The traditional researcher-driven environment of medical knowledge production is losing its dominance with the expansion of, for instance, community-based participatory or participant-led medical research. Over the past few decades, sociologists of science have debated a shift in the production of knowledge from traditional discipline-based to more socially embedded and transdisciplinary frameworks. Recently, scholars have tried to show the relevance of Mode 2 knowledge production to medical research. However, the existing literature lacks detailed clarifications on how a model of (...) Mode 2 knowledge production can be constructed in the context of medical research. This paper calls for such further clarifications. As a heuristic means, the advocacy for a controversial experimental stem cell therapy is examined. It is discussed that the example cannot be considered a step towards Mode 2 medical knowledge production. Nonetheless, the example brings to the fore some complexities of medical knowledge production that need to be further examined including: the shifting landscape of defining and addressing vulnerability of research participants, the emerging overlap between research and practice, and public health implications of revising the standard notions of quality control and accountability. (shrink)

This paper investigates the impact of changing science policy doctrines on the development of an academic field, working life research. Working life research is an interdisciplinary field of study in which researchers and stakeholders collaborated to produce relevant knowledge. The development of the field, we argue, was both facilitated and justified by the, at the time dominant, science policy orthodoxy in Sweden, sector research. Sector research science policy doctrine favoured stakeholder-driven research agendas in the fields relevant to (...) the sector. This approach to agenda setting was highly contested by Swedish universities and left scientists vulnerable to the fallout from any conflicts arising among the stakeholder groupings that were part of the governance arrangement. Our case shows that working life research was in part a victim of the struggle between science and policy over who sets the agenda for science in Sweden. In this struggle, each side chose to use ‘scientific quality’ as a proxy for furth ing its respective interests and visions for how science should be governed. The paper argues that this case is of interest to the continued elaboration of the Mode 2 thesis and the debate about ‘relevant science’. We find that the close association with stakeholders and the concomitant dependence it created left working life research unable to defend itself against its critics and that this state of affairs was particularly problematic for social science research on working life. (shrink)

The author's initial assumption is that in the eyes of much of the younger generation of artists, curators, art critics, and even philosophers, aesthetics has lost its potential to say essential or meaningful truths about contemporary art. Since their beginnings in the eighteenth century, both art and aesthetics have drawn their import from the division between the aesthetic and the practical. The work of Kant generated a tradition which was decisive for our understanding of aesthetics. For this tradition the central (...) issue was the autonomy of art (or, later, the autonomy of culture). It has now become clear that both art and culture have gradually lost their autonomy, and that consequently aesthetics as a discipline lost its former significance. It is, however, important to realise that if society has changed, then not only art and aesthetics, but also other fields and disciplines have had to respond to this change. Due to the fact that for the most part the co-evolution of society and science is responsible for the change that we are witnessing, the author focuses on changes in the contemporary production of knowledge in order to understand this change, in the hope that it could be enlightening to aesthetics as well. He proceeds to the close reading of the theory of scientific knowledge production developed by Michael Gibbons et al, termed Mode-2. In the final part of the article the relation between knowledge production and art/culture is established, showing that aesthetics needs transgress its disciplinary borders in order to survive. (shrink)

Growing expectation that research addresses problems in the context of application has spurred theorization about a ‘‘new mode’’ of production, Mode 2, which contrasts with Mode 1 or discipline-based research production in terms of animating questions, organization, and evaluation criteria. This article examines how the proposed Mode 2 form of research production and the practical role of the intellectual that it promotes align with the career trajectories and identities of academics who simultaneously engage in Mode (...) 1 work. It focuses on a setting that is particularly susceptible to global shifts in knowledge production: a developing country and longtime object of external intervention, Malawi. Numerous contradictions are found between Mode 1 and 2 production as well as impediments to the conversion of products generated in Mode 2 into scholarly contributions to Mode 1 development. The evidence draws from 42 interviews conducted with academics and independent researchers in Malawi during 2003 and 2004 as well as historical documents. (shrink)

The New York Times receives more citations from academic journals than the American Sociological Review, Research Policy, or the Harvard Law Review. This article explores the reasons why scholars cite the NYT so much. Reasons include studying the newspaper itself or New York City, establishing public interest in a topic by referencing press coverage, introducing specificity, and treating the NYT very much like an academic journal. The phenomenon seems to reflect a mode 2 type of scholarship produced in the (...) context of application, organizationally diverse, socially accountable, and aiming to be socially useful as well as high quality as assessed by peers. (shrink)

Advancements in computing, instrumentation, robotics, digital imaging, and simulation modeling have changed science into a technology-driven institution. Government, industry, and society increasingly exert their influence over science, raising questions of values and objectivity. These and other profound changes have led many to speculate that we are in the midst of an epochal break in scientific history. -/- This edited volume presents an in-depth examination of these issues from philosophical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives. It offers arguments both for (...) and against the epochal break thesis in light of historical antecedents. Contributors discuss topics such as: science as a continuing epistemological enterprise; the decline of the individual scientist and the rise of communities; the intertwining of scientific and technological needs; links to prior practices and ways of thinking; the alleged divide between mode-1 and mode-2 research methods; the commodification of university science; and the shift from the scientific to a technological enterprise. Additionally, they examine the epochal break thesis using specific examples, including the transition from laboratory to real world experiments; the increased reliance on computer imaging; how analog and digital technologies condition behaviors that shape the object and beholder; the cultural significance of humanoid robots; the erosion of scientific quality in experimentation; and the effect of computers on prediction at the expense of explanation. -/- Whether these events represent a historic break in scientific theory, practice, and methodology is disputed. What they do offer is an important occasion for philosophical analysis of the epistemic, institutional and moral questions affecting current and future scientific pursuits. (shrink)

