Sydney-Tilburg "The Future of Philosophy of Science" conference

The program for the joint SCFS-TiLPS conference, "The Future of Philosophy of Science," to be held on March 15 2010 at Tilburg is now available.

Sydney International Ideas lecture by Robert Olby

Professor Olby will be giving a Sydney International Ideas lecture on "Francis Crick: Who was the Man Who Discovered DNA?"

Tuesday 9 March 2010, 6.30pm

Seymour Theatre Centre

$20 Adult / $15 Concession

Click here for further information.

2010 AAP Conference

Early bird registration and call for papers are now open for the 2010 Australasian Association of Philosophy (AAP) Conference, to be held at UNSW, 4-9 July 2010.

Australasian Postgraduate Philosophy Conference 2010

Registrations for the AAPC are now open.

University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

7-9 April, 2010

"The Trans-Disciplinary Nature of Philosophy"

Lecture by Hans Pols: "Notes from Batavia, the European's Graveyard"

SCFS Researcher in History and Philosophy of Medicine, Hans Pols, will be giving a lecture on "Notes from Batavia, the European's Graveyard: the Debate on Acclimatisation in the Dutch East Indies, 1820-1860," this Saturday, 30 Jan, at 2pm, to the Australian and New Zealand Society of the History of Medicine.

Location:

Large Conference Room (4.2)
Level 4, Kerry Packer Education Centre
Royal Prince Alfred Hospital
Johns Hopkins Drive
Camperdown

Synopsis:

Soon after the conquest of Batavia in 1619, the city was nicknamed the “graveyard of Europeans” because of the unusually high mortality rate of soldiers and merchants there. Consequently, the Dutch East Indies company (VOC) maintained as few soldiers and officials there as possible. After the demise of the VOC in 1799, Batavia developed into a city of sorts—and the issue whether the Indies were suitable for European habitation came to dominate medical and civil discussions. Willem Bosch, the founder of the Batavia medical school in 1851 and chief of the Indies Civil Health Service, had calculated that European civilians who moved to the Indies sacrificed 60% of their life expectancy, while for soldiers it was a staggering 80%. A number of local physicians protested against these views by arguing that Europeans could maintain their health by following a set of sensible rules. They believed that special attention should be given to individuals who had arrived recently, because they would be unusually vulnerable to disease during the period of acclimatisation.

In this paper I will analyse the often acerbic discussions between the advocates of these different perspectives, which was conducted in the first volumes of the first magazine that appeared in the Indies. Participants in this debate were the aforementioned Willem Bosch; the German explorer Franz Junghuhn, who charted volcanos and produced the first map of Java; the irascible German physician Carl Waitz, who later advocated the water-cure as a panacea; Cornelis Swaving, a physician known for his impenetrable prose; and Pieter Bleeker, a physician who later became famous as an ichthyologist.

The Darwin Show

A link to an article in the London Review of Books on 2009, the year of Darwin's anniversary, "history's biggest birthday party."

(Via Charles Wolfe.)

New article

SCFS Honorary associate Zach Weber, who is about to take up a position at the University of Melbourne, has recently published an article: "Transfinite Numbers in Paraconsistent Set Theory," in Review of Symbolic Logic.