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| 3
October
(Wednesday) 5:00
PM Room 226 |
Ufuk
Tura
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Institute
of Philosophy, Eötvös
University Budapest
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Contemporary
theories of dream
function: a
transdisciplinary
synthesis
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From the beginning of
20th century, mainly after Freud’s
“Interpretation of Dreams”, study
of dreams and dreaming have been
in the scope of various branches
of sciences and disciplines such
as evolutionary biology, ethology,
psychology, psychiatry, neurology,
anthropology, neuroscience,
cognitive science, psychoanalysis
and philosophy. While
technological advancements made it
possible to investigate the
neurobiological basis of dreams
during sleep, phenomenon of
dreaming is by nature elusive to
any means of direct study. It can
also be argued that the
methodology of above branches on
occasion produce discordant, if
not directly conflictual bodies of
knowledge when it comes to the
phenomenon of dreaming. As such,
while there are many answers to
the question “Why do we dream?”
within diverse frameworks, no
consensus is reached within the
scientific community.
This presentation will begin with
a brief review of literature on
dream research to identify what
each dream theory must explain
alongside proposed theories of
dream function. It will, in part,
revolve around the
psychoanalytical and
neuroscientific theories of dreams
and how the approaches of each
branch produce seemingly
irreconcilable bodies of knowledge
as a result of their objective and
subjective explanatory styles. It
will be argued that this results
in an improbability of
intertheoric reduction as the
theoretical frameworks differ
significantly. The aim of this
presentation is to critically
evaluate contemporary theories on
the function of dreaming to reach
a new theoretical framework by
offering certain conceptual
changes to make way for a unified
theory of dream function that has
high explanatory power. The main
tenet of this framework is that
dreams function to consolidate
representational structures rather
than memories. Representations can
be broadly defined as internal
models of multimodally constructed
schemas involving cognitive, motor
and affective associations
regarding an external object. It
will be argued that one added
benefit of this approach is that
it reconciles clinical dreamwork
(albeit with an upside-down
psychoanalytical metapsychology)
and the general idea that dreams
are meaningful by nature, with
neuroscientific research and
theories of dreaming.
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17
October
(Wednesday) 5:00
PM Room 226
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| Péter
Neuman |
Department of
Philosophy and History of
Science
Budapest
University of Technology
and Economics
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Problems,
puzzles and all that stuff
- strategy shifts in
modern physics
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Larry Laudan in his Progress and
its problems (1977) put special
emphasis on the problem-solving
aspect of the scientific
enterprise. He adopts the “view
of scientific activity which
perceives
science as being – above all
else – a problem-solving
activity”
and the approach is shared, to
some extent, by a long series of
authors - not only philosophers of
science, but the view is also
proposed or tacitly accepted by
the problem-solvers, themselves,
i.e.
scientists (e.g. Poincaré,
Einstein, Feynman etc.). However,
if we
really try to understand what
these and other authors mean by
problems (to be
solved), we find a plethora of
ambiguities and ill-defined
qualities around the concept of
scientific problems and also their
solutions. In spite of the large
number of potential questions,
this presentation intentionally
has a
narrow scope, there are three
goals I would like to achieve,
namely:
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By showing how the definition,
or rather, the understanding
of problem and problem solving
may vary in different authors’
works, I would like to cast
doubt on the problem-solving
model itself.
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With referring to some
selected examples taken from
20th and 21st
century physics, I will
attempt to convince the
audience, that it is possible
to benefit from construing the
nature of scientific problems,
in other words, the
ambiguities mentioned above
really show up in the
scientific practice.
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Finally, I will propose a new
understanding of the
problem-solving model, to some
extent, embedded in a
framework borrowed from Rorty.
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