Werner Callebaut
Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria

Beyond reduction and emergence

Wednesday 01st of April 2009 at 12:00pm
508-20 Evans Hall

The positivist unity of science program resulted, somewhat paradoxically, in an anti-reductionist consensus in the philosophy of biology that resonated with postmodernist calls for disunity. In this talk I reconsider the issue of reduction and challenges to it (related to multiple realizability and supervenience, downward causation, emergence, and the myth of fundamentality) in the light of new reductionisms? inspired by quantum physics(Gell-Mann and the Santa Fe Institute) and developments in the neurosciences; and I discuss how disunity can be resisted even if reductionist programs fail.
(video)

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