Dear all,
The next meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group will be delayed by two days in order not to clash with the metaontology workshop, and will take place on FRIDAY 23RD MAY AT 2PM in the faculty Board Room. Our speaker, who has been very tolerant of my dithering about the date and time, is Georgie Statham, who will be giving a talk entitled _Causal Claims in Organic Chemistry_ (abstract below). I hope to see you there. Best wishes, Matthew Simpson Georgie Statham - _Causal claims in organic chemistry_ "Although there is a significant literature on causation (or causal claims) in both physics and biology, little has been written on causation in chemistry, and even less has been said about causation in organic chemistry, in particular. However, chemists do speak in causal terms, and think of chemical reactions as causal processes. There is therefore a gap in the literature, which I intend go some way towards filling in this paper. I discuss three different kinds of causal judgements made in organic chemistry, which I call 'contrastive', 'deviant' and 'mechanistic', and use Woodward's manipulability theory to account for each of these kinds of claim. My particular focus is on the role played by notions of normality in these causal judgements: I show that notions of normality play an important (but different) role in at least two of the kinds of causal claim that I discuss." -- Matthew Simpson PhD Student in Philosophy University of Cambridge Mail: Robinson College, Cambridge, CB3 9AN _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
