Reading Group / Seminar

Schedule and links for the Philosophy of Physics reading group/research seminar at Pitt. Meetings are on the following Fridays, between 1:40pm-3:10pm in CL2322 (Cathedral of Learning, 23rd floor).

Spring 2025

January 17th: Wilson, Alastair (2021). Counterpossible Reasoning in Physics, Philosophy of Science.

January 31st: Earman, John. "Cosmic Censorship", chapter 3 of Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes (OUP, 1995). Available online from Pitt library; scanned copy on author's website.

February 14th: Shoemaker, Sydney. "Time without change." The Journal of Philosophy 66, no. 12 (1969): 363-381.

February 21st: Alyssa Ney visiting. Her paper (with Saaskshi Dulani), "Is the Universe Fundamentally a Density Matrix?".

March 14th: Hoefer, Carl. "Scientific Realism without the Quantum." in Scientific Realism and the Quantum French and Saatsi (Eds.), OUP (2020).

March 21st: Lucy James (Center Postdoc). Research seminar. Tentative Topic: Critical Remarks on Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology.

March 28th:

April 4th: Jeff Barrett is visiting. Topic TBC. NOTE: Different time and location than usual: 3.30 PM in 1008C

April 18th: Mahdi Khalili (Center Fellow). Reseach seminar. Tenative topic: Black Holes and Entity/Causal Realism.