Why and how have lay people participated in scientific observation? And on what terms have they collaborated with experts and professionals? We have become accustomed to the involvement of lay observers in the practice of many branches of science, including both the natural and human sciences, usually as subordinates to experts. The current surge of interest in this phenomenon, as well as in the closely related topic of how expertise has been constructed, suggests that historians of science can offer a (...) valuable contribution to these vital questions. A historical approach to lay participation allows us to better understand the making of expert-lay relations in science, and it offers a broader, long-term perspective on contemporary debates about that boundary. (shrink)

Field Life examines the practice of science in the field in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the American West between the 1860s and the 1910s, when the railroad was the dominant form of long-distance transportation. Grounded in approaches from environmental history and the history of technology, it emphasizes the material basis of scientific fieldwork, joining together the human labor that produced knowledge with the natural world in which those practices were embedded. Four distinct modes of field practice, which (...) were shared by different field science disciplines, proliferated during this period—surveys, lay networks, quarries, and stations—and this book explores the dynamics that underpinned each of them. Using two diverse case studies to animate each mode of practice, as well as the making of the field as a place for science, Field Life combines textured analysis of specific examples of field science on the ground with wider discussion of the commonalities in the practices of a diverse array of field sciences, including the earth and physical sciences, the life and agricultural sciences, and the human sciences. By situating science in its regional environmental context, Field Life analyzes the intersection between the cosmopolitan knowledge of science and the experiential knowledge of people living in the field. Examples of field science in the Plains and Rockies range widely: geological surveys and weather observing networks, quarries to uncover dinosaur fossils and archaeological remains, and branch agricultural experiment stations and mountain biological field stations. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines the field network – linking together lay observers in geographically distributed locations with a central figure who aggregated their locally produced observations into more general, regional knowledge – as a historically emergent mode of knowledge production. After discussing the significance of weather knowledge as a vital domain in which field networks have operated, it describes and analyzes how a more robust and systematized weather observing field network became established and maintained on the ground in the early twentieth (...) century. This case study, which examines two Kansas City-based local observer networks supervised by the same U.S. Weather Bureau office, demonstrates some of the key issues involved in maintaining field networks, such as the role of communications infrastructure, especially the telegraph, the procedures designed to make local observation more systematic and uniform, and the centralized, hierarchical power relations that underpinned even a low-status example of knowledge production on the periphery. (shrink)

Biological field stations proliferated in the Rocky Mountains region of the western United States during the early decades of the twentieth century. This essay examines these Rocky Mountain field stations as hybrid lab-field sites from the perspective of the field side of the dichotomy: as field sites with raised walls rather than as laboratories whose walls with the natural world have been lowered. Not only were these field stations transformed to be more like laboratories, but they were also embedded within (...) the particular regional environmental and institutional context of the Rocky Mountains. Using the University of Colorado’s Mountain Laboratory at Tolland and other contemporaneous sites as examples, this essay analyzes key features of these sites, including their location within transportation networks, buildings, equipment, personnel, scheduling, recreational and social activities, and other material and social practices on the ground. Considering both the distinctive and shared characteristics of the Rocky Mountain field stations in comparison to other types of field stations provides a more complete picture of the diversity and range of lab-field hybrid sites in the biological sciences in the early twentieth-century United States. (shrink)

The building of the transcontinental railroad in the US Central West in the late 1860s greatly improved access to this region and led to the expansion of scientific field work. The relationships between science and the railroad spanned a diverse spectrum, ranging from its practical advantages to more complex interactions such as the transformation of nature along railway corridors and the reciprocal exchange of favours between scientists and railway companies. The dominance of science along the railroad in the second half (...) of the nineteenth century continued into the early twentieth century, with a gradual shift to automobile travel beginning in the 1910s. By stimulating and shaping field research both on and off the railway corridor, the laying of iron tracks across the continent helped guide US science, just as it influenced so many other aspects of US life. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Even as the division between professional scientists and laypeople became sharper by the end of the nineteenth century, the collaboration of local people remained important in scientific fieldwork, especially in sciences such as vertebrate paleontology that required long‐term extractive access to research sites. In the North American West, the competition between museums and universities for the best fossil quarry sites involved negotiations with locals. The conflict over differing conceptions of the field site is vividly demonstrated through an examination of (...) one site on the High Plains of western Nebraska in the early twentieth century. This case offers a rare opportunity to see not only how professionals regarded such sites but also how the resident ranching family, the Cooks, attempted to exercise leverage over the scientific fieldwork that took place there. While the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh became mired in protracted conflict with the Cooks over discovery claims and the ongoing control of the site, the University of Nebraska and the American Museum of New York developed more harmonious relations with the site's resident ranching family. (shrink)

