Jenann Ismael

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Jenann Ismael
Institutions University of Arizona, Foundational Questions Institute, Stanford University, University of Sydney, Columbia University
Main interests
Metaphysics, philosophy of physics

Jenann T. Ismael is a professor of philosophy at Johns Hopkins University [1] [2] and a member of the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi.) [3] Ismael's work has been influential in the scholarship of metaphysics and the philosophy of physics. [4] [5]

Contents

Education and career

Ismael earned her M.A. and PhD from Princeton University in 1994 and 1997, where her dissertation advisor was Bas van Fraassen. [3] In 1996, she was awarded a two-year Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship. [3] In 2003, she was awarded an NEH Research fellowship at the National Humanities Center. [3] Ismael worked at Stanford University from 1996 to 1998, and at University of Arizona from 1998 to the present, taking a 5-year leave from 2005–2010 to be a senior research associate at the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney after the Australian Research Council awarded her a five-year-long Queen Elizabeth II research fellowship. [3] In 2011 Ismael was awarded a Big Questions in Free Will Grant from the Templeton Foundation. [3] In 2012 she was awarded a Scholarly Conversation Grant from the National Humanities Center. [3] She spent 2014-2015 as a fellow at Stanford's Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.

Philosophical work

Ismael's research focuses on the philosophy of physics and metaphysics, especially areas involving the structure of space and time, quantum mechanics, and the foundations of physical laws. [4] She has also published on such issues as the conflict between lived experience and physics, the implications of physics on issues of freedom, death, the nature of the self, and the problem of free will. [4]

Ismael has published four books: Essays on Symmetry in 2001, The Situated Self in 2007 (with a second edition released in 2009,), How Physics Makes Us Free in 2016 and Time: A Very Short Introduction in 2021 as well as a number of peer-reviewed papers. [3]

Essays on Symmetry (2001)

In Essays on Symmetry Ismael aims to draw connections between the concept of symmetry as it is used in philosophy and the concept of symmetry as it is used in physics. [3]

The Situated Self (2007)

In The Situated Self, Ismael presents a naturalistic account of the self, focusing on the construction of internal models that represent the external world, and attempting to explain the relationship between the self and the outside world. [6] The book has three distinct parts: the first part deals primarily with reflexive representation and its uses, the second part applies the idea of reflexive representation to famous problems of the philosophy of mind, and the third attempts to lay out a new conception of what the self is. [7]

Causation, Free Will and Naturalism (paper 2012)

In this paper, [8] Ismael addresses the question of free will from a physics perspective, reconciling the "happy confidence in one's own powers to bring things about" and "recent developments in the scientific understanding of causal concepts." From the broad scientific perspective, dynamical laws seem to preclude not only most folk notions of free will, but the very concept of causality in general. However "interventionist account" of causality, independently developed by Clark Glymour and Judea Pearl, makes sense of considering the impacts of our human behavior on the system. "We need causal information to decide how to act..." [9]

How Physics Makes Us Free (2016)

Her book How Physics Makes Us Free was selected by John Farrell of Forbes Magazine as 2016 Book of the Year. [10]

Related Research Articles

Process philosophy, also ontology of becoming, or processism, is an approach in philosophy that identifies processes, changes, or shifting relationships as the only real experience of everyday living. In opposition to the classical view of change as illusory or accidental, process philosophy posits transient occasions of change or becoming as the only fundamental things of the ordinary everyday real world.

Philosophy of science is the branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. Amongst its central questions are the difference between science and non-science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose and meaning of science as a human endeavour. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of scientific practice, and overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, logic, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and the concept of truth. Philosophy of science is both a theoretical and empirical discipline, relying on philosophical theorising as well as meta-studies of scientific practice. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science.

Causality is an influence by which one event, process, state, or object (acause) contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an effect) where the cause is at least partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is at least partly dependent on the cause. In general, a process can have multiple causes, which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future. Some writers have held that causality is metaphysically prior to notions of time and space.

Free will is the capacity or ability to choose between different possible courses of action.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Determinism</span> Philosophical view that events are determined by prior events

Determinism is the philosophical view that all events in the universe, including human decisions and actions, are causally inevitable. Deterministic theories throughout the history of philosophy have developed from diverse and sometimes overlapping motives and considerations. Like eternalism, determinism focuses on particular events rather than the future as a concept. The opposite of determinism is indeterminism, or the view that events are not deterministically caused but rather occur due to chance. Determinism is often contrasted with free will, although some philosophers claim that the two are compatible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Reductionism</span> Philosophical view explaining systems in terms of smaller parts

Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena. It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical position that interprets a complex system as the sum of its parts.

