We are pleased to announce that on Friday, April 4 at 5.30pm (CET),
Hans Halvorson (Princeton) will give the talk Reduction redux as part of the
Lugano Philosophy Colloquia Spring 2025 organised by the Institute of Philosophy (ISFI) at USI.
This hybrid talk will take place in Room Multiuso, FTL Building (USI West Campus)
and online via Zoom. If you are interested in joining online, please write to
events.isfi@usi.ch.
Here is the abstract of the talk:
To his list of perennial philosophical questions, Kant might have added: can everything be reduced to the microphysical basis? I return to this question with, hopefully, wisdom gained from a hundred years of trying to make that claim precise, and of arguing
about whether it is true. I take two focal points for discussion: (1) the worry (or hope!) that quantum physics shows reductionism to be false, and (2) the hope (or worry!) that new formal insights can save reductionism.