The Center "Leo Apostel"
                  ***********************
in collaboration with the Doctoral Programme of the VUB, invites 
everybody to the 19th of its interdisciplinary seminars in the series 
"Foundations". In this series CLEA invites scholars that are actively 
engaged in the research on the foundations of a particular discipline. 
Their lectures will always be directed to an interdisciplinary 
audience, and the discussions aim at confronting the foundations of 
the different disciplines.


      Endophysics, Or Causal Systems Which Are not Deterministic
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                       by George Kampis
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         (Department of History and Philosophy of Science
                  ELTE University, Budapest)


            Friday, 25 April 1997 at 5 p.m. in room L210
          Vrije Universiteit Brussel , Campus Oefenplein


About the lecture : 
-------------------
Endophysics is a novel approach to some old epistemological problems. 
The idea is to consider systems together with their observers; the 
method is that of the internalist stance, where the observers are 
placed inside the system they attempt to describe. The aim of the 
study is to contribute from a new, explicit methodological perspective 
to the identification of the constraints and structures of the 
knowledge process in which science is engaged with respect to the real 
world. For instance, the often postulated hypothetical identity 
between causality and determinism is among the concepts that do not 
hold any more in an endophysical setting. Distributed processes, slow 
interactions, the coincidence of independent events, and the causal 
use of relational properties are among the examples that mark a point 
of departure from the naive epistemology of causality and determinism.

The lecture offers a discussion of related writings of Popper, 
Rossler, Svozil, Breuer, and Kampis. An endophysics home page is 
maintained at http://hps.elte.hu/endo.html

About the speaker :
-------------------
George Kampis (born 1958) is founding chairman of the Department of 
History and Philosophy of Science at ELTE University in Budapest, 
Hungary. He holds a D.Sc. in philosophy and a Ph.D. in biology. He is 
the author of about 70 publications, among them the 550-page book 
Self-Modifying Systems in Biology and Cognitive science, which was 
published with Pergamon Press, Oxford, in 1991. His research interest 
include foundations of science, philosophy of evolution theory, and 
philosophy of mind/cognitive science. In the latter field he is 
currently leader of a PhD program at ELTE.

The presentations with questions will last about an hour. Afterwards, 
an hour or more is reserved for an in-depth, group discussion of the 
topic. 

More info at the CLEA office: phone 02-644 26 77 or via the Web-page: 
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/CLEA/