There has recently been an explosion of interest in various "structural" notions in metaphysics, including dependence, ground, naturalness, fundamentality, essence, emergence, and others.

One potential area of application of these notions is in the philosophy of physics. To take just one example, much recent work in the foundations of quantum mechanics has focused on how a world of three-dimensional objects might "emerge" or "derive" from a "fundamental ontology" that looks very different. If the words in scare-quotes are taken at face value, the issue cannot be stated without these notions of metaphysical structure.

Many of these notions were commonplace in the philosophy of previous eras but were largely ignored during the twentieth century. So there is some interest amongst contemporary metaphysicians in mining the historical tradition for insights.

The aim of these three workshops is to explore these notions of metaphysical structure, with an eye to both their historical roots and their particular applications in the philosophy of physics.

Workshop I: Contemporary Work

The first workshop will be held in Princeton on the weekend of April 6-7 2013. The speakers are:

• Ralf Bader (Oxford)
• Mark Johnston (Princeton)
• Kathrin Koslicki (UC Boulder)
• Daniel Nolan (ANU)
• Gideon Rosen (Princeton)
• Jessica Wilson (Toronto)

The workshop is free and open to those who registered by March 29 2013.

For the full schedule click here.

For an annotated campus map of the workshop locations click here.

Workshop II: Metaphysical structure in the Medieval and Early Modern period

Details coming soon...

Workshop III: Applications in the philosophy of physics

Details coming soon...