Kick-off Weekend

Introduction & Improvisation Theater

An Astronomical Conception of Society? Error, Variation and the Quantification of People

Seminar & Discussion

Prep Reading: Adolphe Quetelet (1842). Introductory “On Man”, p. 5-9, in: A Treatise on Man (1842).

pp. 51-52, 64-69 in: Theodore M. Porter (1985). The Mathematics of Society: Variation and Error in Quetelet’s Statistics. The British Journal for the History of Science. 1985;18(1), pp. 51-69. 

No Studienkolleg

Individuals and Aggregates in Thermodynamics

Talk & Discussion with Prof. Dr. Thomas Filk (Institute of Physics, University of Freiburg)

What is „the“ Probability? Collectives and Single-Case Probability

Seminar & Discussion

Prep Reading: Tba

What is Individual Risk?

Seminar & Discussion

Prep Reading: Philip Dawid (2017). On individual risk. Synthese 194, 3445–3474.

Duality and Co-constitution of Individuals and Aggregates

Talk & Discussion (via Zoom) with Prof. Dr. Ronald Breiger (School of Sociology, University of Arizona)

Prep Reading: Breiger, R. L. (1974). The Duality of Persons and Groups. Social Forces, 53(2), 181–190. 

Breiger, R. L., Lomi, A., & Pallotti, F. (2025). Culture as configurations of categories: Analyzing peer effects via dual-to-regression modeling. Poetics, 111, 102014. Especially Sections 1 and 4.

pp. 1-3, 9-22, and 27-29, 35-36, and 43-44 (emphasizing applications on prototypicality and polarization) and 46-48 (some qualifications to this approach) in: Quayle, Michael. (2025). Social identity networks: People holding attitudes are a collective social identity information system and bipartite networks are a useful way to represent them. European Review of Social Psychology, 36, 1–66.

Derr, Rabanus. (2026). Neosome and the Prophet or How Does Machine Learning See Me? Unpublished (pp. 1–2).

The epistemic value of examples: Between abstraction, generalisation and specification

Talk & Discussion with Jun. Prof. Dr. Carolin Antos-Kuby (Department of Philosophy, University of Konstanz)

No Studienkolleg

Weekend-Seminar at Monastery Heiligkreuztal

With Daniel Davies (Writer and Consultant, UK) and Prof. Dr. Julian Reiss (Head of Institute for Philosophy and Scientific Method, Johannes Kepler University Linz). Program here.

One for all and all for one? Individuals and populations in clinical trials

Talk & Discussion (via Zoom) with Prof. em. Dr. Stephen Senn (Statistics, Former Head of the Competence Center for Methodology and Statistics at the Luxembourg Institute of Health in Luxembourg)

Prep Reading: Tba

Brainstorming for Project Groups

The Future of Data Sharing

Talk & Discussion with Prof. Dr. Iris Pidgeot (Research Data Infrastructures and Data Science, Director of the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology (BIPS), University of Bremen)