CORDIScovery Podcast | Number 08 (September 2021)

#08 Philosophy of science: the energy and excitement of curiosity

Abstract:

From rabbits plucked out of hats to dark matter, how do we comprehend the inexplicable or the unobservable? What do particle physicists and a magician’s audience have in common? Do we enjoy being baffled? If so, why? What pushes us to seek to understand? Is objectivity so vital in scientific observation and is subjectivity really its negation – or is the relationship between the two more subtle? This week's special guests are:-

• Jason Leddington, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, whose book on the philosophy of magic and other arts of impossibility is under contract with MIT Press. He was the principal investigator on the PhiloMagic project.
• Michela Massimi, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh. Massimi was the coordinator of the Perspectival Realism project and the author of Perspectival Realism, which will come out in January 2022 published by Oxford University Press.
• Jan Sprenger, a professor at the Centre for Logic, Language and Cognition at the University of Turin who was the principal investigator on the Objectivity project.

• Primary Source

Official

European Research Council: Projects, 2021: Making Scientific Inferences More Objective https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/640638

European Research Council: Projects, 2021: Perspectival Realism. Science, Knowledge, and Truth from a Human Vantage Point https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/647272

EU CORDIS: Horizon 2020 Projects: The Art of the Impossible: A Philosophical Study of Theatrical Magic https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/795393

---