This paper takes up some threads of Deleuze’s and Ruyer’s engagement with biology. I begin by laying out the main features of Deleuze’s scheme of morphogenesis, through the lens of his references to embryology. I take Deleuze’s interest in embryology to be guided by the effort to define bodies solely by form-generating factors which are immanent to them. His concept of virtuality, which indicates the creative component of reality, the open field of connections defining a body’s capacities for transformation and (...) interaction, plays a key role in this regard. I then consider two implications: (1) The insistence on morphogenesis displaces the question of life from given biological entities, which preserve themselves and act through regulated cycles, to the myriad of activities that compose and modify them; (2) It also rearticulates the distinction between the living and the nonliving, in that it separates the question of life from that of its emergence from a given material arrangement. In the second part I examine these points with greater reference to Ruyer. After introducing Ruyer’s concepts of functioning and formation, I focus on his account of the continuity between biological and physicochemical forms, following some of his work on the microbiology and ethology of the time. The real difference is not between the living and the nonliving, but between two modes of bonding and composition variously operating on all scales: morphogenetic and statistical. I conclude by assessing the significance of this claim with respect to the traditional distinction between vitalism and mechanism. (shrink)

If we cannot define science using only analysis or description, then we must rely on imagination to provide us with suitable objects of philosophical inquiry. This process ties our intellectual findings to the particular ways in which we philosophers think about scientific practice and carve out a cognitive space between real world practice and conceptual abstraction. As an example, I consider Heather Douglas’s work on the responsibilities of scientists and document her implicit ideal of science, defined primarily as (...) an epistemic practice. I then contrast her idealization of science with an alternative: “technoscience,” a heuristic concept used to describe nanotechnology, synthetic biology, and similar “Mode 2” forms of research. This comparison reveals that one’s preferred imaginary of science, even when inspired by real practices, has significant implications for the distribution of responsibility. Douglas’s account attributes moral obligations to scientists, while the imaginaries associated with “technoscience” and “Mode 2 science” spread responsibility across the network of practice. This dynamic between mind and social order, I argue, demands an ethics of imagination in which philosophers of science hold themselves accountable for their imaginaries. Extending analogous challenges from feminist philosophy and Mills’s. “Ideal Theory’ as Ideology,” I conclude that we ought to reflect on the idiosyncrasy of the philosophical imagination and consider how our idealizations of science, if widely held, would affect our communities and broader society. (shrink)

In this article, we develop a new approach to integrating philosophical phenomenology with qualitative research. The approach uses phenomenology’s concepts, namely existentials, rather than methods such as the epoché or reductions. We here introduce the approach to both philosophers and qualitative researchers, as we believe that these studies are best conducted through interdisciplinary collaboration. In section 1, we review the debate over phenomenology’s role in qualitative research and argue that qualitative theorists have not taken full advantage of what philosophical phenomenology (...) has to offer, thus motivating the need for new approaches. In section 2, we introduce our alternative approach, which we call Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research (PGQR). Drawing parallels with phenomenology’s applications in the cognitive sciences, we explain how phenomenological grounding can be used to conceptually front-load a qualitative study, establishing an explicit focus on one or more structures of human existence, or of our being in the world. In section 3, we illustrate this approach with an example of a qualitative study carried out by one of the authors: a study of the existential impact of early parental bereavement. In section 4, we clarify the kind of knowledge that phenomenologically grounded studies generate and how it may be integrated with existing approaches. (shrink)

Many scientific disciplines rely on the construction and use of models: biomedical sciences are no exception. This PhD thesis addresses several aspects of the practice of scientific modeling. First, I discuss the nature of modeling as such, proposing a novel, complementary account of scientific modeling which I term the experimentation-driven modeling account and which drives the construction of mechanistic models in many fields of biological and biomedical research, such as cancer immunology. Second, I scrutinize an objection to the mechanistic account (...) of explanation according to which the account fails to accommodate the common practice of idealizing difference-making factors. I argue that this objection ultimately fails because it is riddled with a number of conceptual inconsistencies. Third, I analyze the roles of similarity judgments in some fields of cancer research which employ a variety of mouse models to learn about the disease mechanisms, arguing that by appreciating the epistemic complexities it is possible to shed new light on more general philosophical debates regarding scientific representation. Fourth, mechanisms can also be studied using more theoretical apparatus in the form of simulations. I investigate an example of an agent-based model used to model the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2... (shrink)

This essay discusses the ways in which `Mode 1' and `Mode 2' interact, by reviewing the development of research funding in Sweden during the twentieth century. It argues that `Mode 2' has been the traditional mode of practice. `Mode 1' is a post-war phenomenon, but it is presently the dominant layer of Swedish publicly-funded science and science policy. This essay argues that we are seeing not an increase in uncertainty, but rather a decreasing (...) tolerance of uncertainty. (shrink)

In the article the models which are reconstructed in the philosophy of science from the praxis of science are divided into two main types: 1) analogue and metaphor-based models and 2) representational models. I examine functions of the models of both the types, and demonstrate that the models of type 1) are used in science as instruments of acquiring new knowledge on the basis of a knowledge accepted earlier; and models of type 2) are used to create (...) cognitive “images” of reality. I demonstrate that in the philosophy of science the problem areas generated by two functions of models are entirely isolated one from another. Whereas they are non-separably linked one to another. I postulate the necessity of linking them in one unified conception of models, and then in one conception of science. Therefore such a conception of models is needed which will explain how models play two functions simultaneously, i.e. how they function in the context of discovery and how they rep-resent reality. (shrink)

In recent decades, several authors have claimed that an epoch-making change in the development of science is taking place. A closer examination of this claim shows that these authors take different – and problematic – concepts of an epochal break as their points of departure. In order to facilitate an evaluation of the current development of science, I would like to propose a concept of an epochal change according to which it is not necessarily a discontinuous process that (...) typically begins in a subarea of the sciences, has far-reaching consequences for the entire system of the sciences, and can be observed by contemporaries as early as during its initial phase. Taking this concept as my point of departure, I discuss various candidates for the status of an epochal transformation in the recent development of the sciences. Although there are sound reasons to doubt that an epochal break is currently taking place, one must concede that the sciences are probably in a profound transformation, which could unfold in various directions, perhaps even leading to epoch-making new characterizations of the sciences. (shrink)

