Kadish Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory: Peter Galison, Harvard University

Governing Epistemology: Knowledge in Large-Scale Experiments

Peter Galison is the Joseph Pellegrino University Professor at Harvard University. He wrote two dissertations, one in the history of science and one in theoretical (electroweak) particle physics. In 1997, Galison was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; he won a Pfizer Award for Image and Logic as the best book in 1998 in the History of Science; in 1999, he received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize, and, in 2018, the Abraham Pais Award in the History of Physics. More recently, as a member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, he shared in the 2020 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for the capture of the first image of a black hole, and he co-led the focus group on dynamic imaging for the black hole Sgr A* at the center of the Milky Way. During the making of the first black hole image, he produced and directed the feature documentary Black Holes |The Edge of All We Know (Netflix). In the next generation Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration, Galison leads the History, Philosophy, and Culture working group. Finally, as Science Team Lead for the Black Hole Explorer (BHEX), he is deeply involved with structuring work on photon rings, Active Galactic Nuclei, Jets and black hole demographics. Galison is the Director and co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative, an interdisciplinary center for the study of these most extreme objects.

About the Workshop:

A workshop for presenting and discussing work in progress in moral, political, and legal theory. The central aim is to provide an opportunity for students to engage with philosophers, political theorists, and legal scholars working on normative questions. Another aim is to bring together people from different disciplines who have strong normative interests or who speak to issues of potential interest to philosophers and political theorists.  

The theme for the Fall 2024 workshop is “Disagreement.”

This semester the workshop is co-taught by Josh Cohen and Véronique Munoz-Dardé.