[Fis] Announcing the New Session

Dear FIS Colleagues,

In a few days we will start the new session

CONSILIENCE: BRINGING TOGETHER SEPARATE INDUCTIONS

chaired by Malcolm Forster
(philosopher of science, University of Wisconsin)

As one can see in the publications of his Web page,
http://philosophy.wisc.edu/forster/ the theoretical problems around
consilience (term historically coined by the Victorian scholar W. Whewell)
are quite deep: at the very roots of multidisciplinary convergence. In
recent years, the term has been widely circulated after E.O. Wilson's
polemic book "Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge", A. Knopf 1998. An
article by Richard Emery (new member in this list) about this Wilsonian
consilience (BioSystems 72, 217-227, 2003) is an excellent guide to the new
multidisciplinary construction that Wilson has attempted around the theme.
Sure, both the general dynamics of multidisciplinary convergence and the
theoretical problems of putting separate inductions together will get
interwoven in the discussions to come. In actuality, when at FIS we ponder
on the intricacies of informational phenomena across multiple scales of
biological and social organization, aren't we routinely caught into the
dilemmas and difficulties inherent to such multi-disciplinary /
multi-induction convergence? ... So, we will have quite an exciting
discussion time after Malcolm's kickoff text (to be posted, at his
convenience, one of these days), and I should ask his pardon for this too
long announcement!

Thanks are due to John Collier for his help regarding this session.

post-vacational greetings,

Pedro

P.S. As usual FIS members should strictly abide by the 2 messages per week
limitation. Only the discussion chair may produce up to 4 messages per week.
Received on Tue Sep 14 22:16:57 2004