As we mentioned in the second entry of this series, the distinction between ‘the observable’ and ‘the theoretical’ focused on the first of these two concepts, so that the notion of ‘theoretical’ was implicitly understood as meaning simply ‘non-observable’. This distinction was submitted to powerful criticisms since the end of the fifties, when it was […]
Though the persistent reference to “Athens and Jerusalem” captures the cliché that the modern Western way of thinking and of being comes basically from two main roots (Greek philosophy and Hebrew monotheism), the fact is that probably we owe much more to the Romans, the true creators of the civilization from which our kind of […]
In our trip through the philosophical discussion about the nature of observation in science, I propose to take a different route from the most classical ones, and probably a surprising one for most of you. Akerlof’s classic paper ‘The Market for Lemons’, one of the founding works of the Economics of Information, presented an idealised […]
In recent years, supporters of the theory of degrowth have found an ally in an imaginary “new economic theory” that has become very popular: the so-called Doughnut Economics , for the title of a book by the British economist Kate Raworth, who proposed the model in a 2012 article. Raworth is not really a degrowther […]
According to theory of degrowth , the only way to save the planet and humanity from catastrophic collapse due to depletion of natural resources would be to radically limit, and even reduce, global production levels and, since there is still a large part of the population living in intolerable levels of poverty, and the only […]
This column seems to be gaining a new subcategory, which we could name ‘Wokism as the latest historians’ epidemic’ or something like that. I have already written a couple of reviews of recent books that tried to awaken us from our outdated, Eurocentric, rationalistic and neoliberal assumptions about the essence of history (Graeber’s and Wengrow’s […]
As we saw in the first entry of this series, traditionally the idea of theoreticity had been understood as a kind of ‘negative’ concept, for theoretical entities or properties were thought about as those that cannot be observed; hence, ‘theoretical’ was more or less a synonym of ‘ un -observable’. Things started to change around […]
It is not risky at all to assert that fundamental physics has not been in good shape in the last forty years or so, not because of lack of work, talent, conjectures and resources, but because few really big advances (as big as, say, the discovery of thermodynamics, of relativity, of quantum field theory, or […]
Contemporary philosophy of science was, at least during its first decades (those of the glorious Vienna Circle), a kingdom of radically empiricist and positivist intellectuals: scientific knowledge had to be obtained and tested mainly through experiment, and everything that could not be robustly grounded on experimental observations was just dangerous speculation and metaphysics. The connections […]
For the intellectual history of our century, one of the most important books published in 2021 will probably be David Graeber’s and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity , a monumental description of the evolution of the first human societies and of our understanding thereof. The book is conceived as […]