Preamble In the period 2015-2019, I was hired as a mathematician by a biology department in order to perform a research that eventually would become my doctoral thesis. This text is adapted from the last chapter of that thesis, “Cycles and interactions: A mathematician among biologists” (full text available here ). The symbiosis between mathematics […]
In the past entry we introduced Plato’s model of the degrees of knowledge , ‘the simile of the line’, according to which the primordial difference between ‘science’ and ‘mere opinion’ is not so much about the ‘methods’ employed to reach one or the other (as will be assumed in modern times), but about the nature […]
When did something like us first appear on the planet? It turns out there’s remarkably little agreement on this question. Fossils and DNA suggest people looking like us, anatomically modern Homo sapiens, evolved around 300,000 years ago. Surprisingly, archaeology – tools, artefacts, cave art – suggest that complex technology and cultures, “behavioural modernity”, evolved more […]
If the preceding post of this series turned out being a little bit disappointing because of the clumsiness and sophistry of the anonymous author of the leaflet we know as On the (medical) science (the first preserved complete work which discusses the nature of a ‘science’, or, in this case, téchnē ), we reach today […]
I would like to think that the first work devoted to something that we might call ‘the problem of scientific method’ was written by Democritus (around 460-370 BC), the author the philosophical systems of Plato and Aristotle were constructed against , and whose ideas were so revolutionary that it seems that nobody in the last […]
Since this will be a series of entries about something as weird as the ‘prehistory’ of philosophy of science, I think readers deserve a little explanation about what I do exactly mean by that. ‘Philosophy of science’, to begin with, is a topic that took its current status as an autonomous academic field (I mean […]
Participatory budgeting seeks to involve some form of public deliberation in the budget allocation of a city or town. The first process took place in Porto Alegre (Brazil) in the late eighties. Since then the practice spread through the world, with more than 7,000 processes around the world in 2018. The logic underpinning participatory budgeting […]
As we saw in the previous entry, the fundamental role of our beliefs consists in telling us what consequences will most probably our actions have, given the current circumstances . Any influence from any factor that leads to systematic biases in those predictions will be detrimental for the very same reason why we want to […]
Ideology is a concept that has always made me feel a bit perplexed. I have thought a lot about this question in the last weeks, when comparing the reactions and suggestions of different people about the shocking events the world is now involved into. Why do people have so much disparate ideas about the facts […]
When we perform Google searches, most of us assume that we all see the same results and that the first ones to appear are the most relevant from links to other pages. However, this is not the case. Since 2009, Google’s algorithm has provided results that are better for you. This personalization of pre-selected and […]