2013 - Summer School in Tuebingen on The Philosophical History of Modern Space-Time Theory, with Robert DiSalle

We kindly invite graduate students and junior scientists of philosophy, physics and mathematics, to apply for the Forum Scientiarum's International Interdisciplinary Summer School "The philosophical history of modern space-time theory". Candidates from other fields with strong interests in philosophy and/or history of science will be taken into consideration. 

In five lectures, Robert DiSalle will present a philosophical perspective on the history of space-time theory, based on novel historical reconstructions of the key episodes and an original interpretation of the fundamental philosophical issues. In DiSalle's account, the philosophical problem that motivated the development of space-time theory was not, primarily, a question of the metaphysical status of space and time. It was, instead, the more fundamental question, how can any spatial and temporal structures be applied to the physical world? Beginning with Newton, this general question raised more specific questions about the empirical foundations of space-time theory: how is empirical knowledge of spatial and temporal relations possible? What do the laws of physics presuppose about the nature of space and time? How can the invariant features of physical systems be distinguished from merely relative descriptions?

Answers to these questions required, not the defense of metaphysical hypotheses, but the conceptual analysis of the role that the concepts of space and time play in our assumptions about physics, and the role that assumptions about motion and measurement play in our conceptions of space and time.