For our reading group this semester we will be reading James Bryant Conant’s unpublished 1952 philosophy of science lectures, given just before he left the Harvard presidency.…

Clean Water Access, Poverty, & Environmental Health in Urban America A Reilly Center Forum

The Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values invites you to join us for a conversation on the impacts of race and poverty on American's environmental health and clean water access. Expert panelists in sustainable water technology, environmental law, and public health policy will lead this discussion which will explore the current water crisis in Flint, and beyond.

Panelists:

• Kevin Doudrick, PhD, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences, Laboratory of Advanced and Sustainable Water Treatment
• Bruce Huber, PhD, Notre Dame Law School, Reilly Center Fellow
• Jessica Nickrand, Reilly Center

Moderated by Jessica Baron, PhD, Reilly Center

For our reading group this semester we will be reading James Bryant Conant’s unpublished 1952 philosophy of science lectures, given just before he left the Harvard presidency.…

“Antidotes to Scientific Perspectivism”

Is science irreducibly perspectival? Kantian views of scientific knowledge (which take it to be irreducibly reflective of human ways of knowing) and thoroughly conventionalist views (which see all aspects of it in terms of human conventions) are obvious forms of perspectivism. Recently some scientific realists, who hold that we have at least some substantive knowledge of a mind-independent world (unlike Kantians and thoroughgoing conventionalists), have also argued that scientific knowledge is inescapably perspectival. The commonplace use in science of incompatible models of one and the same phenomenon is invoked as exemplary. Can we make sense of this combination of perspectivism and realism, and does the realist need to? The correct answers to these questions are 'no', and 'no', respectively. I'll explore some options for what a realist could say instead.…

For our reading group this semester we will be reading James Bryant Conant’s unpublished 1952 philosophy of science lectures, given just before he left the Harvard presidency.…

This talk draws from the speaker’s book, Galileo’s Middle Finger: Heretics, Activists, and the Search for Justice in Science, and explores the ways in which freedom of research is under assault from multiple fronts, including identity politics activism, the corporatization and branding of universities, and social media shaming campaigns. The speaker, who has twenty years’ experience both as an intersex patient rights activist and as an academic historian, will use case studies to talk about the dangers researchers face today. She will also speak to how researchers can work individually and collectively to try to protect themselves. She argues they must do so not for their own sake, but for the sake of social progress in our fragile democracy.

For our reading group this semester we will be reading James Bryant Conant’s unpublished 1952 philosophy of science lectures, given just before he left the Harvard presidency.…