Zkoumání je založeno na reflexi sémantického pojetí vědec- kých teorií Ronalda Giera. Gierova východiska a závěry jsou podrobeny kritice, na jejímž základě autor buduje svou vlastní variantu modelově založeného pojetí teorií. Hlavním cílem příspěvku je konceptualizace vztahu mezi principy a modely s důrazem na to, že tento vztah může zakládat dynamiku teorie, respektive posloupnosti teorií. Souhrnně bude v příspěvku prověřována řada tezí: 1) Základními prvky teorie jsou modely, které slouží jako nosiče principů. 2) Modely hrají rozhodující roli při pojmové výstavbě (...) teorie. 3) Modely artikulací principů odhalují poznatky, které ze samotných principů neplynou. 4) Principy mohou být někdy souhrnně definovány až poté, co existuje odpovídající množina modelů. 5) Nová teorie nastoupí ve chvíli, kdy je cluster nových modelů dostatečně komplexní a když si vědecké společenství ujasní, že tento nový cluster je založen na určité množině nových principů. (shrink)

Rachel Barney proposes that Plato’s theory of the tripartite soul is plausibly compared to scientific theories today. I depart from Barney by proposing that the tripartite soul is a model and that its status is hypothetical. And I raise four questions: What follows from the Plato-science comparison, as Barney conceives of it? Which questions emerge if science is looked at in the sophisticated mode that Barney employs in her discussion of Plato? Current science invokes a multitude (...) of subsystems relevant to motivation. Why compare it with tripartition? Stoic psychology may share more fundamental ideas with current science, including the premise that all goings-on in the soul are physiological movements. If tripartition is a model, why would one expect it to account for all dimensions of epistemic activity? (shrink)

Dual process theory proposes clusters of features that form two dichotomous groups in cognition. One standing internal issue is defining what the reference of these two dichotomous groups could be in the mind or brain. Does dual process theory speak of two systems, types, minds, modes, kinds or just metaphors? A particular common answer is that differences in clusters of features are evidence of different underlying systems, often called system 1 and system 2. However, the suggestion to abandon the ‘system’ (...) terminology is now common in the literature, but the consequences of doing so need to be addressed. This work reviews and critically discusses previous suggestions. (shrink)

The main idea of this article is to present various perspectives in order to analyze the recent crisis concerning the agriculture-based rural societies in the developed capitalist communities. In all of these countries there is a production crisis, resulting in too much food. But this is also an ideological crisis, because the consumer thinks that the food is produced at too high a price. And it is a political crisis as well because a major part of the voters think subsidies (...) and trade barriers are too high. The paper argues that beneath the present agricultural and rural policy crisis lies the failure of three great projects of our time: 1) The project of natural science; 2) The project of liberal capitalism; and 3) The project of scientific socialism. The failure of these three projects has to do with the breakdown of the positivist idea of modernization. Modernization theory was partly wrong because it overlooked the persistence of locally based life modes. Those life modes must be understood before a sustainable rural development is found. The article reviews some contemporary social science perspectives that have recently been developed to grasp the fundamental changes of today's rural societies. Based on those perspectives and primarily the life mode perspective, five key elements that are essential to analyze if we want to understand future development are isolated: food production, resources, space, social diversity, and culture. (shrink)

Part of teaching the descriptive phenomenological psychological method is to assist students in grasping their previously unrecognized assumptions regarding the meaning of “science.” This paper is intended to address a variety of assumptions that are encountered when introducing students to the descriptive phenomenological psychological method pioneered by Giorgi. These assumptions are: 1) That the meaning of “science” is exhausted by empirical science, and therefore qualitative research, even if termed “human science,” is more akin to literature or (...) art than methodical, scientific inquiry; 2) That as a primarily aesthetic, poetic enterprise human scientific psychology need not attempt to achieve a degree of rigor and epistemological clarity analogous to that pursued by natural scientists; 3) That “objectivity” is a concept belonging to natural science, and therefore human science ought not to strive for objectivity because this would require “objectivizing” the human being; 4) That qualitative research must always adopt an “interpretive” approach, description being seen as merely a mode of interpretation. These assumptions are responded to from a perspective drawing primarily upon Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, but also upon Eagleton’s analysis of aestheticism. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is twofold: to argue for the value of (1) social science as part of the intellectual activity of writing (rather than righting) and (2) the practice of fiction to that intellectual activity. Writing is a mode of representation that eludes our complete and objective knowledge and always remains partial and temporary. While righting, in contrast, is concerned with the absolute truth and the revelation of the right answer. This paper argues that writing is (...) a more productive, creative, and necessary way of engaging with reality than righting, and that it can offer insights and perspectives for both theory and praxis. Drawing on Stephen King’s view on writing fi ction, this paper will also argue that fiction constitutes a kind of writing and employs a particular form of truth that is conceived as a relation between representation and reality. The paper will conclude by suggesting the need for criminologists— and social scientists more generally—to adopt the perspective of writing to gain a better understanding of the phenomena with which they are concerned. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology and philosophy of science studies the ways in which gender does and ought to influence our conceptions of knowledge, the knowing subject, and practices of inquiry and justification. It identifies ways in which dominant conceptions and practices of knowledge attribution, acquisition, and justification systematically disadvantage women and other subordinated groups, and strives to reform these conceptions and practices so that they serve the interests of these groups. Various practitioners of feminist epistemology and philosophy of science argue (...) that dominant knowledge practices disadvantage women by (1) excluding them from inquiry, (2) denying them epistemic authority, (3) denigrating their “feminine” cognitive styles and modes of knowledge, (4) producing theories of women that represent them as inferior, deviant, or significant only in the ways they serve male interests, (5) producing theories of social phenomena that render women's activities and interests, or gendered power relations, invisible, and (6) producing knowledge (science and technology) that is not useful for people in subordinate positions, or that reinforces gender and other social hierarchies. Feminist epistemologists trace these failures to flawed conceptions of knowledge, knowers, objectivity, and scientific methodology. They offer diverse accounts of how to overcome these failures. They also aim to (1) explain why the entry of women and feminist scholars into different academic disciplines, especially in biology and the social sciences, has generated new questions, theories, and methods, (2) show how gender has played a.. (shrink)

The new phase of science evolution is characterized by totality of subject and object of cognition and technology (high-hume). As a result, forming of network structure in a disciplinary matrix modern are «human dimensional» natural sciences and two paradigmal «nuclei» (attraktors). As a result, the complication of structure of disciplinary matrix and forming a few paradigm nuclei in modern «human dimensional» natural sciences are observed. In the process of social verification integration of scientific theories into the existent system of (...) mental and valued options of spiritual culture takes place. The attribute of classical science – ethics neutrality of scientific knowledge becomes an unattainable ideal. One of the trends in the evolution of theoretical epistemology is the study of migration mechanisms of generation of scientific knowledge from the sphere of its own logic and methodology of science in the field of sociology - the consideration of this process, as the resulting system of interactions of social structures and institutions. Ensuing ideas and settings become the dominant worldview of philosophical and technological civilization. -/- . (shrink)

Table of Contents: Illustrations Acknowledgments Conventions Introduction 3 Ch. 1 Kinds of Natural Philosophy 14 Ch. 2 Methods of Bookishness 49 Ch. 3 Modes of Argument 82 Ch. 4 Bodin’s Philosophy of Nature 116 Ch. 5 Theatrical Metaphors 153 Ch. 6 The Reception of the Theatrum 180 Epilogue: The Legacies of the Theatrum 225 Notes 233 Bibliography 331 Index 369.

In Anthropos Today Paul Rabinow's purpose was to "assemble a toolkit of concepts in order to advance inquiry" (2). A good portion of his subsequent work shares this same goal of advancing an experimental mode, especially within the human sciences. In his Coss lecture, "How to Submit to Inquiry: Dewey and Foucault," Rabinow says, "my experiments and inquiries suport the claim that scientifically and ethically, relations among and between the life sciences, human sciences, and ethics require sustained re-thinking and (...) re-working." Science, as it is structured and practiced, is insufficient to our complex endeavors. When asked to consider what science gives to society, Rabinow's answer is tools for thought (Anthropos .. (shrink)

This discourse analysis of metaphors of the crossdisciplinary composite of inter- and trans-disciplinary research gleans in sights for science today. The first section establishes a baseline by comparing spatial images to growing use of organic metaphors in an ecology of knowledge production. Following logically from the comparison, the second reflects on metaphors of exchange and transaction in trading zones, transaction spaces, and third spaces, then addresses implications for the earlier exemplar of Mode 2 knowledge production. The third section (...) considers the current exemplar of convergence as a new dynamic of fundamental and applied research then challenges the premise translation is a one-way transfer and application of findings from one domain to another, thereby recognizing complexity of relational capital, platforms as sites of collaboration, and ensuing tensions. The fourth reflects a widespread tendency to map domains of knowledge, building on Sheila Jasanoff’s cartographic metaphor of Science, Technology, and Society Studies as an archipelago and broader implications for the nature and status of interdisciplinary fields. The fifth section weighs the balance of disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity, questioning the premise of a New Disciplinarity reinscribing a disciplinary home versus transversal flow and flux. The sixth recognizes growing momentum for decolonizing crossdisciplinarity, including the role of lay, traditional, and Indigenous knowledge in fostering a transdisciplinary science of sustainability. The seventh closing section reflects on preceding metaphors against the backdrop of a century of developments that have made interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity part of the fabric of science today, though more often in incremental ways than radical refiguration. (shrink)

T. 1. Metodologicheskie osnovanii︠a︡ i modeli, Bogopoznanie i nauchnoe znanie -- t. 2. Chislo. Garmonii︠a︡. Metafizika Sveta -- t. 3. Svet bogoslovskie osnovanii︠a︡ kreatologi.

There is an emerging consensus that we are experiencing radical change in the way that science is organized and performed. Frequently described as a shift from Mode 1 to Mode 2, this view emphasizes application, transdisciplinarity, collaboration, and accountability. This article examines the ways in which U.K. public sector scientists make sense of scientific endeavor. The data reveal that the extent to which science is being constructed varied both across and between institutions. Data highlight how individual (...) scientists weave their own paths through the changing discourses of science, constructing new understandings that do not fit neatly into any binary framework for understanding. (shrink)

