Colloquium (11/20): Gary Hardcastle, "(Really) Recovering Understanding"

Gary Hardcastle, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bloomsburg University

Tuesday, November 20th, 4:30PM  » Willard Smith Library, Vaughan Literature Building

Abstract: Focusing upon his 1947 On Understanding Science: An Historical Approach (the published form of his 1946 Terry Lectures), this talk recounts James B. Conant's theory of understanding, as well as the social, political, and pedagogical projects Conant associated with it. In 1946 Conant had been the President of Harvard University for ten years; he had served as the Chairman of the National Defense Research Committee during WWII, overseeing the Manhattan Project; he had, with Vannevar Bush, laid the foundation for what would be America's National Science Foundation; and he had brought into being a model of post-war university education, a vision distilled in 1945's General Education in a Free Society, aka the Harvard "Red Book." These achievements brought Conant to regard understanding as vitally important to human survival, and they brought him to articulate a theory of understanding and its transmission, a project he would continue for the rest of his life. Though Conant's thinking about understanding was acutely tuned WWII and the ensuing Cold War, his questions are just those that have motivated a resurgence of interest in understanding in the (heretofore somewhat insulated) fields of epistemology and philosophy of science: "Why," Conant asks, "should any but a relatively few experts need to understand science," and what, for that matter, does it mean, to "understand science"? Moreover, Conant's answers to these questions illuminate some contemporary debates (or so I'll argue).

This event is co-sponsored by the Philosophy Department and the Production of Public Understanding of Science project, which is itself funded by Professor Grimm's Varieties of Understanding project!

Colloquium (11/4): Stephen Grimm, "How Understanding Human Beings Differs from Understanding the Natural World"

Stephen Grimm, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University

Professor Grimm

Tuesday, Nov. 4, 4:30pm  » Willard Smith Library, Vaughan Literature Building

Abstract: When we try to understand the natural world, we often appeal to things like causes or mechanisms or laws. But what happens when we try to understand other people? Do we need to appeal to something different—perhaps to notions like values or goods? I will consider a few ways in which philosophers have claimed that there is something distinctive when it comes to understanding human beings, and argue that these attempts have fallen short in various respects. I will then offer my own view about how understanding human beings differs from understanding the natural world.

Professor Grimm specializes in epistemology, the philosophy of science, and value theory. Since July of 2013 he has led a three-year $4.5 million dollar project on the nature of understanding, supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, with additional support from the Henry Luce Foundation.  The project examines the various ways in which human beings understand the world, how these ways of understanding might be improved, and how they might be combined to produce an integrated understanding of the world.  More details can be found at the website for The Varieties of Understanding project: www.varietiesofunderstanding.com.

This event is co-sponsored by the Philosophy Department and the Production of Public Understanding of Science project, which is itself funded by Professor Grimm's Varieties of Understanding project!