This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace's "human biogeography" paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive "mental and moral" features (...) as more decisive than physical ones. By following Wallace in the field, we can see his field mapping practices in action -- how he conquered the problem of local particularity in the case of human variation. His experiences on the periphery of expanding European empires, far from metropolitan centers, shaped Wallace's observations in the field. Taking his cues from colonial racial categories and his experiences collaborating with local people in the field, Wallace constructed the boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races during several years of work in the field criss-crossing the archipelago as a scientific collector. This effort to map a boundary line in the field was a bold example of using the practices of survey science to raise the status of field work by combining fact gathering with higher-level generalizing, although the response back in the metropole was less than enthusiastic. Upon his return to Britain in the 1860s, Wallace found that appreciation for observational facts he had gathered in the field was not accompanied by agreement with his theoretical interpretations and methods for doing human biogeography. (shrink)

Recent years have witnessed a significant expansion in the number of studies positioned at the intersection of the history of science and environmental history. Although these studies continue to navigate lingering methodological tensions, collectively they underscore the promise of a disciplinary cross-fertilization that proved largely latent for the first quarter century or more following environmental history’s emergence as a discrete discipline. This article situates this recent scholarship in the historiographical landscape from which it has emerged. To that end, it summarizes (...) the fields’ early intersections; examines the ways in which disciplinary tensions made the intersection fraught; traces shifts in both fields that made that intersection more conducive to cross-disciplinary work; and sketches the trajectories of some of the prominent threads of the recent scholarship deliberately situated at the nexus of the disciplines. (shrink)

This paper examines how the 19th-century British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace used biogeographical mapping practices to draw a boundary line between Malay and Papuan groups in the colonial East Indies in the 1850s. Instead of looking for a continuous gradient of variation between Malays and Papuans, Wallace chose to look for a sharp discontinuity between them. While Wallace's "human biogeography" paralleled his similar project to map plant and animal distributions in the same region, he invoked distinctive "mental and moral" features (...) as more decisive than physical ones. By following Wallace in the field, we can see his field mapping practices in action -- how he conquered the problem of local particularity in the case of human variation. His experiences on the periphery of expanding European empires, far from metropolitan centers, shaped Wallace's observations in the field. Taking his cues from colonial racial categories and his experiences collaborating with local people in the field, Wallace constructed the boundary line between the Malay and Papuan races during several years of work in the field criss-crossing the archipelago as a scientific collector. This effort to map a boundary line in the field was a bold example of using the practices of survey science to raise the status of field work by combining fact gathering with higher-level generalizing, although the response back in the metropole was less than enthusiastic. Upon his return to Britain in the 1860s, Wallace found that appreciation for observational facts he had gathered in the field was not accompanied by agreement with his theoretical interpretations and methods for doing human biogeography. (shrink)

Dispositionalism about modality is the view that metaphysical modality is a matter of the dispositions possessed by actual objects. In a recent paper, David Yates has raised an important worry about the formal adequacy of dispositionalism. This paper responds to Yates’s worry by developing a reply that Yates discusses briefly but dismisses as ad hoc: an appeal to a ’plenitude of powers’ including such powers as the necessarily always manifested power for 2+2\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} (...) \begin{document}$$2+2$$\end{document} to be 4. I argue that the reply is not ad hoc at all, by defending the metaphysics of dispositions that should underly it. I then argue, first, that a proper understanding of dispositions’ degrees provides us with an argument for such necessarily always manifested dispositions; second, that all the natural attempts to block that argument can be resisted without being ad hoc; and third, that pragmatic considerations explain our intuitive resistance to the ascription of necessarily always manifested dispositions. Dispositionalism can be formally adequate after all. (shrink)

