European Research Council Studentship: The Metaphysical Unity of Science (EXPIRED)

Title of studentship: The European Research Council: The Metaphysical Unity of Science

Location: University of Bristol, Department of Philosophy

Eligibility: UK, EU and overseas applicants are welcome to apply. Applicants are expected to have a background in a field of philosophy relevant to the project in order to work with the Principal Investigator and the project team (three Postdocs) on the below questions. The main tasks are to complete a dissertation within four years and participate in organising the project’s events.

Funding amount: £14,777

Duration: Jan 2019 – Dec 2022 (full-time)

The Metaphysical Unity of Science (MetaScience) ERC Consolidator Grant project pursues the question of what, if anything, unifies the natural sciences. The project studies the question from the perspective of metaphysics and philosophy of science—metaphysics of science—by way of employing case studies from biology, chemistry, and physics. What does it mean for one scientific phenomenon to be explained in terms of another? Under what conditions does scientific unification take place? In philosophy, these questions are often discussed under the rubric of reduction. Typically, in asking whether one phenomenon reduces to another, we aim to understand what the ultimate or fundamental basis of the first phenomenon is. In the mid to late 20th century, there was a hope to reduce all higher level phenomena to fundamental physics. Yet, it was soon discovered that there are phenomena that cannot be easily reduced, so unification may not be available via this route. The project’s ambitious goal is to produce a novel account of unification. This is made possible by recent breakthroughs in the methodology of metaphysics, an area sometimes called “metametaphysics”. The project’s objectives are (1) to establish the criteria for scientific unification; (2) to conduct case studies of actual scientific reductions at the biology-chemistry and the chemistry-physics interfaces; (3) to study the role of dependence relations weaker than reduction.