First Annual UCLA Conference in
History & Philosophy of Science

Concepts of Cause:
Physics, Biology, History & Philosophy

Place: UCLA Campus, Dodd Hall room 121 (located at F3 on this map)
Date: Sunday, November 7th
Time: 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (doors open at 8:30 a.m.)
Pre-Registration: Pre-register by email at jbragin@igpp.ucla.edu. Those who register by Nov. 3 will be provided with a free lunch.
Parking: $7 self-paid in Lot P2 on the corner of Hilgard and Westholme (E4/E5 on this map)

Who Should Attend: Not only specialists in philosophy, history, and scientific research, but also any inquisitive people interested in increasing their understanding of the philosophy and history of science.

8:45
Coffee and Registration
9:30

Causation and Gravitation

Chris Smeenk, UCLA Philosophy

10:30

Addressing Causality in the Cultural Realm of Science:
The Scientific and Industrial Revolutions

Margaret Jacob, UCLA History

11:30
Lunch
1:00

Notions of Cause in Classical Mechanics

Sheldon Smith, UCLA Philosophy

2:00

Quantum Causation and Faster-than-Light Signalling

Jeff Barrett, UCI Logic & Philosophy of Science

3:00
Break
3:15

Causation and Natural Selection:
Genes, Organisms, and Pragmatic Virtues

P. Kyle Stanford, UCI Logic & Philosophy of Science

4:15

Panel Discussion: Is the concept of causation time, place, and domain specific, or is there a general concept valid across many fields of inquiry?

Moderator: David Kaplan, Reichenbach Chair of Scientific Philosophy, UCLA

5:00
End of the Conference

Abstracts, biographies, and suggested readings.

Convened by Chris Smeenk, Sheldon Smith and John Bragin (jbragin@ucla.edu). This conference is being presented by the UCLA Department of Philosophy. It is co-sponsored by the Southern California Colloquium in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, the UC Irvine Interdisciplinary Program in History and Philosophy of Science (Logic and Philosophy of Science homepage), and the UCLA Center for the Study of Evolution & the Origin of Life (CSEOL), a research and education unit of the UCLA Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics.