Reminder: Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 23 at 5.30pm (CET), Vincent Lam (Bern) will give the talk Modelling the Anthropocene and its Boundaries as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Climate change is increasingly understood as one aspect of a larger story involving disruptive human interferences in fundamental, life support planetary processes. Navigating this new regime of drastic, human-induced global environmental changes requires forms of scientific knowledge that seriously address both the planetary scale as well as the deep entanglement of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ processes at the heart of what can be called the ‘Anthropocene challenge’. In this context, Earth system science (ESS) has emerged as a new scientific paradigm with the ambition to provide a unified understanding of the Earth system, explicitly including the interacting human dynamics. By framing possible societal responses in a planetary perspective, ESS involves fundamental normative and value dimensions whose wide-ranging ramifications are hard to fully grasp. In this context, this presentation will address the difficulties that the planetary scale of the ESS framework raises for the standard philosophy of science discussions on value management in science. Building on the social science and STS scholarship, the aim is to lay the ground for the development of new forms of value management that are characterized by careful attention to power structures and epistemic injustices. Specific attention will be given to the recent entanglement of justice considerations within the ESS framework of planetary boundaries in view of identifying “safe and just planetary boundaries”, in order to establish to what extent and in what sense exactly it can be understood as a form of justice-oriented scientific knowledge, and what the epistemic limitations and constraints can be.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/31751
4 months
Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 23 at 5.30pm (CET), Vincent Lam (Bern) will give the talk Modelling the Anthropocene and its Boundaries as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Climate change is increasingly understood as one aspect of a larger story involving disruptive human interferences in fundamental, life support planetary processes. Navigating this new regime of drastic, human-induced global environmental changes requires forms of scientific knowledge that seriously address both the planetary scale as well as the deep entanglement of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ processes at the heart of what can be called the ‘Anthropocene challenge’. In this context, Earth system science (ESS) has emerged as a new scientific paradigm with the ambition to provide a unified understanding of the Earth system, explicitly including the interacting human dynamics. By framing possible societal responses in a planetary perspective, ESS involves fundamental normative and value dimensions whose wide-ranging ramifications are hard to fully grasp. In this context, this presentation will address the difficulties that the planetary scale of the ESS framework raises for the standard philosophy of science discussions on value management in science. Building on the social science and STS scholarship, the aim is to lay the ground for the development of new forms of value management that are characterized by careful attention to power structures and epistemic injustices. Specific attention will be given to the recent entanglement of justice considerations within the ESS framework of planetary boundaries in view of identifying “safe and just planetary boundaries”, in order to establish to what extent and in what sense exactly it can be understood as a form of justice-oriented scientific knowledge, and what the epistemic limitations and constraints can be.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/31751
4 months
Achille Varzi’s Open Lecture on Ontology
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are happy to invite you to our open lecture on May 26th 2025 from 3:30 pm to 5:00 pm CET.
The open lecture is born to be a safe and friendly space for every student who wants to have a taste of one of our classes. The Master in Philosophy is glad to welcome you with the help of Prof. Achille Varzi and his lecture “Ontology: Material vs. Formal”.
Here is the abstract of the lecture:
"There are two main ways, philosophically, of characterizing the business of ontology. On one account, made popular by Quine, ontology is concerned with the material question of what there is. On the other, which made its way into our times through Brentano and his pupils, especially Husserl, ontology is concerned with the task of laying bare the formal structure of all there is, whatever it is. In this lecture, we will first of all try to be clear about this distinction. Then we shall address the question of how material and formal ontology relate to each other. Particularly, we shall focus on whether one can pursue one sort of inquiry without also engaging in the other—whether, or to what extent, the tasks of material ontology presuppose the backing of some formal-ontological theory, and whether or to what extent formal ontology can be, in the material sense of the term, ontologically neutral.”
Open lectures are held on campus for philosophy students and on Zoom for everyone. To attend either in presence or online, please register by filling out the form on this page: https://join.usi.ch/en/master-philosophy-open-lecture
If you choose to attend the lecture remotely, we will send you an email to the Zoom meeting a couple of hours before the event. Alternatively, if you prefer to join us on campus, please arrive 20 minutes early for check-in.
The lecture will not be recorded! Don’t miss the opportunity to learn about ontolgy with Professor Achille Varzi!
If you wish to know more about our Master in Philosophy, visit www.usi.ch/map<http://www.usi.ch/map>
4 months, 1 week
Reminder: Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 9 at 5.30pm (CET), Cristian Mariani (University of Italian Switzerland) will give the talk Non-Markovian Collapse Models as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room 1.2 FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Spontaneous collapse models (SCM) employ an imaginary noise term in the modification of Schrödinger's equation in order to achieve a stochastic collapse process. Such noise term is typically assumed to be white, and therefore uncorrelated in time, which results in the dynamics being Markovian. In this talk I begin by discussing the reasons why physicists are exploring the possibility to instead employ non-white stochastic noise terms in the dynamics of SCM, and I then briefly introduce these models. In the second part, I am going to evaluate two broadly philosophical consequences of the non-Markovian models. First, I challenge some arguments, made by Builes & Impagnatiello (forthcoming) and by Adlam (2018), pointing to a connection between Markovianity (or lack thereof) and temporal ontology. Second, I discuss the ontological status of the noise field within the context of SCM.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/31750
4 months, 2 weeks
Lugano Philosophy Colloquia (Hybrid)
by events.isfi＠usi.ch
We are pleased to announce that on Friday, May 9 at 5.30pm (CET), Cristian Mariani (University of Italian Switzerland) will give the talk Non-Markovian Collapse Models as part of the Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room 1.2 FTL Building (USI west campus) and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to events.isfi(a)usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
Spontaneous collapse models (SCM) employ an imaginary noise term in the modification of Schrödinger's equation in order to achieve a stochastic collapse process. Such noise term is typically assumed to be white, and therefore uncorrelated in time, which results in the dynamics being Markovian. In this talk I begin by discussing the reasons why physicists are exploring the possibility to instead employ non-white stochastic noise terms in the dynamics of SCM, and I then briefly introduce these models. In the second part, I am going to evaluate two broadly philosophical consequences of the non-Markovian models. First, I challenge some arguments, made by Builes & Impagnatiello (forthcoming) and by Adlam (2018), pointing to a connection between Markovianity (or lack thereof) and temporal ontology. Second, I discuss the ontological status of the noise field within the context of SCM.
For more information: https://www.usi.ch/en/feeds/31750
4 months, 2 weeks