This workshop will bring together philosophers of physics and philosophers of biology with the goal of analyzing, from an inter-disciplinary perspective, issues concerning emergence and reduction. Can the behavior of complex biological or physical systems be explained in terms of the behavior of their parts? What explains the universality of power-law behavior? Does the fitness of a specific type reduce to the fitness of the individuals of that type? Do phase transitions represent a challenge for reductionism? Is mass an emergent property? Is the Nagelian an adequate model of inter-theoretic reduction? What is the role that highly idealized models play in scientific explanations? What are the arguments for an ontological pluralist view? Can all sciences be reduced to physics? These are some of the questions that will be addressed in this meeting.
Fundamental physics aims to account for the behavior of nature. Yet, notwithstanding the empirical success of our best physical theories, there remain outstanding philosophical questions about their own foundations. In particular, the jury is still out concerning what are the basic constituents of matter. For instance, there is an ongoing debate about the ontology of Quantum Field Theory, in that it lends itself to either a particle or a field interpretation. Moreover, philosophers of physics disagree on what sort of realism, if any, one should adopt when trying to understand what physics tells us about the world. This workshops explores a number of open problems about the ontology of some of our most successful physical theories.
En este workshop, Daniel Hutto y Erik Myin presentarán los más recientes desarrollos de su programa de enactivismo radical que delinearan en Radicalizing Enactivism (2014). En esta oportunidad, discutirán el "hard problem of content", la percepción, la memoria y la imaginación desde una perspectiva enactivista radical, respondiendo también a las críticas que ha recibido su proyecto. El workshop concluye con un panel de discusión a cargo de Glenda Satne (UAH), Mario Villalobos (Tarapacá-IFICC) y Victor Marques (Universidade Federal do ABC, Brasil).
The event is the continuation of previous events such as Worlds of Entanglement (Brussels 2017), Times of Entanglement (Shanghai 2010) and Einstein Meets Magritte (1995), where some of the world’s most renowned thinkers, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Ilya Prigogine, Francisco Varela, Massimo Marinacci, Alexander Wendt, among others, meet to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue about fundamental issues of science and society.
The symposium is the natural continuation of past events organized by our centre, in particular the “Einstein meets Magritte” conference (1995), and the “Times of Entanglement” symposium (2010), which brought together some of the world’s most renowned thinkers, such as Zygmunt Bauman, Brian Arthur, Ilya Prigogine, Heinz von Foerster, William Calvin, Bas van Fraassen, Bob Edwards, Adolf Grunbaum, Rom Harré, Chris Langton, Constantin Piron, Francisco Varela, Linda Schele, Robert Pirsig, Barbara Hernstein-Smith, John Ziman, among others, to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue about fundamental issues of science and society.
The Center Leo Apostel (CLEA) of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, and the Institute of Philosophy and Complexity Sciences (IFICC) have joined to launch internationally on the web the series of talks called "Foundations Lectures", held during 1995 and 2010 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. Foundational Lectures invite outstanding scholars that are actively engaged in research on the foundations of a particular discipline. The interactive lectures are addressed to a broad, and interdisciplinary audience, and do not require specific knowledge of the field. The new format for the Foundations Lectures will be that of an online-streamed talk presented at a host research institute or university. Attendants from all over the world will be able to ask questions in chat offered by the streaming service. The lecturer chosen for this first Foundations Lecture is Dr. Humberto Maturana hosted by IFICC. Maturana's lecture is entitled "Natural Evolutionary Drift," and will take place on January 20th at 11:00 am (Santiago de Chile time UTC -3).