PROTEUS Seminar Series 2022/2023
This year our seminar series will be held online. You are more than welcome to join our sessions via Zoom. To register for each or all sessions, please send an […]
Proteus studies main strategies devised by Western philosophy in representing time in cosmology. It aims at modifying current metaphysics and its relationship with cosmology in the light of recent scientific debates in quantum gravity and quantum cosmology, thereby boosting a new research field in history and philosophy of cosmology.
Principal investigator
Dr Silvia De Bianchi
Host institution
University of Milan
Co-beneficiary institution
Autonomous University of Barcelona
Start date: 1 September 2018
End date: 31 August 2023
Project description
The project is based on two hypotheses:
1) The history of philosophy reveals a guideline that can be traced back to Plato and that characterizes physical and metaphysical approaches to the question of the beginning of the universe in terms of a tension between fundamentality and non-fundamentality of time;
2) There is a conceptual problematic assumption in Western culture and it consists in shaping the problem of the origin of the world as a problem of thinking about the very same conditions of possibility of the origin of a process that is not in time.
The project spells out the conceptual roots of current representations of time in quantum gravity and quantum cosmology and highlights the conceptual break that they provide with respect to philosophical concepts of time portrayed in previous systems.
Proteus explores in detail the notions of time and the paradoxes emerging in the philosophy and cosmology of Plato and Kant and identifies the fundamental characters of emergent time in current quantum gravity theories.
In identifying these fundamental features, Proteus produces conceptual innovation in metaphysics in such a way that philosophical investigation is complementary to the development of current theories.
Research team
The research team includes members from different backgrounds (philosophy, mathematics and physics) and promotes the application of a new methodology emphasizing the relevance of the history of philosophy and the actual interaction between philosophers and scientists.
Research Fellow
Department of Philosophy - University of Milan
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Postdoc in Ancient Philosophy
Department of Philosophy - UAB
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Postdoc in Ancient Philosophy
Department of Philosophy - UAB
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PhD student in Philosophy
Department of Philosophy - UAB
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Research Assistant
Department of Philosophy - UAB
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PhD student in Philosophy
Department of Philosophy - UAB
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Postdoc in theoretical physics
IFAE
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Postdoc in History of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy - UAB
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Postdoc in Physics
Department of Philosophy - UAB
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Postdoc in History of Philosophy
Department of Philosophy - University of Milan
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Postdoc in Philosophy of Physics
Department of Philosophy - University of Milan
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Postdoc in Philosophy of Physics
Department of Philosophy - University of Milan
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Upcoming Events
10 October 3pm
Quantum gravity in a laboratory
Nick Huggett (University of Illinois Chicago)
Department of Philosophy, Room B7/1140, Campus UAB Building B and on line by Zoom to register, please send an email to silvia.debianchi@unimi.it
Latest News
Latest Seminar & Conference Videos
On the Emergence of Both Relativistic Structure and a Global Foliation from Discrete Space-Time
Tim Maudlin (New York University)
Composing and Causing Spacetime in Quantum Gravity
Baptiste Le Bihan (University of Geneva)
Recovering General Relativity from a Planck scale discrete theory of quantum gravity
Jeremy Butterfield (Cambridge, UK) and Fay Dowker (Imperial College London)
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 758145)