Contributors

Jonathan Bain

is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University. His research interests include philosophy of space-time, scientific realism, and philosophy of quantum field theory.

Sorin Bangu

is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bergen, Norway. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has previously been a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Western Ontario and a fixed-term lecturer at the University of Cambridge, Department of History and Philosophy of Science. His main interests are in philosophy of science (especially philosophy of physics, mathematics, and probability) and later Wittgenstein. He has published extensively in these areas and has recently completed a book manuscript on the metaphysical and epistemological issues arising from the applicability of mathematics to science.

Robert Batterman

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He is the author of The devil in the details: Asymptotic reasoning in explanation, reduction, and emergence (Oxford, 2002). His work in philosophy of physics focuses primarily upon the area of condensed matter broadly construed. His research interests include the foundations of statistical physics, dynamical systems and chaos, asymptotic reasoning, mathematical idealizations, the philosophy of applied mathematics, explanation, reduction, and emergence.

Gordon Belot

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. He has published a number of articles on philosophy of physics and related areas—and one small book, Geometric possibility (Oxford, 2011).

Craig Callender

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. He has written widely in philosophy of science, metaphysics, and philosophy of physics. He is the editor of Physics meets philosophy at the Planck length (with Huggett) and the Oxford handbook of the philosophy of time. He is currently working on a book monograph on the relationship between physical time and time as we experience it.

Olivier Darrigol

is a CNRS research director in the SPHERE/Rehseis research team in Paris. He investigates the history of physics, mostly nineteenth and twentieth century, with a strong interest in related philosophical questions. He is the author of several books including From c-numbers to q-numbers: The classical analogy in the history of quantum theory (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), Electrodynamics from Ampère to Einstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Worlds of flow: A history of hydrodynamics from the Bernoullis to Prandtl (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), and A history of optics from Greek antiquity to the nineteenth century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Leo P. Kadanoff

is a theoretical physicist and applied mathematician who has contributed widely to research in the properties of matter, the development of urban areas, statistical models of physical systems, and the development of chaos in simple mechanical and fluid systems. His best-known contribution was in the development of the concepts of “scale invariance” and “universality” as they are applied to phase transitions. More recently, he has been involved in the understanding of singularities in fluid flow.

John Byron Manchak

is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington. His primary research interests are in philosophy of physics and philosophy of science. His research has focused on foundational issues in general relativity.

Tarun Menon

is a graduate student in Philosophy at the University of California, San Diego. His research interests are in the philosophy of physics and metaphysics, particularly time, probability, and the foundations of statistical mechanics. He is also interested in formal epistemology and the cognitive structure of science.

Margaret Morrison

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. She is the author of several articles on various aspects of philosophy of science including physics and biology. She is also the author of Unifying scientific theories: Physical concepts and mathematical structures (Cambridge, 2000) and the editor (with Mary Morgan) of Models as mediators: Essays on the philosophy of natural and social science (Cambridge, 1999).

Oliver Pooley

is University Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow and Tutor at Oriel College, Oxford. He works in the philosophy of physics and in metaphysics. Much of his research focuses on the nature of space, time, and spacetime.

Laura Ruetsche

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Michigan. Her Interpreting quantum theories: The art of the possible (Oxford, 2011) aims to articulate questions about the foundations of quantum field theories whose answers might hold interest for philosophy more broadly construed.

Simon Saunders

is Professor in the Philosophy of Physics and Fellow of Linacre College at the University of Oxford. He has worked in the foundations of quantum field theory, quantum mechanics, symmetries, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics and in the philosophy of time and spacetime. He was an early proponent of the view of branching in the Everett interpretation as an “effective” process based on decoherence. He is co-editor (with Jonathan Barrett, Adrian Kent, and David Wallace) of Many worlds? Everett, quantum theory, and reality (OUP 2010).

Chris Smeenk

is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario. His research interests are history and philosophy of physics, and seventeenth-century natural philosophy.

Sheldon R. Smith

is Professor of Philosophy at UCLA. He has written articles on the philosophy of classical mechanics, the relationship between causation and laws, the philosophy of applied mathematics, and Kant's philosophy of science.

David Wallace

studied physics at Oxford University before moving into philosophy of physics. He is now Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy of Science at Balliol College, Oxford, and university lecturer in Philosophy at Oxford University. His research interests include the interpretation of quantum mechanics and the philosophical and conceptual problems of quantum field theory, symmetry, and statistical physics.

Mark Wilson

is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, a Fellow of the Center for Philosophy of Science, and a Fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His main research investigates the manner in which physical and mathematical concerns become entangled with issues characteristic of metaphysics and philosophy of language. He is the author of Wandering significance: An essay on conceptual behavior (Oxford, 2006). He is currently writing a book on explanatory structure. He is also interested in the historical dimensions of this interchange; in this vein, he has written on Descartes, Frege, Duhem, and Wittgenstein. He also supervises the North American Traditions Series for Rounder Records.