Work-in-progress seminars are all on Tuesdays in Botany House 1.03, 12:00-13:00. All will be in hybrid format.
You are welcome to bring along lunch and carry on the conversation(s) after (13:00-14:00).
If any queries: Stefan Bernhardt-Radu; prsbr@leeds.ac.uk
All the sessions can be accessed via zoom here:
Zoom link / Meeting-ID: 878 1247 4624 (if logging without a university account, a code is requested; either look at the weekly-circulated HPS research digests; or e-mail Stefan for the code)
Please Note: For the seminar on the 7th of May and 14th of May, there will be a different zoom link, TBA/see below.
Online Word Document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OhtE1rogp7mdnfGcqtioVlh_Wr3FkkymihEH_RSuHsE/edit
January 30: Adrian Wilson: ‘Mathematics in the “Scientific Revolution” – and vice versa’
February 6: Stefan Bernhardt-Radu: ‘Was Julian Huxley’s modern synthesis ‘reducing the organism to genes’? Or going forward from the past rather than going back from the present’
February 13: Yihan Jiang: ‘Reconciling Process and Structure: Towards a Process-based Ontic Structural Realism’
February 20: Grace Exley: ‘A Sisterhood of the Hammer? Reconstructing Women’s Social and Geological Connections in Oxford, 1813-1914.’
February 27: Greg Radick, ‘Presentism and the Historian of Science: Reflections from the Coalface’
March 5: Jamie Stark: ‘LivingBodiesObjects: Collaboration and Creative Explorations of Health with the Thackray Museum of Medicine’
March 12: CANCELLED, SORRY!
April 23: CANCELLED!
April 30: Yuyou Wu: ‘Between Globalism and Localism: Towards a Cognitive Approach to the Scientific Realism Debate’
May 7: LATE CHANGE! Leverhulme Centre for Scientific Contingency application. Zoom link (no password)
The Leverhulme Centre proposal led by Al and Greg — and involving various other people in HPS and Philosophy (and further afield) — has been selected by the University to go forward to application stage to the Leverhulme Trust. In this session we’ll be soliciting feedback on various aspects of the application. All help much appreciated!
May 14: Alastair Wilson: “Testing Grounds”. Zoom link (Meeting ID: 811 6621 0399 / Passcode: +8MQ?g)
This paper is about grounding explanations in science
(especially in physics), and how they are justified. The idea that
science is an important guide to what grounds what has been growing in
popularity in recent years (e.g. Schaffer 2017; Robertson and Wilson
2023; Giannotti and Kortabarria forthcoming). The thesis of the present
paper is that successful theory-reductions and theory-unifications are
our primary evidence base when it comes to identifying grounding
relations in science. The argument applies the recent proposal of
Robertson and Wilson (2023) concerning the transformability of
‘horizontal’ reductions into ‘vertical’ reductions to argue that, in
general, major theoretical transitions in science are associated with
the production of new evidence concerning the relevant grounding relations.
May 21: Emily Rees & Graeme Gooday: ‘Engineering the ‘British’ workforce: advocacy for women’s technoscientific labour, 1945-1975’
May 28: Steven French: ‘Riding the Waves: Quantum Mechanics, Science Fiction and the Modernists’
HPS Leeds 