Center for Philosophy and the Natural Sciences - California State University Sacramento

Events Spotlight

Symposium: "The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead"

February 17, 2011
Library of Congress
Washington, D.C.

Experts to Discuss Famed Mathematician and Philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and a Rare Piece of Correspondence at Symposium on Feb. 17

A rare, six-page letter written by Alfred North Whitehead, one of the major philosophers and mathematicians of the 20th century, will be the subject of a half-day symposium at the Library of Congress. The letter was recently donated to the Library and will be housed in the Manuscript Division.

Roland Faber, executive co-director of the Center for Process Studies and executive director of the Whitehead Research Project at Claremont Graduate University will give the keynote address "Whitehead’s Work and Impact, Past and Future," which will provide an overview of Whitehead and his legacy in a range of fields.

George Lucas of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis will discuss "Whitehead, Wittgenstein and 20th Century Philosophy and Ethics."

Michael Epperson of California State University in Sacramento will present "Interpretations of Contemporary Physics."

David Finkelstein of the Georgia Institute of Technology will discuss "Reflections on ‘Principia Mathematica,’" which will address the impact of Whitehead in logic and mathematics.

Derek Malone-France of George Washington University will present "Kant and Whitehead."

Ron Phipps of the International Center for Process Philosophy, Science and Education will discuss "Significance of Whitehead’s 1936 Letter."

Timothy Eastman of Plasmas International in Silver Spring, Md., will present "Whitehead in the Tradition of Process Thought."

Henry S. Leonard, Jr., the letter’s donor, will talk about its provenance.

Click here for more information from the Library of Congress website.

July 19-20, 2010
Orcas Island, Washington State

"Foundations of Relational Realism Logical Causality, Intrinsic Decoherence, and a Category-Theoretic Mereotopological Model of Quantum Spacetime"

Philip Stamp: Dept. of Physics, University of British Columbia / PITI
Stuart Kauffman: Complex Systems Center, University of Vermont
Elias Zafiris: Dept. of Mathematics, University of Athens
Karim Bschir: Dept. of Philosophy, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
Timothy Eastman: Plasmas International
Michael Epperson: Dept. of Philosophy & College of Natural Sciences & Mathematics, Director, CPNS, California State University

This is the first principals meeting for the Foundations of Relational Realism research project exploring the phenomenon of logical causality in quantum mechanics and its implications for complex adaptive systems. Specifically, we will: 1) examine the role of local-global internal relation by logical implication in quantum mechanics and its exemplification in the phenomena of environmental and 'intrinsic' decoherence; 2) examine a category-theoretic / sheaf-theoretic quantum formalism as a means of rigorously defining and describing these local-global internal relations in quantum mechanics; 3) explore the application of the above to Stu Kauffman’s concept of the ‘adjacent possible’ and its function in complex adaptive systems.

Click here for a complete schedule of recent and upcoming events.

Publications

New Book by CPNS Research Fellow
Stuart A. Kauffman

Stuart A. Kauffman is the founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics and a professor of biological sciences, physics, and astronomy at the University of Calgary.

He is Emeritus Professor of Biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, a MacArthur Fellow, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, of which he was a founding member. His books include: The Origins of Order: Self-Organization and Selection in Evolution and At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity. Kauffman's notion of natural continuing creativity challenges conventional scientific assumptions that the biosphere's evolution and human activity can be reduced to physics and are fully governed by natural laws.

Research

CPNS Research Initiative on Logical Causality in Quantum Mechanics Receives $230,000
in Funding for 2008-2009

UPDATE: (May 2010) Phase 2 of this project (2010-2013) is now funded and underway. Click here for further details.

CPNS Principal Investigator and Philosophy Department professor Michael Epperson has organized a major research initiative exploring the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics. In January 2008, Epperson secured a $20,000 startup grant for the project from the CTNS/Templeton Foundation's 'Science and Transcendence Research Series' (STARS). With these funds, he and Project Manager Timothy Eastman, a plasma physicist at NASA-Goddard and CPNS Research Fellow, were able to assemble a research team of highly esteemed physicists and philosophers including David Ritz Finkelstein, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Henry P. Stapp, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Within two months, Epperson's project, entitled Logical Causality in Quantum Mechanics: Relational Realism and the Evolution of Ontology to Praxiology in the Philosophy of Nature received a $209,000 grant from the Fetzer-Franklin Fund of the Fetzer Institute. In addition to several forthcoming publications, including several journal articles and an edited volume, this research initiative will include a major international conference on quantum theory and neuroscience to be held at California State University, Sacramento.

Other News

Spacetime: From the Greeks to Gravity Probe B

What did the ancient Hellenic philosophers think about matter and its relationship to space and time? How were these views inherited and modified in the work of Newton, and later in the work of Einstein?

Gravity Probe B (GP-B) is a NASA physics mission that is currently investigating Einstein's 1916 general theory of relativity--his theory of gravity. It is hoped that the results will yield new understandings of the nature of

spacetime, and help physicists and philosophers better understand the longevolution of thought about the nature of the physical world.

The Center for Philosophy and the Natural Sciences
College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics
California State University, Sacramento
6000 J Street
Sacramento, CA 95819-6123

Click here for other publications by CPNS Research Fellows

Click here for a complete schedule of recent and upcoming events

Click here for a summary of our current research

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