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 three 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

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Metaphysics</span> Branch of philosophy dealing with reality

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that studies the fundamental nature of reality. This includes the first principles of: being or existence, identity, change, space and time, cause and effect, necessity, actuality, and possibility.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of science</span> Study of foundations, methods, and implications of science

Philosophy of science is a branch of philosophy concerned with the foundations, methods, and implications of science. The central questions of this study concern what qualifies as science, the reliability of scientific theories, and the ultimate purpose of science. This discipline overlaps with metaphysics, ontology, and epistemology, for example, when it explores the relationship between science and truth. Philosophy of science focuses on metaphysical, epistemic and semantic aspects of science. Ethical issues such as bioethics and scientific misconduct are often considered ethics or science studies rather than the philosophy of science.

Causality (also called causation, or cause and effect) is 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 partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause. In general, a process has many 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Free will</span> Ability to make choices without constraints

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

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

Determinism is the philosophical view that events are completely determined by previously existing causes. 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 other 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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philosophy of physics</span> Truths and principles of the study of matter, space, time and energy

In philosophy, philosophy of physics deals with conceptual and interpretational issues in modern physics, many of which overlap with research done by certain kinds of theoretical physicists. Philosophy of physics can be broadly divided into three areas:

Synchronicity is a concept first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl G. Jung "to describe circumstances that appear meaningfully related yet lack a causal connection." In contemporary research, synchronicity experiences refer to one's subjective experience that coincidences between events in one's mind and the outside world may be causally unrelated to each other yet have some other unknown connection. Jung held that this was a healthy, even necessary, function of the human mind that can become harmful within psychosis.

Physical causality is a physical relationship between causes and effects. It is considered to be fundamental to all natural sciences and behavioural sciences, especially physics. Causality is also a topic studied from the perspectives of philosophy, statistics and logic. Causality means that an effect can not occur from a cause that is not in the back (past) light cone of that event. Similarly, a cause can not have an effect outside its front (future) light cone.

<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.

A temporal paradox, time paradox, or time travel paradox, is a paradox, an apparent contradiction, or logical contradiction associated with the idea of time travel or other foreknowledge of the future. While the notion of time travel to the future complies with the current understanding of physics via relativistic time dilation, temporal paradoxes arise from circumstances involving hypothetical time travel to the past – and are often used to demonstrate its impossibility. Temporal paradoxes fall into three broad groups: bootstrap paradoxes, consistency paradoxes, and Newcomb's paradox.

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.

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Four causes</span> Topic in Aristotelian philosophy

The four causes or four explanations are, in Aristotelian thought, four fundamental types of answer to the question "why?" in analysis of change or movement in nature: the material, the formal, the efficient, and the final. Aristotle wrote that "we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause." While there are cases in which classifying a "cause" is difficult, or in which "causes" might merge, Aristotle held that his four "causes" provided an analytical scheme of general applicability.

<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 the body.

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 there is anything at all</span> Metaphysical question

"Why is there anything at all?" 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, the last of whom 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.

<i>Critique of Impure Reason</i> Book by Steven James Bartlett

Critique of Impure Reason: Horizons of Possibility and Meaning is a book by American philosopher Steven James Bartlett. A study of the limits of knowledge, reference, epistemic possibility, and meaning, it is the most extensive philosophical work by Bartlett to date.

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