Aristides Baltas
Fall 2005
National University of Athens, Greece
Physics as Self-Historiography in Actu:
Assuring the Identity Conditions for the Discipline

Aristides Baltas teaches at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. He holds a Master’s degree in electrical and mechanical engineering from NTUA as well as a Master’s and a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Paris, France. He has been a fellow at the Center back in 1984-85 and he has been trying ever since to establish close ties of collaboration between Pittsburgh and Greece. His main area of research is what he calls “old-fashioned philosophy of science” but he is very interested also in the interface between philosophy of science and epistemology as well as in the possible relations between the analytic and the continental traditions in philosophy. While at the Center, he aims at becoming clearer on what disciplines as diverse as physics and psychoanalysis can have in common, of whether and in what respect they may or may not be called scientific, and other very strange things like that. He considers living in Greece as a very complex affair that has to encompass, almost by necessity, all kinds of dimensions, from running one’s home to running the University and even the country. He tries to cope as well as he can with this complexity.