Series: Metaphysics of Science This talk will take place remotely, on Zoom. Please contact the organizer at cristian.lopez@uclouvain.be if you would like to attend. Abstract: There is a persisting debate about what chemical bonds are and whether they exist. I argue that chemical bonds are real patterns of interactions between subatomic particles. This proposal resolves… Continue reading CEFISES Seminar: Vanessa Seifert, “Chemical Bonds are Real Patterns”

Series: Post-Darwinian Societies Speakers: Ingela Alger (TSE IAST) and Jean-François Laslier (PSE CNRS) Registration: Free, but mandatory, please e-mail dina.geron@uclouvain.be Abstract: “Survival of the fittest” is often taken to imply that human life must be the Hobbesian “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” However, recent theoretical analyses of the evolution of preferences guiding behaviors of… Continue reading Post-Darwinian Societies: Ingela Alger and Jean-François Laslier, “Homo Moralis, a model of moral behavior grounded on evolutionary arguments”

Series: Work in Progress Abstract: The idea of the multiverse in mathematics emerged as a consequence of the forcing technique of Cohen which allows to generate independence results and hence, conflicting models of set theory. The multiverse appears as an adequate tool to represent the co-existence of these models of set theory. Although there are… Continue reading CEFISES Seminar: Stéphanie Ponsar, “The Multiverse in Mathematics”

Series: Post-Darwinian Societies Speaker: Piers Hale (University of Oklahoma) Registration: Free, but mandatory, please e-mail dina.geron@uclouvain.be Abstract: Although terms like Darwinism and Social Darwinism have been used as historical categories to classify certain forms of biological or social thought, the historical record reveals that what it meant to be a Darwinian and what implications this… Continue reading Post-Darwinian Societies: Piers Hale, “‘Darwinism’ in Victorian England: a contested category”

Series: Explanatory Inference Abstract: According to proof-theoretic semantics, the meaning of linguistic expressions, and in particular of logical connectives, should be explained in terms of the rules governing the inferential use of these expressions. Following Dummett, there are two fundamental conditions that the inference rules of a logical connective must satisfy in order to completely… Continue reading CEFISES Seminar: Alberto Naibo, “Stability in Proof-Theoretic Semantics: some comparisons and some remarks”

Series: Life and Cognition Abstract: In recent years, technological advances in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence, have emboldened the hopes of some transhumanists. As in the ancient Greek tale of Pygmalion who fell in love with the statue he crafted with his own hands, they dream of creating an artificial companion made of… Continue reading CEFISES Seminar: Marc Behrendt, “A Glimpse into the Future of Intimacy: Will it be Robotic or Socially Problematic?”