“Emergence and Reduction in Physics” by Dr. Patricia Palacios published by Cambridge University Press
The book can be downloaded free of charge until 20.09.!
We congratulate Patricia Palacios on this successful publication!
New Member of Academia Europaea – Congratulations to Prof. Charlotte Werndl
We are very pleased to report that Prof. Charlotte Werndl was elected to become a member of the Academia Europaea. The Academia Europaea is a distinguished society that was founded in 1988, on the initiative of the UK’s Royal Society and other National Academies in Europe. The Academia Europaea is the only Europe-wide Academy with individual membership from Council of Europe states and from other nations across the world. It has about 4500 members including 72 nobel laureates. Membership is by invitation only and follows a rigorous peer-review selection process. Invitations are made only after peer-group nomination, scrutiny and confirmation as to the scholarship and eminence of the individual in their chosen field.
New paper by Prof. Leonhard Menges
Prof. Leonhard Menges has published his new paper entitled “Responsibility and appropriate blame: The no difference view” in the European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Number 2, 1 June 2021, pp. 393-409(17). https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/bpl/ejop/2021/00000029/00000002/art00008
Two new anthologies by Prof. Johannes Brandl
Two new anthologies on Georg Meggle have been published by Prof. Johannes Brandl. The first volume “Analytische Explikationen und Interventionen” has been published in print by Brill/Mentis ( https://brill.com/view/title/59383?language=de), the second volume “Denken, Reden, Handeln” is available as eBook. Here is the link: https://eplus.uni-salzburg.at/obvusboa/content/titleinfo/6202655
New FWF project for Ass.-Prof. Dr. Leonhard Menges
Philosophieolympiade Wien 2019.
We congratulate Leonhard Menges on his new FWF individual project on “The Sense of Responsibility Worth Worrying About“, which is endowed with €385,927.50.
Abstract: There is an intense debate between those who doubt that humans are morally responsible for their bad actions – call them skeptics – and those who believe that some humans are responsible for their bad conduct – call them defenders. This discussion is complicated by the fact that skeptics and defenders often operate with different notions of responsibility. The main aim of this project is to develop an account of the sense of responsibility that should be at issue between proponents of the two camps. It will be called the sense of responsibility worth worrying about.
The Principle Investigator of the project will be Leonhard Menges, Leonie Eichhorn will be hired as a doctoral student for 42 months, and one postdoc will be hired for 36 months in autumn 2022. Together they will organize one workshop each year and write a couple of papers
Call for Papers SOPhiA 2021
For further information, see: https://www.sbg.ac.at/sophia/SOPhiA/2021/languages/en/index.php
New FWF-Project for Julien Murzi and Brett Topey
Assoc. Prof. Julien Murzi and Dr Brett Topey have been awarded by the FWF a 403.000€ stand-alone project on categoricity and conventionalism, titled “Categoricity by convention”.
Brett will be the main postdoc on the project; a second postdoc will be hired in a couple of years’ time. The project develops a moderate inferentialist view on which the open-ended rules for the higher-order quantifiers determine the full interpretation of second-order logic (and indeed of all logics of finite order), so that, via standard categoricity and quasi-categoricity results, higher-order mathematical theories can be seen to be categorical or quasi-categorical (pace Skolem, Putnam etc.).
The idea is of course old — Vann McGee among others has been arguing for much the same view — but the details are new. Among other things, Julien and Brett provide a new solution to Carnap’s categoricity problem for propositional logic, and strengthen and generalize to higher-order logic a recent result by Denis Bonnay and Dag Westerståhl concerning the categoricity of predicate logic.
Julien and Brett’s view yields a novel, largely syntactic criterion for logicality, a moderate form of pluralism, and an attractive epistemology of the a priori. (Or so they hope!) In the course of their project, Julien and Brett aim to organize a couple of conferences (online or in person), visit a few places, work on a bunch of papers, and eventually write a short, compact monograph.
New Publication in ‘Humanities and Social Sciences Communications’
Our Patricia Palacios has just published a joint paper on democratic backsliding in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications (associated to Nature):
„What Science can do for Democracy: a Complexity Science Approach“.
The paper questions assumptions of conventional political science, where it has often been assumed that achieving democracy is a one-way ratchet. Only very recently has the question of “democratic backsliding” attracted any research attention. The paper argue that democratic instability is best understood with tools from complexity science. The explanatory power of complexity science arises from several features of complex systems. Their relevance in the context of democracy is discussed. Several policy recommendations are offered to help (re)stabilize current systems of representative democracy.
Congratulations to Patricia Palacios!
DOC-scholarship for our Ph.D. Student Matteo de Ceglie
Our Ph.D. student Matteo de Ceglie won a DOC-scholarship (funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences) for 24 months. The department congratulates him on this amazing achievement!
Thesis: A naturalist account of the Generic Multiverse with a core
Abstract: In recent years, the notion of ‘set-theoretic multiverse’ has emergedand progressively gained prominence in the debate on the foundationsof set theory. Several conceptions of the set-theoretic multiverse havebeen presented so far, all of which have advantages and disadvantages.In this project, I plan to introduce a new conception of the set-theoreticmultiverse, that is, the ‘V -logic multiverse’, which expands on mathematicalwork conducted within the Hyperunuverse Programme, butalso draws on features of the set-generic multiverse, in particular, onSteel’s proposed axiomatisation of it.
