Francisco Calderón

Este ensayo tiene dos objetivos: uno principal y otro secundario. El principal es mostrar que los chistes de Aristófanes revelan cierta familiaridad con la ciencia del momento comparando pasajes de la comedia con otras fuentes primarias. El secundario consiste en darle un abrebocas al lector sobre varios rasgos clave de la ciencia griega temprana de los presocráticos (y, en menor medida, de los médicos hipocráticos) a través de la comedia, y en dirigirlo a literatura secundaria pertinente que aborde esos rasgos con más profundidad y cuidado. Los cuatro rasgos en los que me enfoco a lo largo del ensayo son: el contenido de la ciencia griega temprana, es decir, los fenómenos que estudiaron los presocráticos; la manera de hacer ciencia; las innovaciones lingüísticas que ayudan a conformar el marco conceptual de las disciplinas nacientes; y la dimensión mística que aún se preservaba en las investigaciones sobre la naturaleza. Entre estos cuatro aspectos, Aristófanes nos presenta un Sócrates multiforme, en el que se intersecan tradiciones, doctrinas, técnicas, palabras y prácticas de la ciencia de punta del momento, legándonos así a un “Sócrates presocrático”.

There has been significant interest in addressing the underrepresentation of various demographic groups in philosophy. Indeed, many have proposed remedies at the disciplinary level. However, underrepresentation is an issue that varies by subfield in philosophy. Women, for example, are especially underrepresented in subfields considered formal (e.g., logic). As has already been argued in the existing literature, addressing underrepresentation, even within subfields, is not as simple as recruiting more students from underserved populations. Instead, we advocate for a student-centered approach, promoting inclusive pedagogy. In this paper, we share a case study in which we implemented feminist and trauma-informed interventions in two undergraduate formal logic courses and investigated their impact with respect to elements of structural injustice. We found that our interventions successfully eliminated existing gender-based differences in perceptions of self-efficacy and largely diminished students’ perceptions of the objectivity of logic, but were unsuccessful at changing students’ impressions of the broader applicability of logic. By sharing our interventions, we hope to provide educators with practical tools and ideas for implementing similar approaches in their classrooms. By sharing our results, we invite educators to reflect on the potential impact of similar approaches in formal philosophy courses and on tools for measuring that impact.

The normalization in the path integral approach to quantum field theory, in contrast with statistical field theory, can contain physical information. The main claim of this paper is that the inner product on the space of field configurations, one of the fundamental pieces of data required to be added to quantize a classical field theory, determines the normalization of the path integral. In fact, dimensional analysis shows that the introduction of this structure necessarily introduces a scale that is left unfixed by the classical theory. We study the dependence of the theory on this scale. This allows us to explore mechanisms that can be used to fix the normalization based on cutting and gluing different integrals. “Self-normalizing” path integrals, those independent of the scale, play an important role in this process. Furthermore, we show that the scale dependence encodes other important physical data: we use it to give a conceptually clear derivation of the chiral anomaly. Several explicit examples, including the scalar and compact bosons in different geometries, supplement our discussion.

Algebraic quantum field theory (AQFT) puts forward three ``causal axioms'' that aim to characterize the theory as one that implements relativistic causation: the spectrum condition, microcausality, and primitive causality. In this paper, I aim to show, in a minimally technical way, that none of them fully explains the notion of causation appropriate for AQFT because they only capture some of the desiderata for relativistic causation I state or because it is often unclear how each axiom implements its respective desideratum. After this diagnostic, I will show that a fourth condition, local primitive causality (LPC), fully characterizes relativistic causation in the sense of fulfilling all the relevant desiderata. However, it only encompasses the virtues of the other axioms because it is implied by them, as I will show from a construction by Haag and Schroer (1962). Since the conjunction of the three causal axioms implies LPC and other important results in QFT that LPC does not imply, and since LPC helps clarify some of the shortcomings of the three axioms, I advocate for a holistic interpretation of how the axioms characterize the causal structure of AQFT against the strategy in the literature to rivalize the axioms and privilege one among them.