New England Journal of Medicine’s History of Surgery

Fascinating article from the NEJM entitled "Two Hundred Years of Surgery" which highlights, inter alia, the importance of anesthesia in the development of modern surgical techniques: Surgeons soon found, however, that anesthesia allowed them to perform more complex, invasive, and precise maneuvers than they had dared to attempt before. Within a decade, for instance, the first successful hysterectomy [...]

2014-03-18T16:55:36-04:00June 14th, 2012|Philosophy of Science|

Beyond Turf Wars

By Wayne Myrvold There has been a bit of squabbling, of late, between physicists and philosophers of science.  In 2010, in their  book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. declared that “philosophy is dead …  Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.  More recently, the [...]

2013-03-04T10:25:12-05:00June 11th, 2012|Philosophy of Science|

When Experience Machines Are Obligatory

Nozick’s classic discussion of ‘experience machines’ in Anarchy, State and Utopia attempted to show that, contrary to the ‘hedonistic’ thesis, experiencing pleasure is not all that matters to us. The ‘experience machine’, of course, is a kind of simulated reality wherein the subject would be able to choose pleasurable experiences that would be indistinguishable from [...]

Uncovering Hidden Causes and Hidden Assumptions in Public Policy Debates – Amy Wuest

Nancy Cartwright began the second installment of her Rotman Lecture (‘Wiser use of Social Science’) with a discussion of the tragic death of 17 month old Peter Connelly, a case of child neglect and abuse that led to a widespread media controversy and to a public inquiry into Britain’s child services and social services programmes. [...]

2016-04-27T23:18:40-04:00May 7th, 2012|Science and Society|

Thinking Beyond the Observable

An interview with Rotman Institute Visiting Fellow John Bolender John Bolender has been a Visiting Fellow in the Rotman Institute during the 2011-2012 academic year. He is a philosopher of mind whose primary interest is cognition. Specifically, he has inquired into how the computational core of language may crucially enter into uniquely human cognitive capacities, [...]

REPOC Event: Science Pub Night on Black Holes – Melissa Jacquart

It is my pleasure to introduce the Rotman Institute of Philosophy Events Planning and Outreach Committee (REPOC for short).  REPOC organizes and helps Rotman Institute members carry out public outreach and science education events. On Tuesday, April 2nd, REPOC held its inaugural event, the first in a series of Science Pub Nights.  At Science Pub Nights, [...]

2014-03-18T17:02:43-04:00April 25th, 2012|Events|

Policy and Values

A while back in the article “Science, Values and Democracy” I argued that science alone cannot determine policy and that values and politics play an integral part of the decision making process.  If you don’t want to take my word for it, here is an article by psychiatry profess or Keith Humphreys talking about values in [...]

2014-03-18T17:03:28-04:00April 24th, 2012|Science and Society|

Articles in the London Free Press

Here are links to letters published in the London Free Press discussing two of their recent editorials: Veils during Citizenship Oaths: http://www.lfpress.com/comment/letters/home.html?p=48009&x=letters&l_publish_date=&s_publish_date=&s_keywords=brandt&s_topic=&s_letter_type=Letter%20to%20Editor&s_topic=&s_letter_status=Active&s=letters Como Conquistar Un Hombre   Regulations Governing Prostitution: http://www.lfpress.com/comment/letters/home.html?p=49989&x=letters&l_publish_date=&s_publish_date=&s_keywords=brandt&s_topic=&s_letter_type=Letter%20to%20Editor&s_topic=&s_letter_status=Active&s=letters zp8497586rq

2022-01-13T13:46:37-05:00April 10th, 2012|Graduate Students|

Pirahã and Progress – Nic McGinnis

The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published an account of a divisive controversy in linguistics concerning the features of an obscure Amazonian language, Pirahã. Allegedly absent in Pirahã is 'recursion'—the embedding of sentences within sentences—a feature that is (supposedly) central to human language according to the dominant Chomskyan account. The Chronicle article is unfortunately focused [...]

2014-03-18T17:06:35-04:00April 3rd, 2012|Philosophy of Language|
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