What’s New about Systems Biology? I was recently invited to an inter-disciplinary workshop held at the Institute of Systems Biology (ISB) in Seattle, where HPS scholars and scientists met to address the question: What’s new about ‘Systems Biology’? The workshop was organized by Arizona State University’s (ASU) Center for Biology and Society, in partnership with [...]
1. “I grew up reading Ayn Rand and it taught me quite a bit about who I am and what my value systems are, and what my beliefs are. It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff.” That’s Paul Ryan, [...]
Academic Culture and the Climate for Women in Philosophy Philosophy stands out in humanities as the lone field in which gender equality remains a goal, not a reality. In the August 10th article in the National Post, Philosophy gender war sparked by call for larger role for women, we can find at best a half-hearted attempt to think [...]
In September 2011, Yann Benétreau-Dupin arrived at Western to pursue his PhD in Philosophy. Yann was one of the two recipients of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy Doctoral Entrance Scholarship, a $10,000 scholarship offered to students of with outstanding performance history and achievements, and who specialize in the study of philosophy and science. In October, [...]
By Katy Fulfer I’ve recently attended the International Congress of the Feminist Approaches to Bioethics, held in Rotterdam, the Netherlands in late June. One argument that Mary Rawlinson presented in her talk, “The Future of Food: Bioethics, Justice, and the Imperative to Consume,” has stayed with me in the following weeks. In her talk, Rawlinson [...]
By Wayne Myrvold Big news of the day is the press conference that CERN held this morning, announcing strong evidence of something that has some of the right properties to be the Higgs boson. Is today the day that will forever mark the “discovery” of the Higgs boson? We like nice, neat milestones like that, [...]
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. [...]
By Wayne Myrvold I posted a link to my blog post, “Beyond Turf Wars,” on my Facebook page. It resulted in an interest back-and-forth involving myself, philosopher Vishnya Maudlin, and Matt Leifer, a physicist working on the foundations of quantum theories, about, among other things, the differences between physics and philosophy, and the respectove roles [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]