The diverse essays in this volume speak to the relevance of phenomenological and psychological questioning regarding perceptions of the human. This designation, human, can be used beyond the mere identification of a species to underwrite exclusion, denigration, dehumanization and demonization, and to set up a pervasive opposition in Othering all deemed inhuman, nonhuman, or posthuman. As alerted to by Merleau-Ponty, one crucial key for a deeper understanding of these issues is consideration of the nature and scope of perception. Perception defines (...) the world of the perceiver, and perceptual capacities are constituted in engagement with the world – there is co-determination. Moreover, the distinct phenomenology of perception in the spectatorial mode in contrast to the reciprocal mode, deepens the intersubjective and ethical dimensions of such investigations. -/- Questions motivating the essays include: Can objectification and an inhuman gaze serve positive ends? If so, under what constraints and conditions? How is an inhuman gaze achieved and at what cost? How might the emerging insights of the role of perception into our interdependencies and essential sociality from various domains challenge not only theoretical frameworks, but also the practices and institutions of science, medicine, psychiatry and justice? What can we learn from atypical social cognition, psychopathology and animal cognition? Could distortions within the gazer’s emotional responsiveness and habituated aspects of social interaction play a role in the emergence of an inhuman gaze? -/- Perception and the Inhuman Gaze will interest scholars and advanced students working in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, psychology, psychiatry, sociology and social cognition. -/- Table of Contents -/- Introduction -/- Part I. The Gaze in Classical Phenomenology: Perspectives on Objectification -/- 1. Defending the Objective Gaze as a Self-transcending Capacity of Human Subjects -/- Dermot Moran -/- 2. Two Orders of Bodily Objectification: The Look and the Touch -/- Sara Heinämaa -/- 3. On Eliminativism’s Transient Gaze -/- Timothy Mooney -/- 4. Not wholly human. Reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty with Jacques Lacan. -/- Dorothée Legrand -/- 5. Disclosure and the Gendered Gaze in Simone de Beauvoir's Ethics -/- Christinia Landry -/- Part II. Vision, Perception and Gazes -/- 6. Inside the gaze -/- Shaun Gallagher -/- 7. Perception and its Objects. -/- Maurita Harney -/- 8. Technological Gaze: Understanding How Technologies Transform Perception -/- Richard Lewis -/- 9. The Inhuman Gaze and Perceptual Gestalts: The Making and Unmaking of Others and Worlds -/- Anya Daly -/- Part III. Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Inhuman Gazes -/- 10. Values and Values-based Practice in Psychopathology: Combining Analytic and Phenomenological Approaches -/- G Stanghellini and K.W.M. (Bill) Fulford -/- 11. The Inhuman and Human Gaze in Psychiatry, Psychopathology and Schizophrenia. -/- Matthew Broome -/- 12. Overcoming the Gaze: Psychopathology, Affect, and Narrative. -/- Anna Bortolan -/- 13. From excess to exhaustion : The rise of burnout in a post-modern achievement society. -/- Philippe Wuyts -/- 14. Blackout Rages: The Inhibition of Episodic Memory in Extreme Berserker Episodes -/- John Protevi -/- Part IV. Beyond the Human: Divine, Posthuman and Animal Gazes -/- 15. Wondering at the Inhuman Gaze -/- Sean. D. Kelly -/- 16. What Counts as Human/ Inhuman Right Now? -/- Rosi Braidotti -/- 17. Beyond Human and Animal: Metamorphosis in Merleau-Ponty -/- Dylan Trigg -/- Part V. Sociality and Boundaries of the Human -/- 18. Voice and gaze considered together in ‘languaging’. -/- Fred Cummins -/- 19. Ethics Beyond the Human: Disability and The Inhuman -/- Jonathan Mitchell -/- 20. Social Invisibility and Emotional Blindness -/- James Jardine -/- 21. What are you looking at? Dissonance as a window on the autonomy of participatory sense-making frames. -/- Mark James. (shrink)

Many translations have been made from the original Sanskrit of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali. They have become well loved, well used, and well applied by many in all parts of the world and of all religious beliefs. The Sutras have a power and a timelessness about them which demonstrate the accuracy with which they pinpoint the basic truths of human evolution from subservience to personality clamours to the serene freedom of the soul. Most human problems today originate in selfish (...) desire; the prostitution of the feeling nature to self-centred physical appetites. This is also brought out clearly in the teaching of the Lord Buddha, the treading of the Noble Eight-Fold path providing the only way out of the maze: Right Values; Right Speech; Right Mode of Living; Right Thinking; Right Expression; Right Conduct; Right Effort; Right Rapture or True Happiness. These are attributes of the soul. Patanjali explores exhaustively the means, the techniques and the mental posture which create the connecting thread between the form-centred personality and these stages towards spiritual achievement and soul fusion. The four parts of the book develop: 1. The Problem of Union (51 sutras). 2. sutras). 4. Illumination (34 sutras). Many different training techniques have been available over the centuries, depending on the condition of human consciousness and the phase of spiritual growth to be accomplished. Each Yoga has had its place, fulfilled its function, and become an absorbed part of human experience. In this book the factor of mind in meeting present-day needs is again given prominence as the agent of the soul, and the key to personality release. These Yoga Sutras of Patanjali are based on Raja Yoga, the kingly science of the soul: Through the science of Raja Yoga the mind will be known as the instrument of the soul and the means whereby the brain of the aspirant becomes illuminated and knowledge gained of those matters which concern the realm of the soul. The soul is concerned with the working out of planetary purpose and plan; so again we find that mental training, and the self-achievement of the individual, lead to cooperation and service on a scale far more comprehensive and of far greater evolutionary significance than merely the individual effects on the life of the disciple. venture on the path of union with the soul. When through the removal of hindrances and the purification of the sheaths, the totality of knowledge becomes available, naught further remains for the man to do. (shrink)

Much bioethical scholarship is concerned with the social, legal and philosophical implications of new and emerging science and medicine, as well as with the processes of research that under-gird these innovations. Science and technology studies (STS), and the related and interpenetrating disciplines of anthropology and sociology, have also explored what novel technoscience might imply for society, and how the social is constitutive of scientific knowledge and technological artefacts. More recently, social scientists have interrogated the emergence of ethical issues: (...) they have documented how particular matters come to be regarded as in some way to do with ‘ethics’, and how this in turn enjoins particular types of social action. In this paper, I will discuss some of this and other STS (and STS-inflected) literature and reflect on how it might complement more ‘traditional’ modes of bioethical enquiry. I argue that STS might (1) cast new light on current bioethical issues, (2) direct the gaze of bioethicists towards matters that may previously have escaped their attention, and (3) indicate the import not only of the ethical implications of biomedical innovation, but also how these innovative and other processes feature ethics as a dimension of everyday laboratory and clinical work. In sum, engagements between STS and bioethics are increasingly important in order to understand and manage the complex dynamics between science, medicine and ethics in society. (shrink)

