One of the most recurrent (and most disputed) headers during the last half century in the debates about whether cosmology points to some ‘fundamental purpose’ of the universe is (I didn’t need to say it) the (ill-)famous anthropic principle . Many versions of it have been formulated since it was so named in the 70’s […]
Since more than a century ago, every generation has a moment in which religious believers experience an agonising urge to persuade themselves that the ‘truths’ of their religion are compatible with the sophisticate description of the universe that contemporary science is unfolding. Every now and then this leads to the landfall of some best-selling books […]
In their recent paper “Telling Gender: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Gender Ascriptions” , the philosophers Quill Kukla and Mark Lance (well known in the philosophy of language as authors of the 2009 essential book Yo! And Lo! The Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons ) embark on a journey into the heart of […]
One possible and relatively trivial explanation of the absence of the category of “social problem” in the list of topics that have deserved some interest in the social ontology literature, is that perhaps social problems are intuitively seen as being too far from the ‘ground’ or the ‘bottom’ of social reality. According to this hypothesis […]
The absence of ‘social problems’ as a distinct ontological category in the extensive literature on social ontology is a notable oversight. This one and the following entry aim to shed light on this absence and explore the interconnectedness of social problems with both the positive and normative aspects of social reality and thought. In doing […]
democracy There is a growing movement to democratize science, involving the public, often lacking traditional scientific credentials, in the research process. This inclusivity manifests in various forms, particularly involving the public in making value judgments that play a vital role in the scientific decision-making process. As demonstrated by philosophers and scholars of science, scientific inquiry […]
Public events In our series about theory and observation (as well as in the philosophical literature dealing with this question), the truth is that most of what we have said is more about theory than about observation (perhaps with the only exception of our third entry). Philosophers of science have devoted a lot of effort […]
nets One of the most interesting aspects of Joseph Sneed’s structuralist view of science is the one I mentioned in passing in my last entry: the fact that a scientific theory must not be understood as a mere combination or conjunction of different propositions (its “axioms”, plus the indefinite number of assertions they make about […]
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 […]