Piece Description

Voices:

Michael Esfeld - Univeristy of Lausanne. He researches the structures and causation in the philosophy of physics and the philosophy of mind. His physics interests are summarized here:

Structural realism is a form of holism in the philosophy of physics, claiming that in the domain of fundamental physics, there are in the first place certain structures in the sense of networks of concrete physical relations instead of objects whose identity is constituted by intrinsic properties. We develop a conception of moderate ontological structural realism that recognizes objects as that what stands in the relations, but those objects are characterized mainly by the relations in which they stand. We apply this conception to quantum physics and to space-time as treated in general relativity theory. We currently investigate whether and in what sense these structures can be considered to be causal, their being causal distinguishing physical from mathematical structures and grounding the direction of time.

Ned Hall - Harvard University. He works mainly on metaphysics and philosophy of science, with a special emphasis on philosophical problems associated with the foundations of quantum physics. In the philosophy of physics, his current research focuses on disentangling the various problems associated with the quantum mechanical treatment of measurement, and on elucidating the implications of and conceptual basis for the usual quantum mechanical description of systems containing identical particles. His current interests in the philosophy of science center on the analysis of natural laws and their role within scientific theories. His other work has included investigations into the connections between probability theory and the logic of conditionals, the epistemology and metaphysics of objective probability, and the analysis of causation. He recently edited (with John Collins and L. A. Paul), Causation and Counterfactuals.

Nathalie Miebach - Her work focuses on the intersection of art and science and the visual articulation of scientific observations. For her most recent project called “Recording and Translating Climate Change”, she gathers weather observations from specific ecosystems using very simple data-collecting devices. The numbers are then compared to historical / global meteorological trends, before being translated into sculpture. By examining the complex behavioral interactions of living/non-living systems between weather and an environment, she hopes to gain a better understanding of complexity of systems and behaviors that make up weather and climate change. Lately, she have also started to translate the data into musical scores, which are then interpreted through sculptures as well as through collaborations with musicians. Her aim is twofold: to convey a nuance or level of emotionality surrounding my research that thus far has been absent from my visual work and to reveal patterns in the data musicians might identify which I have failed to see.

Jonathan Schaffer- Australian National University. He received his PhD from Rutgers University in 1999. He joined the ANU in 2007, from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Jonathan’s main interests are in metaphysics and epistemology. His current research centers on metaphysical monism, coupled with contrastive theories of causation and knowledge.

Richard Scheines - Carnegie Mellon University. His research is on causal discovery, in particular the problem of learning about causation from statistical evidence. The theoretical and computational dimensions of this work have come to be called the TETRAD project, which represents nearly 25 years of collaboration with Clark Glymour, Peter Spirtes and many, many others. Building efficient and practically useful algorithms for causal discovery is as much computer science as philosophy, and thus I have a courtesy appointment in the Machine Learning Department.