Neoliberal precepts of the governance of academic science-deregulation; reification of markets; emphasis on competitive allocation processes have been conflated with those of performance management—if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it—into a single analytical and consequent single programmatic worldview. As applied to the United States’ system of research universities, this conflation leads to two major divergences from relationships hypothesized in the governance of science literature. (1) The governance and financial structures supporting academic science in the United (...) States’ system of higher education are sufficiently different from those found in many other OECD countries where these policies have been adopted to produce political pressures for an increase rather than a decrease in governmental control over university affairs. (2) The major impact upon academic science of performance measurement systems has come not externally from new government requirements but internally from the independent adoption of these techniques by universities, initially in the name of rational management and increasingly as devices to foster reputational enhancement. The overall thrust of the two trends in the U.S. has been less a shift as experienced elsewhere from bureaucratic to market modes of governance than the displacement of professional-collegial control by internal bureaucratic control. (shrink)

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1808-1711.2012v16n2p319 In Re-Thinking Science. Knowledge and the Public in an Age of Uncertainty (2001) H. Nowotny, P. Scott, e M. Gibbons vindicate a “socially robust” scientific knowledge in accordance with the social needs of our time. Such a knowledge would not be just epistemically reliable; in addition, it would also fit the situations to which will be put to use, and take into account the consequences of its utilization. In the authors’ view, this new kind of science, which (...) they call “Mode 2 knowledge” in another book, would do justice to a society that is not restrained to receive or ask for scientific information, but also requires sharing in its production. Nowotny and her colleagues mention several epistemological changes which a “robust” knowledge would involve. In this paper I analyze some of those alleged changes. (shrink)

The Kuhnian 'Revolution' and its implications for sociology --Verdade, realismo e virtude 2.0 -- Images and imaging in science : modes of perception, algorithmic imagism and big data -- Dos experimentos de pensamento na ciência e na filosofia em relação com outras modalidades de experimentos -- Um savant-philosophe : Michael Polanyi e a filosofia da ciência -- Tempo e explicação : pré-formação, epigénese e pseudomorfose nos estudos comparativos nas ciências sociais -- Why some physical theories should never die -- (...) Sobre a relação entre filosofia natural e teologia natural no pensamento de Newton -- L'harmonie de l'inattendu : Henri Poincaré entre physique et philosophie -- A recepção das ideias do Círculo de Viena em Portugal : duas tentativas de teses de doutoramento sobre o empirismo lógico -- Riscos tecnológicos, agricultura transgénica e alternativas. (shrink)

(Back Cover:) « La pensée métaphysique renaîtra demain. Ce sont des savants qui ont le goût et le sens de la pensée conduite jusqu’au terme de ses exigences internes, et des philosophes initiés aux sciences expérimentales qui, en commun, la feront. » L’œuvre de Claude Tresmontant (1925-1997) illustre parfaitement cette recherche de la métaphysique d’un monde en devenir, qui sait écouter et se modeler sur la transformation – la métamorphose – promise à une Création finalisée. Le trait commun aux exposés (...) ici présentés sous forme définitive a été cette recherche autour d’une pensée qui renouvelle de l’intérieur la métaphysique en réalisant le vœu de Bergson qu’elle devienne « auscultatrice », que l’énigme que pose l’homme face à son origine et sa destinée ne soit pas recouverte par une pensée qui se perdrait dans la description des choses ou dans l’esprit de système, mais qui non plus n’irait se recroqueviller sur elle-même, en narrant sa propre expérience subjective sous le mode de la déréliction. Claude Tresmontant a su penser l’être en genèse, et il a cherché à renouveler la question de l’existence de Dieu, en en transformant la problématique en dialogue avec les sciences contemporaines. À ce goût de l’être dont les sciences ont renouvelé l’approche, il a également voulu infuser un « supplément d’âme », en repensant la réalité de la création et l’horizon de la cause finale, toujours à partir de la nature ultimement théologique de la réponse à la question « qu’est-ce que l’homme ? » Contributeurs : Yves Tourenne, Philippe Gagnon, Fabien Revol, Brunor, Frédéric Crouslé, Bertrand Souchard, Emmanuel Gabellieri. Table of Contents: Note Liminaire (Ph. Gagnon) - 7 En quoi la pensée de Claude Tresmontant nous stimule-t-elle encore ? Hommage et critique (Y. Tourenne) - 13 L’imbrication de la preuve de Dieu et de la cosmologie chez Tresmontant représente-t-elle une preuve ? (Ph. Gagnon) - 27 L’usage apologétique de la philosophie de Tresmontant dans les Indices pensables de Brunor (F. Revol) - 49 Réponse à Fabien Revol (Brunor) - 77 Qu’est-ce qui cloche dans la théologie de Claude Tresmontant ? (Fr. Crouslé) - 85 Les métaphysiques principales de Claude Tresmontant : la foi biblique est-elle à part de la raison philosophique grecque ? (B. Souchard) - 109 Maurice Blondel et Claude Tresmontant (E. Gabellieri) - 123 La vision informationnelle de Tresmontant, surtout en référence au problème de l’âme (Ph. Gagnon) - 133. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ignorance, Knowledge, and Omniscience: At and Beyond the Limits of Faith and Reason after Shinran:Reflections on The Boundaries of Knowledge in Buddhism, Christianity, and Science, with Special Attention to Dennis HirotaAmos YongAlthough published in the series Religion, Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, Paul Numrich's edited volume is really about epistemology in religion and science, in particular about human knowing in Buddhist and Christian traditions shaped by the world of (...) science on the one hand, and how such knowing might also inform scientific knowledge on the other hand.1 The panoply of positions is presented by both Buddhist and Christian thinkers.From the Buddhist side, the following arguments are sketched:• that religion and science are complementary modes of knowing and that "understanding the true nature of the physical world" opens up "the way to enlightenment" (Trinh Xuan Thuan).2• that Buddhism is both continuous with (and hence deserving of serious consideration amidst) the epistemic discourses of modernity in many respects and yet also discontinuous with (and hence capable for critically interrogating) modernity's epistemology in other respects as well (David L. McMahan).3• that a Shin Buddhist approach to human knowledge—which in this chapter is brought into dialogue with Martin Heidegger's (1889-1976) notion of truth—opens up to a Kuhnian philosophy of science that emphasizes how paradigmatic shifts occur when new perspectives replace older frameworks (Dennis Hirota).4• that the questions raised by theoretical and quantum physics provide a scientific framework for discussing fundamental epistemological, ontological, and metaphysical questions that Buddhists and Christians might otherwise disagree about (Mark T. Unno).5From the Christian side, the following theses are explored: [End Page 201]• that boundary constraints confront not only working scientists but also Buddhists and Christians, and that these constraints can thus serve as a springboard for a science and religion "trilogue" (Paul O. Ingram).6• that the mystery of creative becoming (God, in traditional Christian terms) is the dynamic backdrop to the ongoing human quest for knowledge (Gordon D. Kaufman).7• that it is at the boundaries of knowledge that genuine creativity occurs (not only scientific creativity but also theological creativity emerges, i.e., the apophatic tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy or the theory of coincidentia oppositorum of Nicholas of Cusa [1401-1464]), and where, as a result of such creative approaches, distinct fields of inquiry open up and different domains of knowledge emerge (Antje Jackelén).8• that theological discourse is paradoxical precisely because such discourse marks the fluid boundaries demarcating sense and nonsense (Tom Christenson).9And, befitting a volume on the encounter between religion (i.e., Buddhism and Christianity) and science, there is a concluding chapter from a physicist on the limits of scientific knowledge that both is encouraged by the gains made by science (presuming a critical realist approach to science's modeling of reality) and yet also is honest about there being much more to learn on small and big questions (John R. Albright).10The foregoing summaries do not do justice to the complexity and sophistication of the chapters in the book. However, they provide a broader context for my interactions with Dennis Hirota's chapter on Shinran's (1173-1263) epistemology and its implications for both religious and scientific knowledge. As an evangelical Christian, I am particularly intrigued by the challenges confronting a Shin Buddhist approach to the sciences, even as I am hopeful that such a consideration will precipitate creative insights both for the Buddhist-Christian encounter and for the religion-science dialogue. I am all the more motivated since I have long been convinced that the religion-science dialogue has been dominated by generically religious approaches and that it is time for more particularistic or even confessional positions to be registered in the discussion.11 I am optimistic that the specificity of the Shin tradition will provide both complementary and contrasting perspectives to the contemporary Buddhist encounter with science that has so far been dominated by the broadly Tibetan approaches of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (1935-) and those in his circle of dialogue partners,12 and that this will in turn open up new trajectories—even initiate new paradigms, as Hirota suggests—for the Buddhist... (shrink)

