Recurring Events and Tasks #

We have a number of required events that keep our culture alive and our work moving forward productively. Primarily, this comprises three meetings that you will need to attend regularly. There are also some recurring tasks that are assigned to lab members, which will be described here.

CEFISES Seminars #

Every one of you is also a member (automatically, by being affiliated with me) of the Centre de philosophie des sciences et sociétés (CEFISES), and this comes with a few obligations of its own. Most importantly, you need to attend the weekly CEFISES seminar (currently on Friday afternoons). These meetings are a series of research or work-in-progress talks, from local and remote scholars (our group is often in charge of one, though the topics and responsibilities change every year), in areas ranging from logic and rationality to general philosophy of science to philosophy of a variety of special sciences (physics, biology, even cognitive science or medicine). They are a fantastic way to keep yourself sharp and benefit from the collective wisdom of the group.

Reading Group #

Our lab usually runs a reading group, which meets every two weeks and will read either a book that we choose together, or a series of journal articles around a central theme. We usually choose either topics that concern active projects in the lab, or we use this time to read more broadly in HPS.

Details are distributed on Zulip.

Lab Meeting #

The third, and perhaps most important, regular meeting is our monthly lab group meeting. Everyone who is in or around Belgium is expected to attend these, which are a kind of brainstorming and status update meeting. We’ll go around the table checking in on everybody’s research projects and status, and if people have issues or problems, we can work together to resolve them. It’s also a place to find shared and overlapping interests, or even unexpected collaboration opportunities.

Individual Meetings #

I do not currently have a practice of meeting periodically with every member of the lab, one-on-one. (I may yet develop one.) I rely on postdoctoral fellows to let me know when they’d like to chat, and on doctoral and master’s students to keep up a schedule of planned meetings and checkpoints that will propel them forward on their work. To that end, if you’re a postdoc and would like to meet, please ask. If you’re a master’s or doctoral student, you should already know when your next meeting will be, and what you will have to present there. If not, ask me!

Recurring Tasks #

(Currently there are no lab-specific recurring tasks. Watch this space.)

You may also be asked to perform some recurring tasks for CEFISES. These include:

• Importing and cataloging books in philosophy of science for the philosophy library.
• Updating events on the CEFISES website. This will require some quick training.
• Managing the CEFISES mailing lists (membership and moderation).