On Friday, 3 December, David Albert (Columbia University) will give a talk titled “Physical Laws and Physical Things” (abstract below).

The meeting will take place online on Zoom (17:00-19:00 CET). If you have not registered yet, you can do so here.

You can address any inquiry to antonio.vassallo@pw.edu.pl.

ABSTRACT

I will consider several strategies for absorbing unwanted pieces of concrete physical ontology (for example: absolute/substantival Newtonian space, Maxwellian Electromagnetic fields, and especially and particularly quantum-mechanical wave-functions) into the metaphysical category of Laws. I will argue that these strategies work well for the case of Newtonian absolute space – but that they work poorly for the case of quantum-mechanical wave-functions.