Knowledge and Limitations

Saturday, September 20, 2014
2:30-4:30pm
Past Event

This roundtable will examine the scope and limits of human knowledge about the universe, and whether metaphysical inquiry can be integrated with empirical approaches to understanding nature.

What do we know about the universe and how do we know it? As John Locke would ask, what are the extent and limitations of human knowledge? Is our understanding of the laws of nature bound by limits on what the mind can grasp, or can formulate linguistically, or are there inherent limitations of physical and mathematical knowledge? Can metaphysics, a philosophy concerned with first and universal principles—the unseen and imperceptible—be integrated with an empirical theory of knowledge?

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This is a past event that happened on Saturday, September 20, 2014 2:30-4:30pm.

Participants

Joseph Kohn

Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, Princeton University

Joseph Kohn was born in Prague, on May 18, 1932. He emigrated to Ecuador in 1939 and to the US in 1945.  There, he received his BS at MIT 1953,  and his Ph.D. at Princeton, in 1956. He served as a Professor at Brandeis University 1958-1968 and at Princeton since 1968. Professor Kohn’s research regards the Theory... read more! »

Tim Maudlin

Professor of Philosophy, New York University

Tim Maudlin is Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He received his B. A. in Physics and Philosophy from Yale and his Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh. His work centers on the interpretation of physical theory: how the mathematical structures used in physics may be understood as... read more! »

Priyamvada Natarajan

Professor of Astronomy and of Physics, Yale University

Priyamvada Natarajan’s research is focused on exotica in the Universe-dark matter, dark energy and black holes. She is noted for her key contributions to two of the most challenging problems in cosmology: mapping the distribution of dark matter and tracing the growth history of black holes. Her work using gravitational lensing has provided a deeper... read more! »

Dorothea von Mücke

Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Columbia University

Professor Dorothea von Mücke holds a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University and has been teaching at Columbia since 1988. She has held visiting professorships in Berlin and Giessen. Representative courses: Eighteenth-Century Semiotics and Aesthetics, Heinrich von Kleist, Rousseau and Goethe, The Romantic Fantastic, Paradigms of Feminist Scholarship, Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literature, Literature... read more! »