Chair Casterman & Hamers: History and Philosophy of Sciences

Introduction

In 2013 scientists Cécile Casterman and Raymond Hamers create the Chair History and Philosopy of Sciences. This academic chair consists of a lecture series of internationally renowned speakers, programmed by Crosstalks. The kick-off of the chair took place in October 2013 with VUB honorary doctor Prof. Londa Schiebinger (Stanford University).

Guest speakers in recent years were among others: Anne Fagot-Largeault (Collège de France), Dava Sobel (novelist), Philipp Blom (historian, novelist), Peter Gallison (Harvard University), Adam Lowe (Factum Arte) en Simon Schaffer (Cambridge University), John Thackara (Doors of Perception), Paul Halstead (The University of Sheffield), Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia University) and Maneesha Deckha (University of Victoria).

Cécile Casterman and Raymond Hamers performed research into antibodies in the eighties, resulting in their discovery of a new class of antibodies in camelids: the alpaca antibody. Their research lead to the spin-off company Ablynx, one of Belgium's success stories. Cécile Casterman passed away in 2020.

Goals

The Chair History and Philosophy of Sciences answers the need of a university wide and interdisciplinary program in the History and Philosophy of Sciences. The desire and commitment of Cécile Casterman and Raymond Hamers to enable and facilitate intergenerational discussions in science, are the engine of this chair.

Raymond Hamers about the Chair History and Philosophy of Sciences:

"There is a lack in our academic curriculum about history and philosophy of sciences. Yet, this is a crucial bridge for transdisciplinary learning and mutual understanding. We wanted to do something about this since we need that historical framework when talking about science. Take the atomic theory for instance, which already existed as a conceptual concept with the Greeks, with the atom as the smallest particle of a matter. History is not about a chronological overview of events, but rather about the evolution of scientific ideas.”

The public lectures focus on the international relationship between science, art and technology, on the one hand, and on local cooperation with Brussels organisations and institutes, on the other.

Mireille Hildebrandt

Chair holder 2021-2023: Mireille Hildebrandt

Mireille Hildebrandt is a tenured Research Professor on 'Interfacing Law and Technology' at Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB). She is co-Director of the research group on Law Science Technology and Society studies (LSTS) at the Faculty of Law and Criminology. She also holds the part-time Chair of Smart Environments, Data Protection and the Rule of Law at the Science Faculty, at the Institute for Computing and Information Sciences (iCIS) at Radboud University Nijmegen. This demonstrates her keen interest in crossing disciplinary borders, e.g. resulting in a text book on ‘Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk’, recently published in open access with Oxford University Press.

Her research interests concern the implications of automated decisions, machine learning and mindless artificial agency for law and the rule of law in constitutional democracies. She has published 5 scientific monographs, 23 edited volumes or special issues, and over 100 chapters and articles in scientific journals and volumes.

In 2018 she has been awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the fundamental research project ‘Counting as a Human Being in the Computational Law’ (CoHuBiCoL), on the cusp of law and computer science. In that context she founded the international peer review open access Journal of Cross-Disciplinary Research in Computational Law, with Laurence Diver.

Hildebrandt also has a keen interest in cross border interaction between art and science, notably where art enables to disrupt and uproot stalemate scientific practice, thus inspiring lateral ways of looking at one’s own discipline.