Heidelberg 2022 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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AGPhil: Arbeitsgruppe Philosophie der Physik

AGPhil 1: Symmetry and Geometry

AGPhil 1.1: Vortrag

Montag, 21. März 2022, 11:00–11:30, AGPhil-H14

A Proposal for a Metaphysics of Self-Subsisting Structures — •Antonio Vassallo¹ and Pedro Naranjo^1,2 — ¹Faculty of Administration and Social Sciences, Warsaw University of Technology, Plac Politechniki 1, 00-661 Warsaw, Poland — ²Faculty of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, Krakowskie Przedmieście 3, 00-047 Warsaw, Poland

We present a new metaphysical framework for physics that is conceptually clear, ontologically parsimonious, and empirically adequate. This framework relies on the notion of self-subsisting structure, that is, a set of fundamental physical elements whose individuation and behavior are described in purely relational terms, without any need for a background spacetime. Although the specification of the fundamental elements of the ontology depends on the particular physical domain considered --and is thus susceptible to scientific progress--, the structural features of the framework are preserved through theory change. The kinematics and dynamics of these self-subsisting structures are technically implemented using the theoretical framework of Pure Shape Dynamics, which provides a completely relational physical description of a system in terms of the intrinsic geometry of a suitably defined Riemannian space, called shape space.