Dr. Tom Stapleford, Associate Professor, PLS; Dr. Philip Mirowski ,Koch Professor, HPS; Dr. Lynn Joy, Professor, Philosophy; Dr. Chris Hamlin, Professor, History
Thomas Stapleford and Dan Hicks have recently argued (Isis Sept. 2016) that Alasdair MacIntyre’s virtue ethics and portrayal of communal practices provide a novel and effective means for historians of science to frame some big questions in historiography: the significance of studying scientific practice…
Agnotological Challenges: How to Capture the Production of Ignorance in Science
Martin Carrier, Universität Bielefeld
Agnotology concerns the creation and preservation of confusion and ignorance. Certain positions are advocated in order to promote economic, political, or metaphysical interests with the result of creating mock controversies or maintaining unjustified agreement. I propose to identify agnotological ploys by examining the discrepancy between the conclusions suggested by the design of a study and the conclusions actually drawn or intimated. Agnotological ploys are characterized by the unrecognized difference between those issues for which a study is sensitive and those issues that feature in its interpretation. This mechanism of “false advertising” serves to implement agnotological endeavors and helps to identify them without having to invoke the motivations of the relevant agents. Pinpointing such endeavors is a means for weeding out approaches that look fitting at first glance, but are blatantly inappropriate, in fact. Pinpointing agnotological approaches helps transform a pluralist manifold of contrasting accounts into a manageable range of alternatives.…
Location: Mendoza College of Business, Jordan Auditorium
HEAD GAMES The Inside Story of Football’s Concussion Crisis
• How one New York Times sportswriter exposed a massive N.F.L. cover-up, forced Congressional hearings and revolutionized sports safety.
• Exclusive league documents, notes and audio from real-time interviews with commissioner Roger Goodell and more. …
The 2016 James T. Cushing Memorial Prize in History and Philosophy of Physics was awarded to Dr. Adam Caulton, currently assistant professor at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, for his paper, “The Role of Symmetry in the Interpretation of Physical Theories,” published in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics…
Physics Old and New: Historical and Critical Perspectives on Physics and the Philosophy of Nature
Workshop in Honor of Katherine Brading
March 24, 2017
160 Mendoza
Lecture 8:00am-3:00pm
with Mary Domsky (University of New Mexico), George Smith (Tufts), Alison Petermen (Rochester), Nick Huggett (University of Chicago), David John Baker (University of Michigan), and Tom Pashby (University of Chicago)…
Join the Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values and the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore for the launch of Ethics and Cyber Warfare by George Lucas.
Books will be available for purchase at the event and a book signing will follow the reading. …
HPS Colloquium Presented by: Richard Bellon, Assistant Professor of History, Michigan State University
A Hodge-Podge of Philosophers and the Oxford Malignants: Science and High-Church Theology in the Age of Darwin
In June of 1832 Charles Darwin was in Rio de Janeiro when the second meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science took place in Oxford. This meeting unleashed cultural and religious politics that influenced deeply the context in which Darwin would develop and communicate his theory of evolution by natural selection. The Oxford high churchmen John Keble and John Henry Newman watched aghast as men of science of all variety of religious affiliation congregated in their Anglican university. They were particularly disgusted that Oxford granted honorary degrees to what Keble dismissed as a “hodge-podge of philosophers” (Michael Faraday, David Brewster, Robert Brown and John Dalton), none…
What is the relationship between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, religion and science? Since the rise of contemporary philosophies of science in the 1960s, there has been a growing desire to contextualize standard discussions of theology and science through newly understood historical and philosophical methodologies. This desire has shown itself primarily in historical studies on Galileo, Augustine, Aquinas, and contemporary studies on cosmology, evolutionary biology, and particle physics. Such studies have led scholars to interact in novel ways and explore previously unknown horizons of discussion, leading to an unexpected level of interdisciplinarity. In this vein, the international interdisciplinary conference, “The Quest for Consonance: Theology and the Natural Sciences,” represents a step forward in this movement towards more interactions between theology, philosophy, history, and science. Leading scholars from all four disciplines from around the world will come together to “seek consonance” among the fields and among each other, using as a common touchpoint the idea that there is more that holds us together than breaks us apart. …
What is the relationship between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, religion and science? Since the rise of contemporary philosophies of science in the 1960s, there has been a growing desire to contextualize standard discussions of theology and science through newly understood historical and philosophical methodologies. This desire has shown itself primarily in historical studies on Galileo, Augustine, Aquinas, and contemporary studies on cosmology, evolutionary biology, and particle physics. Such studies have led scholars to interact in novel ways and explore previously unknown horizons of discussion, leading to an unexpected level of interdisciplinarity. In this vein, the international interdisciplinary conference, “The Quest for Consonance: Theology and the Natural Sciences,” represents a step forward in this movement towards more interactions between theology, philosophy, history, and science. Leading scholars from all four disciplines from around the world will come together to “seek consonance” among the fields and among each other, using as a common touchpoint the idea that there is more that holds us together than breaks us apart. …
