Two LPS professors, Cailin O'Connor (top) and James Weatherall (right), have been appointed visiting fellows at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for the Philosophy of Science for fall  2015.  The center is one of the most important and active locations for the exchange of ideas in the philosophy of science. 

Pitt is also home to the Archive for Scientific Philosophy, which houses a large number of documents related to 20th century philosophy of science.

Weatherall plans to spend the time in Pittsburgh working on how and whether relativity puts constraints on "reasonable" differential equations for matter, and if so, whether these constraints amount to a prohibition on superluminal propagation.  He'll also be looking at documents in the archive related to Carnap's views on instrumentalism post 1950.  

O'Connor's project is on methodology in evolutionary modeling, and in particular, on how focusing on strategic settings that are interesting for game theoretic analysis distorts our understanding of evolutionary pressure.  She'll investigate cases where strategic models from the social sciences are imported whole-cloth to biology although the relevant strategic aspects no longer apply.

A number of LPS faculty have been visiting fellows in past years; most recently, LPS professor Kyle Stanford was the center's inaugural senior fellow in 2012-13.

-courtesy of LPS Department