In philosophy, the philosophy of physics deals with conceptual and interpretational issues in physics, many of which overlap with research done by certain kinds of theoretical physicists. Historically, philosophers of physics have engaged with questions such as the nature of space, time, matter and the laws that govern their interactions, as well as the epistemological and ontological basis of the theories used by practicing physicists. The discipline draws upon insights from various areas of philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of science, while also engaging with the latest developments in theoretical and experimental physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">G. E. M. Anscombe</span> British analytic philosopher (1919–2001)

Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, usually cited as G. E. M. Anscombe or Elizabeth Anscombe, was a British analytic philosopher. She wrote on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of action, philosophical logic, philosophy of language, and ethics. She was a prominent figure of analytical Thomism, a Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, and a professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Emergentism</span> Philosophical belief in emergence

Emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is a new outcome of some other properties of the system and their interaction, while it is itself different from them. Within the philosophy of science, emergentism is analyzed both as it contrasts with and parallels reductionism. This philosophical theory suggests that higher-level properties and phenomena arise from the interactions and organization of lower-level entities yet are not reducible to these simpler components. It emphasizes the idea that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Historically, emergentism has significantly influenced various scientific and philosophical ideas, highlighting the complexity and interconnectedness of natural systems.

Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nancy Cartwright (philosopher)</span> American philosopher of science

Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire is an American philosopher of science. She is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at San Diego and the University of Durham. Currently, she is the President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology (DLMPST) of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology under the International Science Council (ISC).

The deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, also known as Hempel's model, the Hempel–Oppenheim model, the Popper–Hempel model, or the covering law model, is a formal view of scientifically answering questions asking, "Why...?". The DN model poses scientific explanation as a deductive structure, one where truth of its premises entails truth of its conclusion, hinged on accurate prediction or postdiction of the phenomenon to be explained.

Retrocausality, or backwards causation, is a concept of cause and effect in which an effect precedes its cause in time and so a later event affects an earlier one. In quantum physics, the distinction between cause and effect is not made at the most fundamental level and so time-symmetric systems can be viewed as causal or retrocausal. Philosophical considerations of time travel often address the same issues as retrocausality, as do treatments of the subject in fiction, but the two phenomena are distinct.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mind–body problem</span> Open question in philosophy of how abstract minds interact with physical bodies

The mind–body problem is a philosophical problem concerning the relationship between thought and consciousness in the human mind and body.

Brian Ellis is an Australian philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor in the philosophy department at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, and Professional Fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. He was the Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for twelve years. He is one of the major proponents of the New Essentialist school of philosophy of science. In later years he has brought his understanding of scientific realism to the Social Sciences, developing the philosophy of Social Humanism. He was appointed a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1972.

Causal reasoning is the process of identifying causality: the relationship between a cause and its effect. The study of causality extends from ancient philosophy to contemporary neuropsychology; assumptions about the nature of causality may be shown to be functions of a previous event preceding a later one. The first known protoscientific study of cause and effect occurred in Aristotle's Physics. Causal inference is an example of causal reasoning.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Why is there anything at all?</span> Metaphysical question

"Why is there anything at all?" or "why is there something rather than nothing?" is a question about the reason for basic existence which has been raised or commented on by a range of philosophers and physicists, including Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger, who called it "the fundamental question of metaphysics".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert D. Rupert</span> American philosopher (born 1964)

Robert D. Rupert is an American philosopher. His primary academic appointment is at the University of Colorado at Boulder (UCB), where he is Professor of Philosophy, a fellow of UCB's Institute of Cognitive Science, and a member of UCB's Committee on the History and Philosophy of Science. He is Regular Visiting professor at the University of Edinburgh’s Eidyn Centre and is the co-editor in chief of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.

Universal causation is the proposition that everything in the universe has a cause and is thus an effect of that cause. This means that if a given event occurs, then this is the result of a previous, related event. If an object is in a certain state, then it is in that state as a result of another object interacting with it previously.

James Francis Woodward is an American philosopher who works mainly in philosophy of science with particular emphasis on causation and scientific explanation. In addition, Woodward has published in moral and political philosophy as well as philosophy of psychology. Woodward is Professor Emeritus in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. and was previously J.O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities at Caltech.

References

  1. "Jenann Ismael | Professor of Philosophy – Columbia University" . Retrieved 2023-05-03.
  2. "People | Philosophy | Johns Hopkins University". William H. Miller III Department of Philosophy. Archived from the original on 2023-04-19. Retrieved 2023-05-03.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Ismael, Jenann. "About Me". Archived from the original on 2 November 2013. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
  4. 1 2 3 DesAutels, Peggy. "Jenann Ismael: August 2013". Highlighted Philosophers. American Philosophical Association. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
  5. "The Situated Self - J. T. Ismael". Oxford University Press. Retrieved 20 August 2013.
  6. Butler, Jesse (2010). "J. T. Ismael: The Situated Self". Philosophy in Review XXX. 2.
  7. Rupert, Robert (15 October 2007). "The Situated Self (Review)". Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
  8. pdf
  9. Ismael, Jennan (2013). Ross, Don; Ladyman, James (eds.). Scientific Metaphysics. Oxford University Press. p. 213. ISBN   978-0-19-969649-9.
  10. Book Of The Year: How Physics Makes Us Free Dec 31, 2016