Philosopher of Science Professor Paul Hoyningen-Huene comes to visit the Department of Philosophy

Prof. Paul Hoyningne-Huene, who has been invited to present his work at the 2018 Winter School for University of Tartu doctoral students, will deliver two public lectures in Tartu.

The first of these will be part of the winter school itself. It takes place on the 6th February at 10am, Jakobi 2 in the lecturehall 226. The subject of this talk will be "The Human Sciences between Quantification and Hermeneutics". For further information see the Winter School website.

The second talk will take place at the Department of Philosophy Colloquium on Wedneday 7th February at 4.15pm, in room 336, in Jakobi 2. The title of this talk will be “Strong Incommensurability and Deeply Opaque Ignorance.”

Prof. Hoyningne-Huene has visited the Department of Philosophy in the past. A translation of his treatment of systematicity in science was published in the journal Akadeemia in 2002. On the same subject he published his book Systematicity: The Nature of Science in 2013 with OUP. In 2016, he was one of the plenary speakers at that year's Estonian Annual Philosopy Conference in Tallinn at the Tallinn Technical University. In 1993, he achieved international acclaim for his book Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science, in which he presented a neo-Kantian interpretation of Kuhn's philosophy of science. Moreover he has quite a number of works on the topic of incommensurability—a topic he returns to in his presentation at the Department of Philosophy Colloquium

Abstract of the second talk:
Strong Incommensurability and Deeply Opaque Ignorance
Roughly speaking, “opaque ignorance” is a kind of ignorance in which one is not even aware of one’s ignorance. It has already been observed by some authors that there are different kinds of opaque ignorance, among them the particularly interesting case of “deeply opaque ignorance”. In the paper, I shall explore this kind of ignorance by relating it to the concept of incommensurability, more specifically to “strong incommensurability”, a new concept. Does strong incommensurability imply deeply opaque ignorance? I shall discuss this question both on an abstract level and by means of several cases studies from the history of science and the history of medicine (Mercury’s perihelion, viruses, prions).

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