Guests

Conventionalism, Cambridge University Press 2006

Causation in Science, Princeton University Press 2018

Rethinking the Concept of Law of Nature ( Editor) Springer 2022

David Head is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University.

His areas of specialization are ethics, political philosophy, applied ethics, and bioethics.

From his books:

Genetics (California, 1992), Toleration (editor, Princeton, 1996), Supererogation (Cambridge, 1982)

Winner of the 2017 A.M.T Prize in Philosophy.

ד”ר ווסל רייירס הוא חוקר פוסט-דוקטורט במחלקה לפילוסופיה באוניברסיטת וינה. בנוסף, הוא משמש כמדען אורח בטכניון ובמכון האוניברסיטה האירופי. המחקר שלו מתמקד בהשפעות האתיות והפוליטיות של טכנולוגיות מתפתחות. בעיקר, הוא חוקר את הדרך שבה מערכות סוציו-טכניות כמו מערכות אשראי חברתי ומערכות blockchain מעצבות את ההבנה שלנו לגבי אזרחות וצדק. ד”ר רייירס הוא מחבר שותף של המונוגרפיה Narrative and Technology Ethics (Palgrave, 2020) ועורך שותף של הכרך Interpreting Technology (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021). תחומי המחקר שלו הם פילוסופיה ואתיקה של טכנולוגיה, חדשנות והרמנויטיקה פילוסופית.

Digital culture and multi sensory experience

Interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-cultural contexts in design

Scientists and designers collaboration on visual material

Design and visualisation’s  opportunities for public engagement with scientific ideas and phenomena

Digital environment as the testing ground both for science and art, where evolution of a human and society takes place:

• sensory sensations transformation,
• learning to navigate in virtual environments
• social and ethical challenges emerging from digital spaces,
• agency within digital landscape,
• the ability to effect positive change in the individuals and infrastructures.
• digital environments in education and research as tools for academic purposes,  social interaction, creative practices.

David Manheim is a public policy researcher currently visiting the Technion, specializing in biological and technological risks and the impacts of new technologies, as well as a lead researcher at 1Day Sooner, an advocacy organization for Human Challenge Trial volunteers. He has done research on topics from COVID-19 to the future of pandemic response and monitoring to forecasting risks of AI at the World Bank, the Council on Strategic Risks, and Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute. In addition to dozens of academic publications in journals ranging from Technological Forecasting and Social Change to Clinical Infectious Diseases, and from Health Security to PLoS Computational Biology, his work on the implications, risks, and management of novel technologies has appeared in Foreign Affairs and TechCrunch.

Dr. Maria Pavlova obtained her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2015. She has held teaching and research positions at different universities (University of Oxford, University of Warwick) and research centres (Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies) in the UK and Italy. Her research interests lie in three main areas: Italian epics and romances from Andrea da Barberino to Torquato Tasso; cultural encounters between Renaissance Italy and the Islamic world (with special focus on the Ottoman Empire); and Renaissance intellectual history. Her first monograph, Saracens and their World in Boiardo and Ariosto (Cambridge: Legenda, 2020), reconstructs the history of Ferrara’s interactions with different Islamic states and contextualises Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s representations of religious Otherness in this Ferrarese context. At the same time, it carefully unravels the literary memories contained in Orlando Innamorato and Orlando furioso, situating these poems within the wider context of the Italian chivalric literary tradition. She is currently working on a critical edition of Raffaele Vacieco’s Quinto libro (1514) as well as two book projects related to her research interests.

Emanuele Ratti hold a PhD in Ethics and Foundations of the Life Sciences from the European School of Molecular Medicine (SEMM) in Milan, Italy. He has worked for almost five years at the University of Notre Dame (in the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and in the Technology Ethics Center), and he is now based at Johannes Kepler University Linz, in the Institute of Philosophy and Scientific Method.

His areas of specialization are the History and Philosophy of Science (molecular biology, genomics, and AI), and Ethics of Science and Technology (including virtue ethics). He is interested in the aspects of the natural sciences and data science that stand at the intersection of ethical and epistemic questions. In particular, he has two research trajectories.

First, he works in the history and philosophy of the life sciences. His work so far has been focused on the relation between computer science and the life sciences (genomics and biomedicine). He uses philosophical, computational, and historical resources to explore this topic.

Second, he investigates how ethical and epistemic considerations interact and shape one another in data science. He uses an approach (called ‘microethics’) that prioritizes the analysis of the minutiae of the practice of data scientists and the moral relevance of each of their technical acts. This approach integrates the virtue ethics tradition with philosophy of science, in order to identify where the ethics emerges in the practice.

I study the intersection between philosophy of science and philosophy of social science. I am a Marie Skłodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow in the STS program at MIT, and I have a Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science from Tel Aviv University.

My first project, Mathematics, Reality, and Us, aims to offer a new vision of the development of mathematics that focuses on the interactions between mathematics and society: to view it as comprised of the complex and profound connections between individual mathematicians, the community they are part of, the standards and norms they are committed to, and the cultural, political, and social contexts in which they operate. Historically, I am interested in specifying how rejected but high-profile theories contribute to and impact mainstream discussions. Philosophically, I am interested in how the social organization of scientific knowledge affects our understanding of the concepts of truth and objectivity. Sociologically, I am interested in the interactions between individual scientists and the scientific community, the establishment of scientific norms, and the development of social constructs. 

​My second project, Between Us, Within Us, combines philosophy of psychology with behavioral science studies to develop a new conceptual framework for understanding individuals’ attitudes toward social norms. The project zooms in on four core concepts in human behavior: groups, norms, emotions, and social identity, to conceptually and systematically clarify how these elements intersect and impact one another. Specifically, it focuses on processes of internalization of social norms and of social identity in an attempt to understand how such processes affect people’s identification with their groups and their decision to join, stay, or leave social groups. 

Paula Reichert studied physics, mathematics and philosophy at the University of Munich (LMU), Germany, where she also obtained a Ph.D. in mathematical physics. After having spent three years as an assistent teacher and postdoctoral researcher at the Mathematics Department of the LMU, she became a visiting lecturer at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP). From April to September 2022 she will be a visiting lecturer at the Department for Humanities and Arts of the Technion, Haifa.

Paula Reichert is a fellow of the John Bell Institute for the Foundations of Physics. Apart from this, she is one of the organizers and moderator of the online discussion series „Laws of Nature. Discussion Series on Quantum Theory and Relativity.“

Her research focuses on foundational questions of physics, in particular, regarding the foundations of statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, gravitational theory and relational physics (shape dynamics). Another part of her research is dedicated to the philosophy of physics, in particular, to questions regarding the ontology of space, time, and matter, the metaphysics of laws and the concept of physical explanations, in general.

paula.reichert@gmail.com

Personal website: https://www.math.lmu.de/~reichert/
Laws of Nature Discussion Series website : https://laws-of-nature.net/

Barnaby Hutchins is a research fellow at the Technion. He works on the intersections of metaphysics, history and philosophy of biology, and early modern philosophy – in particular, Descartes, Spinoza, and Cavendish. His previous projects have looked at mechanisms, reductionism, the problem of biological life, and lifeforms in the context of action theory. He is currently working on issues around distributed ontologies (i.e., ontologies that can’t be exhausted by any single description).