In March 2013 the German Society for Philosophy of Science/Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP) held its first meeting. It is somewhat of a sociological puzzle why a country with such a rich tradition in philosophy of science did not have (up until now, that is) a society dedicated to the field. The overarching conference theme was How [...]
Recently, the Vancouver Sun reported on an ongoing legal case that potentially has important implications for neuroethics and the law. Kenny Ng, the patient at the center of the controversy, was injured in a car accident seven years ago and diagnosed, after rigorous clinical assessment, as being in a vegetative state. His wife would like [...]
S. Matthew Liao, director of the bioethics program at NYU, recently drew attention to important issues related to the use of propranolol to treat combat related post-traumatic stress disorder. In an interview published in the New York Times, Liao stated that a growing area of interest in the ethics of psychiatric therapy is the use [...]
The Guardian recently ran an article about fraud in the sciences, noting the institutional pressures placed on researchers that play a part in motivating misconduct: "A recent paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that since 1973, nearly a thousand biomedical papers have been retracted because someone cheated the system. [...]
By Katy Fulfer In Friday's Globe and Mail, Preston Manning (CEO of a conservative think-tank in Canada) lamented the Canadian Parliament's decision to not re-open the definition of legal personhood. Many Canadians viewed the attempt to discuss legal personhood (which currently is granted upon birth) as an attack on abortion rights. (Find Manning's commentary at the [...]
By Wayne Myrvold A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. The title was “On the Social Responsibility of Philosophers of Science.” The idea behind the talk was simple, as it pretty much had to be, given the time constraints. [...]
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. [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Steve Sherwood, of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, provides a thoughtful, if schematic, discussion of historical scientific controversy, linking past polemics to present strife on climate change. Both Copernican heliocentrism and Einstein's theory of relativity met with opposition from critics that was as much moral-political [...]