the concept of HPS on the institutional map, Hanson’s distinctive account of the interdependence between history of science and philosophy of science has been mostly forgotten, and often misinterpreted where it is remembered. The purpose of this talk is to show that a fruitful and transformative framework for understanding the interrelation of the history and philosophy of science is obtained by uniting three separate, and not wholly harmonious or fully developed, elements of Hanson’s philosophy of science: his analysis of the conceptual dynamics of science, his championing of Keynes’s interpretation of probability as providing a philosophically respectable means for appraising the evidential support for a theory at some point in history, and his discussions of the significance of the Genetic Fallacy for philosophical explorations of history. It is argued that the essential elements of his view remain legitimate and that extension of his approach is more likely to overcome the contemporary rift between philosophers and historians of science than the historiographic approaches of Lakatos and Kuhn. As Hanson himself put it, his account allowed him to navigate a via media between the Scylla and Charybdis of “Tautology and Chronicle”.

 

Oct 17

Kevin Robbins

IUPUI

Title: The Largest, Secular Healthcare Network in Early Modern Europe:Beaune’s Hôtel-Dieu and Its Satellite Hospitals, circa 1550—circa 1700. Ward Care, Practical Pharmacology, and the Political Empowerment of Lay Nurses.

Abstract: The Largest, Secular Healthcare Network in Early Modern Europe: Beaune’s Hôtel-Dieu and Its Satellite Hospitals, circa 1550—circa 1700.

Ward Care, Practical Pharmacology, and the Political Empowerment of Lay Nurses.

Between 1443 and 1700, the private charity hospital (or Hôtel-Dieu) in the French Burgundian town of Beaune dramatically expanded the reach of its unique medical operations. A cadre of lay female nurses, given exceptional administrative powers and opportunities for professional development by the hospital’s founder, expanded to create or take over more than fifty other hospitals for the sick poor in southeastern France and western Switzerland. These lay women nurses, whose public repute grew by solicitous ward care and their mastery of hospital pharmacies, became redoubtable opponents of men’s meddling in their medical service. Their active engagement in the power politics of the era made them vital architects of the public sphere in early modern Europe.

 

Oct 24

William Wimsatt

University of Chicago

Title: The Evolution of Modularity and Normativity in Technological and Cultural Change

Abstract:

The Evolution of Modularity and Normativity in Technological and Cultural Change

I discuss the difficulties in specifying relevant units in cultural evolution, the fact that most obvious modules are differentiated parts of larger systems, rather than replicators, and the reasons why—even more than for evodevo—a theory of cultural evolution must be developmental. I talk about the necessary components of a theory of cultural change, and how differential generative entrenchment allows for a different (and complementary) kind of account of the dynamics of evolutionary change than genetics-based or genetics inspired approaches. I then consider the biological and cultural significance of modularity, the roles of modularity in the explosive increase of technological variety in the 19th century, and discuss the common stages through with modularity and a class of normative standards can arise in technological evolution, illustrating with technological examples.

 

Nov 21     COFFA LECTURE     Location: Woodburn Hall 003

Brian Skryms

Department of Philosophy, University of California Irvine

Title: Evolution of Signaling Systems with Multiple Senders and Receivers

Abstract: COFFA LECTURE

EVOLUTION OF SIGNALING SYSTEMS WITH MULTIPLE SENDERS AND RECIEVERS

Sender-Receiver games are simple, tractable models of information transmission. They provide a basic setting for the study the evolution of meaning. It is possible to investigate not only the equilibrium structure of these games, but also the dynamics of evolution and learning – with sometimes surprising results. Generalizations of the usual binary game to interactions with multiple senders, multiple receivers, or both, provide the elements of signaling networks. These can be seen as the loci of information processing, of group decisions, and of teamwork.

 

Dec 05    01 : 30 PM   to   03 : 30 PM

Lisa Sideris

Indiana University

Title: The Varieties of Evolutionary Enchantment

Abstract: The Varieties of Evolutionary Enchantment

This paper examines the variety of ways in which scholars in religious environmental ethics and science/religion studies have sought to re-enchant the natural world. All of those I discuss have drawn in one way or another on evolutionary or Darwinian insights and many of them are engaged in a re-telling of scientific narratives in the form of a new “myth” or “story.” In particular, I look at the movement (and book) called “Thank God for Evolution” and related efforts to tell “The Universe Story” in mythopoeic language. I compare these approaches to those developed by Richard Dawkins and E. O. Wilson who promote enchantment not with nature per se but with science, and consider some of the ethical implications of these two forms of enchantment

 

Jan 16 (2009)   01 : 30 PM   to   03 : 30 PM

Richard Nash

Indiana University

Title: Byerley’s Charger and Somerville’s “Chase”: Agential Realism and more Worldly Cultural Histories

Abstract:

I would like to use the occasion of this HPS Colloquium to think along the sutured seam that currently holds together my perhaps overly ambitious research project. Whether I am, in fact, thinking through two projects or one is very much an open question for me at the moment. My title alludes to two obscure avatars of that project: Byerley’s Charger is the horse that Robert Byerley rode at the Battle of the Boyne, a horse who is widely identified as the earliest imported “foundation sire” of the thoroughbred racehorse; Somerville’s “Chase” is a poem (a very good poem) about hunting that was remarkably popular in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century before retreating into obscurity. In my shorthand referencing, Byerley’s Charger represents my interest in telling a dramatically revisionist account of the history of the thoroughbred racehorse (most recently retold in the historical novel of Jeremy James) and the construction of our modern notion of “breed,” an account that challenges many important details in the received history and locates the origin of that sport in a particular history of political change during which human and animal kinship networks interacted in complex and important ways. My interest in William Somerville’s “The Chase” performs a somewhat different project of revisionist history, recovering a poem from obscurity, and exploring how that poem is located within a particular “recreational” context, both literary and cultural, that valued a fundamentally different articulation of human/non-human animal relations than the humanist paradigm that did so much to remove humans from the animal world. Jointly, these two revisionist historical projects point to models of rethinking human agency in the world along paths suggested in the writings of Jakob Von Uexkull, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad.

