Collectives in Space and Time
Workshop mit Antony Galton, Peter Simons u.a. 23. bis zum 25. Juni 2011
Ort: Universitätsgebäude Parkstraße 6, Raum 206
Beginn: Donnerstag, 23.06., 18 Uhr
Zum Tagungsprogramm
Suffering from an individualistic bias, classical ontology has long disregarded collectives. But collectives are important. Not only do we live and work in social collectives, but in a way we seem to be collectives ourselves, namely collectives of cells, molecules or atoms. Set theory and mereology, the two standard accounts for collectives, have notorious difficulties: How can abstract sets be renderings of concrete collectives, existing in space and time, having causal relevance? How can we avoid that the arbitrariness of sets and sums carries over to collectives? The workshop brings together experts from philosophy and information science to explore these problems and discuss possible Solutions.