AJ Cotnoir has been selected for an ERC Consolidator grant of \u20ac1.7 million for a 5-year project studying the metaphysics of unity. The planned start date is January 2024.<\/p>\n
Instruments\u00a0of\u00a0Unity: The Many Ways\u00a0of\u00a0Being One<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n How do many things come together into single unified entity? What is it to be whole? How is a group united? How do we carve the world into its most natural units? We perceive unities everywhere: from ant colonies to cellular automata, from organisms to organisations. Yet we have little understanding about the general constraints by which they unified. The Instruments\u00a0of\u00a0Unity Project tackles this abstract question in a way that provides concrete applicable answers. The core hypothesis: unity is a complex pluralistic phenomenon, requiring a multifaceted theoretical approach. We identify unity relations across a variety\u00a0of\u00a0formal settings, using tools from part\/whole theory, theories\u00a0of\u00a0location, qualitative dimensions, modal logics, graph theory, weighted networks, topology, mathematical morphology, and more. In sum: there are many ways to be one.<\/p>\n The project goals include: pioneering novel formal paradigms for unity; developing a measurement-theoretic \u2018Guide for Naturalness\u2019; applying the framework to problems in metaphysics, including social and formal ontologies; and even addressing the \u2018meta\u2019-question\u00a0of whether\u00a0there\u2019s any unity to the different types\u00a0of\u00a0unity. Along the way, we will rehabilitate a more holistic \u2018carving\u2019-based metaphysics over against the dominant reductionistic \u2018building\u2019-based paradigm.<\/p>\n Using the proven method\u00a0of\u00a0expert-led collaborative research, and advised by a Board\u00a0of\u00a0researchers from Europe and the US, the project progresses over three phases in five years. The team (composed\u00a0of\u00a0the PI, three postdocs, and a fully-funded PhD student) will deliver: over twenty articles in top journals, a research monograph, an open-access PhD thesis, a small workshop, a major conference, an annotated open-source bibliography, a downloadable reference database, and shareable infographics to facilitate accessible knowledge exchange to non-experts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" AJ Cotnoir has been selected for an ERC Consolidator grant of \u20ac1.7 million for a 5-year project studying the metaphysics of unity. The planned start…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":10204,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-grants-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10203"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10205,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10203\/revisions\/10205"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.st-andrews.ac.uk\/arche\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}