Science / Philosophy & Social Aspects

Total 34 results found.

The Dynamics of Science

The Dynamics of Science

Computational Frontiers in History and Philosophy of Science
Millions of scientific articles are published each year, making it difficult to stay abreast of advances within even the smallest subdisciplines. Traditional approaches to the study of science, such as the history and philosophy of science, involve closely reading a relatively small set of journal articles. And yet many questions ...
Vaccine Hesitancy

Vaccine Hesitancy

Public Trust, Expertise, and the War on Science
Winner, 2022 PSA Women’s Caucus Prize in Feminist Philosophy of Science Award The public has voiced concern over the adverse effects of vaccines from the moment Dr. Edward Jenner introduced the first smallpox vaccine in 1796. The controversy over childhood immunization intensified in 1998, when Dr. Andrew Wakefield linked the MMR vaccine ...
Creativity from the Periphery

Creativity from the Periphery

Trading Zones of Scientific Exchange in Colonial India
Science is usually knownbyits most successful figures and resource-rich institutions. In stark contrast, Creativity from the Peripherydraws our attention to unknown figures in science—those who remain marginalized, even neglected, within its practices. Researchers in early twentieth-century colonial India, for example, have made significant contributions to the stock of scientific ...
Science and Moral Imagination

Science and Moral Imagination

A New Ideal for Values in Science
The idea that science is or should be value-free, and that values are or should be formed independently of science, has been under fire by philosophers of science for decades. Science and Moral Imagination directly challenges the idea that science and values cannot and should not influence each other. Matthew ...
From Commodification to the Common Good

From Commodification to the Common Good

Reconstructing Science, Technology, and Society
The commodification of science—often identified with commercialization, or the selling of expertise and research results and the “capitalization of knowledge” in academia and beyond—has been investigated as a threat to the autonomy of science and academic culture and criticized for undermining the social responsibility of modern science. In ...
Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge

Liberty and the Pursuit of Knowledge

Charles Renouvier's Political Philosophy of Science
French philosopher Charles Renouvier played an influential role in reviving philosophy in France after it was proscribed during the Second Empire. Drawn to the ideals of the French Revolution, Renouvier came to recognize that the free will and civil liberties he supported were essential to the pursuit of science, contrary ...
Above the Gene, Beyond Biology

Above the Gene, Beyond Biology

Toward a Philosophy of Epigenetics
Epigenetics is currently one of the fastest-growing fields in the sciences. Epigenetic information not only controls DNA expression but links genetic factors with the environmental experiences that influence the traits and characteristics of an individual. What we eat, where we work, and how we live affects not only the activity ...
Love, Order, and Progress

Love, Order, and Progress

The Science, Philosophy, and Politics of Auguste Comte
Auguste Comte’s doctrine of positivism was both a philosophy of science and a political philosophy designed to organize a new, secular, stable society based on positive or scientific, ideas, rather than the theological dogmas and metaphysical speculations associated with the ancien regime. This volume offers the most comprehensive English-language ...
Nature From Within

Nature From Within

Gustav Theodor Fechner And His Psychophysical Worldview
Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) was a German physicist, psychologist, and philosopher, best known to historians of science as the founder of psychophysics, the experimental study of the relation between mental and physical processes. Michael Heidelberger’s exhaustive exploration of Fechner’s writings, in relation to current issues in the field, ...
The Foundations of Scientific Inference

The Foundations of Scientific Inference

50th Anniversary Edition
After its publication in 1967, The Foundations of Scientific Inference taught a generation of students and researchers about the problem of induction, the interpretation of probability, and confirmation theory. Fifty years later, Wesley C. Salmon’s book remains one of the clearest introductions to these fundamental problems in the philosophy of ...
Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy and Medicine

Human and Animal Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy and Medicine

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, new anatomical investigations of the brain and the nervous system, together with a renewed interest in comparative anatomy, allowed doctors and philosophers to ground their theories on sense perception, the emergence of human intelligence, and the soul/body relationship in modern science. They ...
Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered

Scientific Pluralism Reconsidered

A New Approach to the (Dis)Unity of Science
Can we expect our scientific theories to make up a unified structure, or do they form a kind of “patchwork” whose pieces remain independent from each other? Does the proliferation of sometimes-incompatible representations of the same phenomenon compromise the ability of science to deliver reliable knowledge? Is there a single ...
What Makes a Good Experiment?

What Makes a Good Experiment?

Reasons and Roles in Science
What makes a good experiment? Although experimental evidence plays an essential role in science, as Franklin argues, there is no algorithm or simple set of criteria for ranking or evaluating good experiments, and therefore no definitive answer to the question. Experiments can, in fact, be good in any number of ...
Science as It Could Have Been

Science as It Could Have Been

Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem
Could all or part of our taken-as-established scientific conclusions, theories, experimental data, ontological commitments, and so forth have been significantly different? Science as It Could Have Been focuses on a crucial issue that contemporary science studies have often neglected: the issue of contingency within science. It considers a number of ...
The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice

The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice

Science and Values Revisited
In The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice, philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science offer a multidisciplinary view of the complex interrelationships of values in science and society in both contemporary and historic contexts. They analyze the impact of commercialization and politicization on epistemic aspirations, and, conversely, ...

Total 34 results found.