The hermeneutic movement in philosophy and criticism has done us a service by directing our attention to the role of critical interpretation in understanding the humanities. But it has done us a disservice also because it does not recognize any comparable role for interpretation in the natural sciences and in this way sharply separates the two fields of scholarship and experience.1 Consequently, I shall argue, the central truths and virtues of hermeneutics have become encumbered with a whole string of false (...) interferences and misleading dichotomies. These distortions have had two effects. On the one hand, they have rationality which are crucial goals of the natural sciences; and, on the other hand, they have encouraged an exaggerated idea of the extent to which difference in personal and/or cultural standpoint rule out any such goal for the humanities. Once we recognize that the natural sciences too are in the business of "construing" reality, we shall be better able to preserve the central insights of the hermeneutic method, without succumbing to the misleading implications of its rhetorical misuse.Physics, in particular, has always required its participants to adopt an interpretive standpoint, and this standpoint has changed more than once during the historical development of that science. Yet this variable standpoint has done nothing to undercut the commitment of physicists to rationality and objectivity: on the contrary, they have made it one of their chief aims to discover just what aspects of reality, or nature, lend themselves to interpretation and understanding as considered from any particular standpoint. If we can drive this wedge between scientific objectivity and hermeneutic relativity in the case of physics, we are free to return to the humanities and apply the same distinction there too. It has too often, and too readily, been assumed that whatever needs to be interpreted in order to be understood will, to that extent, become a matter of taste or subjectivity; and, as a result, any claims to rationality and objectivity in the critical realms–whether moral or aesthetic, political and intellectual–have been too hastily surrendered.The current sharp distinction between scientific explanations and hermeneutic interpretation was launched by Wilhelm Dilthey nearly a century ago; and, in justice to Dilthey, we need to bear in mind that the interpretive element in natural science was far less evident then than it is today. Scientists nowadays view the world from a new and less rigid standpoint. This period which Frederick Ferre calls "postmodern science," differs from the older one of "modern science" in just those respects that enable us to reconcile the rational claims that have always been central to the natural sciences with a new hermeneutic richness and variability.1. Some will respond that Edmund Husserl, for one, spoke of the natural sciences as being, in their own way, "interpretive"; but the role allotted to natural science by the phenomonologists and their successors—I have in mind Hans Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermass much as Martin Heidegger and Husserl—I an impoverished and unhistorical one. The hermeneutic philosophers have not, in this respect, fully recognized either the plurality or the historical variability of the interpretive modes adopted in one or another of the natural sciences for different intellectual purposes and at different stages in their historical development.Stephen Toulmin is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He is author of, among other works, Foresight and Understanding, Human Understanding, and Knowing and Acting and is currently at work on volume 2 of Human Understanding. His previous contribution to Critical Inquiry, "The Inwardness of Mental Life," appeared in the Autumn 1979 issue. (shrink)

