Philosophers in the National Academy of Sciences

According to this story from Leiter Reports, only nine philosophers have been elected to the NAS: Dewey, Gibbard, Kuhn, Ernest Nagel, Peirce, Popper, Quine, Skyrms, and Suppes.

Seeing the list was interesting. It includes some of my favorite philosophers.

That is all.

Rutgers Workshop on the Foundations of Statistical Mechanics

From Heather Demarest:

"May 13th and 14th, there will be a workshop on the foundations of statistical mechanics at Rutgers in the seminar room. The workshop will mostly focus on issues raised in David Albert's Time and Chance. Topics will range over the philosophical foundations of statistical mechanics, the nature of probability, the direction of time, experience and causal influence. Participants will include David Albert, Valia Allori, Craig Callender, Adam Elga, Mathias Frisch, Shelly Goldstein, Nick Huggett, Jenann Isamel, Doug Kutach, Chris Meacham, Alyssa Ney, Jill North, Sarah Scott, Michael Strevens, Brad Weslake, Eric Winsberg, and Nino Zanghi. If you would like to attend the workshop, or have any questions, please send me an email (heatherdemarest@gmail.com). The speakers will assume that the participants have read the papers, which can be found at the workshop website below:

http://fas-philosophy.rutgers.edu/hdemarest/StatMech.html

Hope to see many of you there, Heather."

Choice and Inference ...

is the new blog by Jake Chandler (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) and Jonah Schupbach (University of Pittsburgh). Here is brief description from C&I:

"Choice & Inference provides a platform for dialogue and news within the fields of formal epistemology and decision theory, broadly construed. Topics include (but are not limited to) uncertain and ampliative inference, coherence, paradoxes of belief and / or action, belief revision, disagreement and consensus, causal discovery, epistemology of religion, etc. And the formal tools used to pursue questions within these topics include (but are not limited to) game theory and decision theory, formal learning theory, probability theory and statistics, networks and graphs, and formal logic."

ISIPTA 09 -- 2nd call for poster contributions

Your help with circulating this announcement locally is much appreciated. Apologies for multiple postings

ISIPTA '09 - 2nd CALL FOR POSTER CONTRIBUTIONS

Poster abstract submission deadline extended to 20 May. IMPORTANT: To qualify for reduced conference costs (for PhD students, and participants from Africa and from former Soviet Union countries) you must register by *1 May*.

http://www.sipta.org/isipta09/students.html

From 14-18 July 2009, the 6th International Symposium on ImpreciseProbability: Theory and Applications will take place in Durham (UK), see:http://www.sipta.org/isipta09/. The deadline for full paper contributions has passed, and the reviewing process is under way. However, there is an exciting opportunity to participate at the conference by contributing a poster,which is particularly intended to open up the conference to a wider audience, and to communicate ideas about related research,applications and problems which are not yet at the stage that a fullpaper could be presented. For example, PhD students or researchers whoare relatively new to the topic field, or would just like to explore opportunities, are welcome to present posters outlining research questions and initial ideas, and practitioners may wish to present posters with the main goal to explore applications of imprecise probabilities to specific problems.If you wish to present a poster, please submit a one-page abstract ofthe work you intend to present, byDEADLINE: 20 May using the poster abstract submission page:

http://www.sipta.org/isipta09/submitabstract.html

Thomas Augustin, Frank Coolen, Serafin Moral, and Matthias TroffaesISIPTA '09 Program Committee Board

A correction to the SEP Modal Logic Article

I posted a correction to the SEP Modal Logic article at Certain Doubts yesterday. The current version of the SEP article mistakenly claims that knowing that a modal axiom schema is valid on some class of Kripke models is sufficient to uniquely determine the frame properties of that class of models. A short counter-example and explanation of the error is given under the above link.

In Memoriam: Ernest Adams

Here is the notice from Berkeley:

"The Philosophy Department was deeply saddened to learn that Emeritus Professor Ernest W. Adams died on March 29th, 2009, shortly after being diagnosed with an advanced case of liver cancer. Professor Adams joined the Department in 1956, following graduate studies in philosophy at Stanford University (where his dissertation was supervised by Prof. Patrick Suppes); he continued teaching at Berkeley until his retirement in 1991. Prof. Adams worked in philosophical logic and the philosophy of science, and was best known for his research on conditionals; his influential book The Logic of Conditionals appeared in 1975. Professor Adams also made important contributions in a number of other areas, including the foundations of geometry and physics, as well as utility theory, game theory, and general measurement theory. A volume of essays in honor of his work, Probability and Conditionals, was published in 1994. At Berkeley Prof. Adams was a founding member of the Group in Logic and Methodology of Science. A memorial symposium is scheduled for Friday, April 24, from 1:00–5:00 p.m. in Evans Hall on the Berkeley campus; details will be announced later on our website. "

Vincent Hendricks is moving ...

"Vincent F. Hendricks is taking up a position as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Copenhagen, Department of Philosophy, August 1, 2009. Professor Hendricks is Editor-in-Chief of Synthese and received both the Elite Research Prize from the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation and the Roskilde Festival Elite Research Prize in 2008. He was previously Professor of Formal Philosophy at Roskilde University, Denmark."