Roundtable events.
Philosophy meets mathematics meets neuroscience in this roundtable investigating how cutting-edge mathematical models are elucidating the computational rules encoding brain functions and the implications for a deeper understanding of mind.
Free and open to the public.… read more »
How do emotions color and shape our actions? How do we decide to take action in the midst of fear for our own lives–go to war, fight an intruder, save a person falling on subway tracks–or to ward off catastrophes such as global climate change and the irreversible loss of species that could lead to the extinction of our own species?… read more »
Perhaps no thing conceived in the mind has enjoyed a greater confluence of cosmological, mathematical, philosophical, psychological, and theological inquiry than the notion of the infinite. The epistemological tension between the concrete and the ideal, between the phenomenological and the ontological, is nowhere clearer in outline yet more obscure in content.… read more »
From Xenophanes’ 6th c. BCE theory of divine intellection imbuing, comprehending, and organizing the cosmos, through Nicholas of Cusa’s 15th c. definition of mind as “the limit and measure of all things,” through Hume and his Enlightenment kin’s aspiration to be the “Newton of the mind,” to the naturalized explanations of contemporary cognitive science, Western men and women have wrestled with the proper place of mind among the constituents—material and non-material—of the universe.… read more »
Proof, in the form of step by step deduction, following the rules of logical reasoning, is the ultimate test of validity in mathematics. Some proofs, however, are so long or complex, or both, that they cannot be checked for errors by human experts.… read more »
If a biologist were asked for a single word that would appropriately point to the essence and substance of biology, the word might be Life. It stands for the essential unity of that subject despite the enormous range of different interests of biologists—from proteins to the behavior of elephants to medical applications.… read more »
Proof, in the form of step by step deduction, following the rules of logical reasoning, is the ultimate test of validity in mathematics. Some proofs, however, are so long or complex, or both, that they cannot be checked for errors by human experts.… read more »
The question of what the world in which we live consists of is as old as mankind itself. In philosophical jargon, this is the question of the ontological basis of reality. With the growing success of physics and other sciences, the idea of one fundamental ontology, that of particles and fields, became dominant as a physicalist version of ontology.… read more »
What do you think of when you think of the number five? Do you think of symbol like 5, a pattern like ⁙, or the fifth item on a list? Today, the concept of number is fixed and eternal, unlinked to anything in the universe. … read more »