According to the traditional myth, mentioned in passing in the first entry of this series, contemporary philosophy of science would have started in the post-WWI Vienna, when a group of young philosophers and scientists, under the heading of Moritz Schlick, attempted to show how scientific knowledge could be unambiguously derived from observational data (or at […]
Scientists have created the world’s first monkey embryos containing human cells in an attempt to investigate how the two types of cell develop alongside each other. The embryos, which were derived from a macaque and then injected with human stem cells in the lab, were allowed to grow for 20 days before being destroyed. We […]
A middle-aged white man raises his sword to the skies and roars to the gods. The results of his genetic ancestry test have just arrived in his suburban mailbox. His eyes fill with tears as he learns that he is “0.012% Viking”. These are the scenes from a video advertisement for the TV-series Vikings. This […]
Our species, Homo sapiens, rose in Africa some 300,000 years ago. The objects that early humans made and used, known as the Middle Stone Age material culture, are found throughout much of Africa and include a vast range of innovations. Among them are bow and arrow technology, specialised tool forms, the long-distance transport of objects […]
If you ask people to list the most intelligent animals, they’ll name a few usual suspects. Chimpanzees, dolphins and elephants are often mentioned, as are crows, dogs and occasionally pigs. Horses don’t usually get a look in. So it might come as a surprise that horses possess an unusual skill, widely considered an indicator of […]
One fascinating, as well as disconcerting fact about the evolution of Greek thought about science is that, almost immediately after the end of the ‘Classical’ period of philosophy, and particularly after Aristotle’s founding work on both philosophy and science, these two activities seemed to follow two radically separate courses. Actually, Greek science achieved its peak […]
Let me make a short interruption in our series about the prehistory of philosophy of science, to discuss a completely different point. I am writing this now, just because in the last days I think I have been able to clearly formulate a specific perplexity that for many years I had felt about what we […]
According to Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose History of the Kings of Britain was written in 1136, the mysterious monoliths at Stonehenge were first spirited there by the wizard Merlin, whose army stole them from a mythical Irish stone circle called the Giants’ Dance. Centuries before the development of rudimentary geology, Geoffrey’s exotic theory – that […]
Around 5,000 years ago (c. 3100 BC), what we know today as Ancient Egypt came into existence. A thousand years either side, and other such “primary states” had also arisen across the world, in Mesopotamia, North China, the Indus Valley and other locations. But why did human social dynamics change so dramatically in such a […]
Besides being one of the main pioneers of scientific thought, Aristotle is the author of the work that can unquestionably be considered the first book explicitly and exclusively devoted to what we can call ‘philosophy of science’ . This small book is known by the rather insipid name of Posterior Analytics ( Ἀναλυτικὰ ὑστέρων ) […]