8/7/2018: Joint Session Podcast - Symposium VI on Fundamental Powers, featuring Alexander Bird and Barbara Vetter

The 92nd Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association was held at the University of Oxford from 6 to 8 July 2018. The Joint Session is a three-day conference in philosophy that is held annually during the summer by the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association. It has taken place at nearly every major university across the United Kingdom and in Ireland. Since 1910, the Joint Session has grown to become the largest gathering of philosophers in the country, attracting prestigious UK and international speakers working in a broad range of philosophical areas. Inaugurated by the incoming President of the Mind Association, the Joint Session includes symposia, open and postgraduate sessions, and a range of satellite conferences.

This podcast is a recording of the sixth and final symposium at the Joint Session - "Fundamental Powers" - which featured Alexander Bird (KCL) and Barbara Vetter (Freie Universität Berlin).

Alexander Bird is Peter Sowerby Professor of Philosophy and Medicine at King’s College London, having previously been professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol. His published books are Philosophy of Science (1998), Thomas Kuhn (2000), and Nature’s Metaphysics (2007). His current project Knowing Science, Knowing Medicine aims to bring insights from general epistemology to bear on the philosophy of science and medicine.

Barbara Vetter is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin. She has previously taught at Humboldt-Universität Berlin and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen, and holds a BPhil and a DPhil from Oxford University. Barbara Vetter is the author of Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality (OUP 2015), co-editor of Dispositionen: Texte aus der zeitgenössischen Debatte (with Stephan Schmid, Suhrkamp 2014) and has published various articles on dispositions, modality, abilities, and related issues in metaphysics, semantics, and philosophy of science. Most of her work focusses on developing and defending a disposition-based approach to modality.