In the classic study Little science, big science (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), Derek Price traces the historical shift from what he calls little science?exemplified by early?modern ?invisible colleges? of scientific amateurs and enthusiasts engaged in small?scale, informal interactions and personal correspondence?to 20th?century big science, dominated by professional scientists and wealthy institutions, where scientific information (primarily in print form and its analogues) was mass?produced, marketed and circulated on a global scale. This article considers whether the (...) growing use of more participatory, interactive ?Web 2.0? technologies and social media in science today (e.g. wikis, blogs, tagging and bookmarking, conferencing, etc.) may signal a revival of little science modes of communication that contrast with big science conventions that continue to dominate research policy, scientific institutions, and the publishing industry. A brief historical review of responses to the scientific ?information explosion? since the early 1900s is presented, with a particular focus on the idealization of large?scale, automated information systems and the privileging of formal (document?producing) over informal (interpersonal) modes of scientific communication. Alternative frameworks for scientific communication that incorporate both documents and interaction are used to examine contemporary examples of so?called Science 2.0 and citizen science projects to determine whether such projects indicate the emergence of new modes of communication in science that bridge the immediacy and involvement of invisible colleges and the rigor of peer?reviewed publishing. The implications for traditional documentary forms such as the journal article are also discussed. (shrink)

Intense public interest in scientific claims about COVID-19, concerning its origins, modes of spread, evolution, and preventive and therapeutic strategies, has focused attention on the values to which scientists are assumed to be committed and the relationship between science and other public discourses. A much discussed claim, which has stimulated several inquiries and generated far-reaching political and economic consequences, has been that SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately engineered at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and then, either inadvertently or otherwise, released to (...) the public by a laboratory worker. This has been pursued despite a clear refutation, through comprehensive genomic analysis, of the hypothesis that the virus was deliberately engineered and the failure of detailed investigations to identify any evidence in support of a laboratory leak. At the same time a substantial, established body of knowledge about the many factors underlying the emergence of novel zoonotic diseases has been largely ignored—including climate change and other mechanisms of environmental destruction, tourism, patterns of trade, and cultural influences. The existence and conduct of these debates have raised questions about the vulnerability of science to manipulation for political purposes. Scientific discourses are vulnerable because: (i) claims can be made with no more than probabilistic force; (ii) alleged “facts” are always subject to interpretation, which depends on social, ethical, and epistemological assumptions; and (iii) science and scientists are not inherently committed to any single set of values and historically have served diverse, and sometimes perverse, social and political interests. In the face of this complexity, the COVID-19 experience highlights the need for processes of ethical scrutiny of the scientific enterprise and its strategic deployment. To ensure reliability of truth claims and protection from corrupting influences robust ethical discourses are required that are independent of, and at times even contrary to, those of science itself. (shrink)

Academia’s mathematical metaphysics are briefly explored en route to an elaboration of the qualitatively rigorous requirements underpinning the calibration and unambiguous interpretation of quantitative instrumentation in any science. Of particular interest are Gadamer’s emphases on number as the paradigm of the noetic, on the role of play in interpretation, and on Hegel’s sense of method as the activity of the thing itself that thought experiences. These point toward and overlap with (1) Latour’s study of the metrological social networks through (...) which technological phenomena are brought into language as modes of being that can be understood, and (2) the way that Rasch’s models for measurement comprise a potential beginning for metaphysically astute, qualitatively and quantitatively integrated, mathematical methods in the social sciences. The paper closes with observations on the general problem that is philosophy, the need to remain open to multiplicities of meaning even as clear understandings are sought and obtained. (shrink)

Ever since Plato’s famous attack on artists and poets in Book 10 of The Republic, lovers of literature have felt pressed to defend poetry, and indeed from ancient times down to the present, literature and art have had to fight various battles against philosophy, religion, and science. After providing a brief overview of this conflict and then arguing that between poetry and science there are some noteworthy similarities---that is, that some of the basic mental structures with which the (...) scientist studies the “text‘ of nature (facts, laws, theories) find their counterparts in ways an informed reader studies the poetic text, I develop what I see as the most important differences between poetry, on the one hand, and science, philosophy, and theology, on the other. These differences lie chiefly in two areas: (1) in the stance that each takes toward language itself and (2) in the stance each takes toward that ancient polarity between the one and the many. The aim of my argument is neither to privilege poetry over the other modes of knowing the world nor to grant, particularly to science in its reductive “objectivity,‘ a higher epistemological status than that accorded to poetry and the arts. Instead, I wish to argue that science, by pushing the boundaries of knowledge about the material world, shows the poet, as well as the theologian, some of the more important work to be done and that poetry, with its emphasis on the particular over the abstract and on the ambiguities and paradoxes of language as inherently metaphorical, serves science and religion by providing a caution against the naive acceptance of language as literal and the consequent enthrallment to the power of absolutes and totalizing abstractions. (shrink)

This paper attempts to outline some of the important concepts and ideas used in system analysis which is taken to be a general mode of analysis used in all sciences. Systems are seen from three perspectives: (1) that involving the relationship between system and environment, (2) that involving interaction between several systems, and (3) that involving one type of system composed of other types of systems. The writers also discuss the concepts "structure" and "equilibrium" as they apply to system (...) analysis, the point being made that the use of these concepts in the social sciences has often been vague or even incorrect. (shrink)

The clearly recognized innovation in Galileo’s work on free fall has been a stimulus and a challenge for the history and philosophy of science. This article will analyze the experimental and theoretical aspects of Galileo’s work on free fall. It draws on several authors’ results to justify the claim that the research model established by Galileo remains valid today (Sections 2 and 3). The article draws this parallel with current science by focusing on Galileo’s method, way of considering (...) scientific instruments, and practice of confrontation between theory and experiments. The Galilean mode of investigation can be interpreted from a variety of possible philosophical perspectives: Section 3 examines how relevant the so-called constructivist and conventionalist perspectives are to analysis of Galileo’s innovations. Section 4 discusses Galileo’s contribution to the mathematization of science and the Platonic character of his thought. Finally, the article attempts to show that Galileo’s Platonism also involves experiments, as he conceives them. Keywords: Inclined Plane. Mathematics. Platonism. (shrink)