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, [...]
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 [...]
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
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 [...]
It is not usually within the aegis of a philosophy blog to comment on controversies within popular media; but in certain particularly illustrative cases, exceptions can be made. Here we are once again concerned with public policy, expertise, and argument: Sandra Fluke’s. It might seem late to comment on an story that is already ‘old’ [...]
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 [...]
Historically, most philosophers and scientists have thought about the distinction between life and non-life as an abrupt one. For vitalists like Driesch life was an irreducible phenomenon, which depended on a new type of force, one of a non-physical nature (an entelechy or a “vis essentialis”). For emergentists like Broad, life depended on the way [...]
Dr. Nancy Cartwright will be the third annual Lecturer in Philosophy & Science, giving two talks: one on Thursday, March 8th beginning at 5pm EST ("Evidence, Argument and Mixed Methods"), and another on Friday, March 9th at 3:30 pm EST ( "Wiser Use of Social Science, Wiser Wishes, Wiser Policies"). Both talks will be streNintendo [...]
We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Stathis Psillos (University of Athens) has been nominated by Western as the Rotman Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in philosophy of science. His application will now go through the CRC peer review process. Dr. Psillos has made major contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and metaphysics; served [...]
The CBC reports on Nature's extraordinary editorial on the Harper government's control over scientific dissemination, policy which is starting to make headlines internationally as well. The full text of the editorial in Nature can be found here. The criticism is severe. As the articles notes, Researchers who once would have felt comfortable responding freely and [...]