 

Jan 30

Valia Allori

Northern Illinois University

Title: On Wave Function Monism in Spontaneous Collapse Theories

Abstract: On Wave Function Monism in Spontaneous Collapse Theories

Can a quantum theory with only the wave function (evolving according to whatever equation) be a satisfactory fundamental physical theory? Bell’s famous alternatives to solve the measurement problem – either the wave function is not everything or the Schroedinger’s equation is not right – might suggest the possibility, as the result of one of the alternatives, of wave function monism. I argue that wave function monism is not a desirable ontological choice. Even if we change the evolution of the wave function from Schroedinger’s equation to a different one, it would still be the case that a satisfactory quantum theory cannot be with the wave function only. Instead, a preferable choice is that of a quantum theory in which physical objects are represented by an entity in three–dimensional space or in space-time.

 

Feb 06 (2009)

Carl Craver

Washington University St. Louis

Title: A Field-Guide

Abstract: A Field-Guide

Few terms are more abused than "level." There are levels of abstraction, being, complexity, description, explanation, generality, regularity, organization, size, and theory. There are Marr's levels, Dennet's levels, Lycan's homuncular levels, and Oppenheim and Putnam's hierarchical levels. To make matters worse, the personal/subpersonal distinction, the role/occupant distinction, and the function/mechanism distinction are all frequently described using the levels metaphor. But the levels metaphor is undemanding, requiring only a set of relata and a means of ranking them as higher and lower than one another. I distinguishing several senses of level common in neuroscience, and I identify one sense, levels of mechanisms, as especially important for thinking about the explanations and theories of contemporary neuroscience. I then show how confusion about interlevel relations sometimes results from failing to distinguish levels of mechanisms from levels of realization, on the one hand, and from personal and sub-personal levels on the other. 

 

Feb 20

Lynn Nyhart

University of Wisconsin

Title: Natural history as an evolving social system in Germany and the United States, 1880-1925.

Abstract: In late nineteenth-century Germany, a "biological" approach to natural history emerged that would provide the foundation for the new science of animal ecology in the early twentieth century. Infusing the study of nature with attention to relationships among organisms and between organisms and their environments, this approach was especially prominent outside of the university system, evidenced especially among zoo and museum reformers, taxidermists, schoolteachers, and an emerging cohort of professional animal ecologists. In this paper, I compare this situation with the United States to assess what characteristics of this movement were uniquely German and what were more broadly "modern." In doing so, I hope to address the more general question of how we rise above the unique, situated story to make broader claims about the history of science.

 

Mar 06 (2009)    WESTFALL LECTURE

Anita Guerrini

Oregon State

Title: Who is the Anatomist in the Seventeenth Century?

Abstract: Who is the Anatomist in the Seventeenth Century?

Dissection was possibly the most performed scientific activity in the seventeenth century. Human corpses and live and dead animals were regularly dissected all over Europe, in public and in private. Who did the work of anatomy, where did they learn it, and where was it done? Focusing on France, this paper will examine the multifarious performers and places of anatomy. In particular, I will assert the central role played by animals in this work, and the central role they played in early modern natural philosophy.

 

Mar 11 (2009)   01 : 30 PM   to   03 : 30 PM     Location: IMU-Maple Room

Peter Anstey

University of Ontago, New Zealand

Title: Early Modern Philosophy of Experiment

Abstract:

This paper provides an exposition of the philosophy of experiment developed by Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. The Bacon-Boyle-Hooke view of experiment is then used to shed light on the way in which many early modern natural philosophers conceived of the relation between experiment and theory. This, in turn, provides the basis of a critique of some recent accounts of both the rise of experiment in the early modern period and its relevance to the ‘new experimentalism’ of the late twentieth century.

 

Mar 27

Hannah Landecker

UCLA

Title: From Messengers and Bodies to Signals and Cells

Abstract: In the 1960s, the concept of hormones as messengers that traveled from one organ to another in the body and acted on enzymes to cause physiological changes was gradually replaced by hormones as signals that traveled from one cell to another, and acted via the cellular mechanisms of receptors and gene transcription to cause a cascade of molecular events. In particular, metabolic effects of hormones in the liver were a site of intensive work and debate about the mechanism of hormonal translation of environmental cues into bodily responses. This story of the mechanism of hormone action is offered as an example of a larger history of the organism and its milieu in twentieth century biology

 

Apr 17    01 : 30 PM   to   03 : 30 PM

Osvaldo Pessoa

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA

 

Apr 17    01 : 30 PM   to   03 : 30 PM

Osvaldo Pessoa Jr.

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA