TILPS

Speakers

The René Descartes Lecturer 2010:

Ian Hacking is a Canadian philosopher who has written about many things: On experimental science in Representing and Intervening; on mental illness in Rewriting the Soul and Mad Travelers; on the 'archaeology' of ideas about probability in The Emergence of Probability and the Taming of Chance -- as well as on topics of the moment such as The Social Construction of What? and essays in the New York Review of Books and The London Review of Books. His most recent honor was the 2009 Holberg International Memorial Prize awarded annually in Norway for 'outstanding scholarly work in the fields of the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology'. These lectures take up matters that Hacking has been mulling over for decades, ever since he was a graduate student at Cambridge University. For more information, visit here or here.




Commentators:

James Conant is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor in the College at the University of Chicago. He is also currently Chair of the Department of Philosophy. He received both his B.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1990) from Harvard University. He works broadly in philosophy and has published articles in Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Aesthetics, German Idealism, and History of Analytic Philosophy, among other areas, and on a wide range of philosophers, including Kant, Emerson, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Josiah Royce, William James, Frege, Carnap, Wittgenstein, Putnam, Cavell, Rorty, and McDowell, among others. He is currently working on four projects: a monograph on skepticism entitled Varieties of Skepticism, a co-authored collection of essays with Cora Diamond entitled Wittgenstein and the Inheritance of Philosophy, a book on film aesthetics entitled The Ontology of the Cinematographic Image, and a forthcoming collection of interpretative essays on a variety of philosophers entitled Resolute Readings. For more information, visit his webpage.

Marcus Giaquinto is a professor of philosophy at University College London. His main research is in philosophy of mathematics. Topics of past intensive study include mathematical logic (as a graduate student) and numerical cognition (guided by Brian Butterworth of UCL's Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience). He is the author of two books: The Search For Certainty and Visual Thinking in Mathematics. Topics of recent research are (1) Kant's view of geometrical knowledge, (2) limits to the use of visual thinking in mathematics and (3) our knowledge of abstracta. He is currently studying Euclid's Elements (Heath-Heiberg). For more information, visit his webpage.

Pierre Jacob is presently Head of the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris and President of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology. He studied at the ENS de Saint Cloud and received his PhD in History of Science from Harvard in 1978. His books include De Vienne à Cambridge, l'Héritage du Positivisme Logique (Gallimard, 1980) and L'Empirisme Logique (Minuit, 1980). His current work fouses on the philosophy of mind. For more information, visit his webpage.

Martin Kusch holds a chair in "Applied Theory of Science and Epistemology" at the University of Vienna. Before coming to Vienna in 2009, he held academic appointments at the universities of Edinburgh (1993-1997) and Cambridge (1997-2009). His main interests are in social epistemology, philosophy of science, and the sociology of scientific knowledge. His most recent book, A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules (2006), is a defence of Kripke's interpretation of Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. He is currently completing a book on Wittgenstein's views on epistemic scepticism and relativism. For more information, visit his webpage.

Hannes Leitgeb earned a PhD in mathematics in 1998 and in philosophy in 2001 from the University of Salzburg, Austria. Since 2005, he has a joint position at the Departments of Philosophy and Mathematics in Bristol, being promoted to Professor of Mathematical Logic and Philosophy of Mathematics in 2007. His main research areas are in logic, cognitive science, philosophy of mathematics, philosophy of science and history of philosophy. His research is unified by his pursuit of fruitful applications of logical and mathematical methods to philosophy. For more information, visit his webpage.

Mary Leng is Lecturer in Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Prior to coming to Liverpool she was a Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge, and held visiting positions at the University of California at Irvine and at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her primary teaching and research interests are in the Philosophy of Mathematics and Logic, and the Philosophy of Science. Her book, Mathematics and Reality (OUP, 2010) defends a fictionalist approach to mathematics, arguing that the indispensable use of mathematics in formulating our empirical theories can be accounted for without assuming the truth of the mathematics used. Aside from publishing on issues relating to fictionalism and the indispensability argument, she has also published papers on the philosophy of mathematical practice. She is currently working on the concept of logical consequence. For more information, visit her webpage.