Excellence in Teaching Award 2017/18 for our doctoral student Pascale Lötscher
On June 6 2018 our doctoral student Pascale Lötscher received the Excellence in Teaching Award 2017/18 for her course UV “Sprachphilosophie” (philosophy of language). She was praised for her didactical methods and commitment towards her students. Her course was very well structured and provided a very good opportunity for students to practice their skills in the reconstruction of arguments and structuring of texts. We congratulate her on this well-deserved award.
Hiking day 2018
Bluntautal
Irvine-Munich-PoliMi-Salzburg Network
The Irvine-Munich-PoliMi-Salzburg network in philosophy and foundations of physics aims at fostering the collaboration between faculty, researchers and students based in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California Irvine, the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, the Department of Mathematics and the META group at the Politecnico di Milano, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Salzburg.
The activities of the network include the circulation of scholars among the four schools, as well as the organization of regular workshops on dedicated topics and an annual international conference for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows. Throughout the joint application for external funding it also promotes the career development of young researchers coming from all around the world.
The local coordinators are Prof. James Weatherall in Irvine, Prof. Stephan Hartmann in Munich, Prof. Giovanni Valente in Milan, and Prof. Charlotte Werndl in Salzburg.
New joint project
We are pleased to announce that the FWF (Austria) and the FWO (Belgium) will fund a joint project titled „The Puzzle of Imagistic Cognition“. The principal investigators are Christopher Gauker (Salzburg) and Bence Nanay (Antwerp). The aim of the project is to develop a theoretical approaches to the question how the mind uses mental imagery in solving practical problems.
The project will fund one four-year doctoral fellowship and and three two-year postdoctoral fellowships. (In each of the first three years of the project one new post-doc will be hired.)
For more information on the doctoral fellowship, see: www.christophergauker.sbg.ac.at/documents/DoctoralFellowSalzburgAntwerp.pdf
For more information on the post-doctoral fellowship, see: www.christophergauker.sbg.ac.at/documents/PostDocAntwerpSalzburg.pdf
For more informationon the aims of the project, see: http://www.christophergauker.sbg.ac.at/documents/PuzzleImagisticCognition.pdf
Salzburg Philosophy Department as Partner in the Philosophy of Language and Mind Network (PLM)
The Philosophy Department of the Faculty of Cultural and Social Sciences of the University of Salzburg is pleased to announce that it has been accepted as a partner in the Philosophy of Language and Mind Network (PLM). This is a consortium of European philosophy departments that are especially strong in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. The PLM hosts conferences, workshops and master classes. We can expect that Salzburg will in the future host events for the PLM.
ANALYTICAL PHILOSOPHY: EQUILIBRIA AND UNCERTAINTIES.
Report on Charlotte Werndl in PLUS REPORT 2017
Report on the New Bachelor Programme in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (Salzburger Nachrichten, June 10, 2017)
Hiking day 2017
On the top of the “Schlenken”, 1648 m
Left to right: Lorenzo Rossi, Lena Zuchowski, Benedetta Pacini, Otto Neumaier, Flavio Murzi, Julien Murzi, Johannes Brandl, Bettina Bußmann, Laurenz Hudetz, Charlotte Werndl, Pauline van Wierst, Pascale Lötscher, Michele Ginammi, Benedict Eastaugh, Christopher Gauker
Report on climate models by Charlotte Werndl (Salzburger Nachrichten)
Press release
We are very proud to announce the press release of the article that our Assistant Professor Patricia Palacios wrote with many collaborators from different disciplines (mathematical, natural and social sciences) on the topic of democracy using the Complex Systems Theory. The article was published in the European Journal of Physics.
Here is the link to the full paper.
Impressions from the open day on March 15, 2017
Hiking day 2016
Forsthaus Wartenfels, near Fuschlsee
left to right: Lorenzo Rossi, Norbert Paulo, Campbell Fiocco, Johannes Brandl, Marcello Fiocco, Ashley Fiocco, Matteo Murzi, Julien Murzi, Christopher Gauker, Florian Wüstholz, Valentina Petrolini, Pascale Lötscher, Alexander Hieke
Report on Charlotte Werndl in “Die Presse” of 28 May, 2016
Interview with Bettina Bußmann in Der Standdard of 24. November, 2015
Interview with Charlotte Werndl in Salzburger Nachrichten of 10 October, 2015.
Interview with Charlotte Werndl in Salzburger Nachrichten of 31 July, 2015.
Report on Charlotte Werndl in “Die Presse”
Interview about Philosophy of climate Science with charlotte werndl
in The Reasoner, Volume 8, Number 10, October 2014
Newspaper Report on Charlotte Werndl in the Salzburger Nachrichten, 28 July 2014.
Interview with Charlotte Werndl
in the Annual Report 2013 of the Centre for Technology Assessment, Bern, pp.11–12 (in German)
