October 30, 2009

Time for a brief report of the second European Philosophy of Science Association Conference, which took place in Amsterdam, 21-24 October. My photos from the conference are available here, but I was quite lazy with the camera this time, and since I’ve been to Amsterdam several times before (and the weather was quite horrible part of the time), there are no touristy photos. There are a few photos from Amsterdam in my gallery from previous trips though.

The EPSA conference was another one in a series of fairly well organised conferences, although they neglected to leave time for transferring from one room to another. An interesting aspect were a number (about 20) of symposia which consisted of about four talks each. Most of the sessions I attended where in fact symposia. However, the content, although it was of a decent standard in general, was not particularly interesting for me.

Where the Metaphysics of Science conference in Nottingham earlier this year had a lot of talks on topics like natural kinds and laws, there was very little of that branch of philosophy of science present at the EPSA conference. The keynotes were also quite uninteresting, mainly due to very thin philosophical content, not to mention that I had never heard of any of them before, with the exception of Elliot Sober. But Sober decided to give the very same paper that he gave at the BSPS conference earlier this year, so I had already seen that, and although the paper was ok, it certainly wasn’t good enough to see twice.

My own symposium, ‘The Structure of Scientific Knowledge’, with Alexander Bird, Robin Hendry and Paul Winstanley, was among the only sessions with more metaphysical content. We had quite a nice audience and some good discussion in any case. My own choice of paper, entitled ‘The A Priori and Scientific Knowledge’, was not a great choice though, mainly because it was much too general to present in 20min for a philosophy of science audience. I gave more or less the same paper earlier this year at the BSPS conference, where it did go down fairly well, but perhaps the extra 10min that I had there contributed to this. I think that a paper which I gave just the other day at out postgraduate seminar in Durham would’ve been much better, as it was more like a case study of the same subject, namely the case of Euclidean geometry. A revised (but still sketchy) version of that paper is available here.

Well, that’s about everything I’ve got to say about the conference, although it could be mentioned that there was an exceptionally great number of Finnish philosophers present, about ten or so.

Some news and perhaps a more philosophical post as well will follow soon…

Tags: conference report, EPSA, philosophy of science, photos