Keynote Speakers
Angela Potochnik
Professor of Philosophy, Head of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the Center for Public Engagement with Science at the University of Cincinnati
"Architects of Complexity"
Herbert Simon’s “The Architecture of Complexity” (1962) was enormously influential in establishing levels as a default assumption about organization. Jaegwon Kim’s articulation of levels in his causal exclusion principle and Jerry Fodor’s articulation of a “working hypothesis” about multiple realization helped to ingrain levels in philosophical discussion of causation and explanation, respectively. In this talk, I sketch a view of organization opposed to the framework of levels shared by these thinkers and many others they influenced. However, the view I sketch is also aligned with the animating impulse behind these views that systemic organization is central to our world and to what we know of it through science. We live in an ordered world. But the orderings are various, changeable, and relative to interests.
Randall Irmis
Chief Curator and a Curator of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah and an Associate Professor in the Department of Geology & Geophysics at the University of Utah
Talk Abstract TBA
Carlos Mariscal
Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nevada, Reno, and a member of the Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology (EECB) Program, the Integrative Neuroscience Program, and the Core Humanities Department
Talk Abstract TBA
See the rest of the Program here