Logic and Philosophy of Science Group Talk (Jo Wolff, Edinburgh)

The Logic and Philosophy of Science Group is pleased to welcome guest speaker Jo Wolff. Dr. Wolff became a senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in 2019. Before joining Edinburgh, Professor Wolff was a lecturer at King’s College London and an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Hong Kong University. In addition, Dr. Wolff is also a Humboldt Fellow at the Munich Centre for Mathematical Philosophy (MCMP) in Germany. Dr. Wolff works primarily on questions in the philosophy of science and metaphysics, with a current research focus on the metaphysics of quantities. Their scholarship also examines structural realism, idiosyncratic aspects of the history of quantum mechanics, and theories of laws of nature and causation.

Join the meeting: https://utoronto.zoom.us/j/89632021226

Talk Title

Quantities Are Structures

Talk Abstract

What makes quantitative attributes like mass, length or temperature special? I argue that to understand the metaphysics of quantities, we have to understand quantities as structures. In this talk, I’ll explain what I mean when I say quantities are structures, what sorts of structures quantities are, and why we should think of them as structures. The resulting view is a substantival structuralism about quantities.

About the Logic and Philosophy of Science Group

One of five departmental Research Interest Groups, the Logic and Philosophy of Science Group hosts talks on logic, general philosophy of science, and philosophy of the particular sciences, as well as talks in allied areas such as formal epistemology, decision theory, and the metaphysics of science.