Levels of Explanation

Katie Robertson, Lecturer in Philosophy and Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Stirling, Alastair Wilson, Professor of Philosophy, University of Leeds

Katie Robertson is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling. After completing the BPhil in Philosophy in Oxford, she did her PhD in Cambridge on the philosophy of thermal physics. She was then a postdoc with the FraMEPhys project at the University of Birmingham, before being awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship exploring the relationship between thermodynamics and black holes. Her research has focused on questions about how different sciences, or levels, fit together. She has also worked on how non-fundamental theories such as thermodynamics and their quantities like entropy are related to more fundamental quantities in quantum mechanics.

Alastair Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of science (especially physics), and epistemology. Before joining Leeds, he spent 11 years at the University of Birmingham and 18 months as a postdoc at Monash University. His doctoral thesis was on the metaphysics of Everettian (many-worlds) quantum mechanics; this line of thought culminated in his book The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism (OUP, 2020). More recently he has focused on explanation and dependence in physics; he has also worked on grounding, laws of nature, chance, and the epistemology of self-locating belief.