Douglas Kutach

Fall Term 2013
New Foundations for Physical Geometry

Douglas Kutach is the founder of Empirical Fundamentalism, a philosophical program that exploits a distinctive conception of fundamentality and the method of empirical analysis in order to pronounce on a range of traditional philosophical problems. His recent book (August 2013) Causation and Its Basis in Fundamental Physics applies this program to causation. His articles within this program also address modality, natural kinds, reductive identities, the passage of time, and the epistemic "arrow of time."

While at the Center, Doug will be building on Tim Maudlin's New Foundations for Physical Geometry, which establishes new axioms and definitions for topology. Doug will attempt to use the new mathematical machinery to manufacture models of hidden dimensions, entanglement, and non-locality. This part of a broader effort, called "Project Line", to expand Maudlin's recent work and thereby explore the geometry of fundamental reality and how it relates to space and time.

2014

I published a book entitled "Causation" which I wrote while at the Center.
http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745659954

2015

An article I wrote in 2013 while at the Center, "Ontology: An Empirical Fundamentalist Approach," was accepted for publication last year and should be appearing any day now in Metaphysics in Contemporary Physics. This article demonstrates for the nth time how Empirical Fundamentalism succeeds at identifying the core issue that other philosophical methodologies fail to recognize.