Dear all, A reminder that Christian List (LSE) will be giving a paper entitled “Levels: descriptive, explanatory, and ontological” this afternoon at the Serious Metaphysics Group (abstract and link to the paper below).
The seminar will take place at the Philosophy faculty Board Room from 4.30 to 6.00pm. The talk should last about 45 minutes followed by questions and discussion. Also, if you would like to have dinner with Christian List in the evening following his talk, please email me (cr...@cam.ac.uk) at the latest by lunchtime today. Hope to see you there, Carlo Abstract: Scientists and philosophers frequently speak about levels of description, levels of explanation, and ontological levels. The aim of this talk is to present a unified framework for modelling levels. I give a general definition of a system of levels and show that it can accommodate descriptive, explanatory, and ontological notions of levels. I further illustrate the usefulness of this framework by applying it to some salient philosophical questions: (1) Is there a linear hierarchy of levels, with a fundamental level at the bottom? And what does the answer to this question imply for physicalism, the thesis that everything supervenes on the physical? (2) Are there emergent properties? (3) Are higher-level descriptions reducible to lower-level ones? Although I use the terminology of "levels", the proposed framework can also represent "scales", "domains", or "subject matters", where these are not linearly but only partially ordered by relations of supervenience or inclusion. An accompanying paper can be downloaded from: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/13311/1/LevelsRevised.pdf _____________________________________________________ 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.