Plato is performing a dialectical thought process in juxtaposing Socrates and the Eleatic Stranger in the Statesman, as well as in other dialogues related by dramatic sequence to the trial of Socrates, which include the Theaetetus, Sophist, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. In so doing Plato exhibits a fundamental philosophical tension between Socratic political philosophy---a dialectical political philosophy---on the one hand, and an Eleatic political philosophy---a technical, scientific political philosophy or political science---on the other. Plato provides two aspects of his (...) own thought in order to provide an internal critique of his ideas, to reveal their complexity, and to encourage scrutiny and reexamination of them. ;The goal in providing a dialectic between two very different methods of political philosophy is not to show the ultimate similarity between them, or to demonstrate that Plato changed his mind about the way philosophy ought to be practiced and politics ought to be understood. Nor is the dialectical approach intended to portray the inherent complementarity of the different methods. In the Statesman Plato presents an alternative approach to the study of politics---with Socrates present---ultimately to dramatize the advantages of the Socratic approach by way of contrast. For Plato, the Stranger calls attention to a number of difficulties and potential excesses in Socrates' way of philosophizing. Yet it is only through a thorough recognition of Socrates' limitations and potential excesses that his legacy can be perpetuated in proper fashion. ;Only by observing---and participating in---Plato's elaborate thought experiment can we perpetuate a dialectical political philosophy that is most conducive to human affairs and balances objective and perspectival concerns. Plato's dialogic writings attempt to capture as much as possible the complex character of Socrates in a way that invites further investigation and interpretation. The dialectical approach to philosophy balances theoretical and practical concerns without lapsing into relativism or dogmatism. The conception of inquiry as an ongoing pursuit is central to Platonic political philosophy, and is perhaps Plato's most striking and important inheritance from Socrates, his teacher. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects for dispositional accounts of abilities. According to so-called new dispositionalists, an agent has the ability to Φ iff they have a disposition to Φ when trying to Φ. We show that the new dispositionalism is beset by some problems that also beset its predecessor, the conditional analysis of abilities, and bring up some further problems. We then turn to a different approach, which links abilities not to motivational states but to the notion of success, and (...) consider ways of implementing that approach. Our results suggest that there are principled disanalogies between abilities and disposition which prevent any dispositional account of abilities from succeeding. (shrink)

We discuss from a philosophical perspective the way in which the normal concept of time might be said to `emerge' in a quantum theory of gravity. After an introduction, we briefly discuss the notion of emergence, without regard to time. We then introduce the search for a quantum theory of gravity ; and review some general interpretative issues about space, time and matter. We then discuss the emergence of time in simple quantum geometrodynamics, and in the Euclidean approach. Section 6 (...) concludes. (shrink)

Author Jeremy Waldron has thoroughly revised thirteen of his most recent essays in order to offer a comprehensive critique of the idea of the judicial review of legislation. He argues that a belief in rights is not the same as a commitment to a Bill of Rights. This book presents legislation by a representative assembly as a form of law making which is especially apt for a society whose members disagree with one another about fundamental issues of principle.

Bentham's best-known book stands as a classic of both philosophy and jurisprudence. The 1789 work articulates an important statement of the foundations of utilitarian philosophy — it also represents a pioneering study of crime and punishment. Bentham's reasoning remains central to contemporary debates in moral and political philosophy, economics, and legal theory.

This paper responds to the contributions by Alexander Bird, Nathan Wildman, David Yates, Jennifer McKitrick, Giacomo Giannini & Matthew Tugby, and Jennifer Wang. I react to their comments on my 2015 book Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, and in doing so expands on some of the arguments and ideas of the book.

Since its founding in the nineteenth century, social anthropology has been seen as the study of exotic peoples in faraway places. But today more and more anthropologists are dedicating themselves not just to observing but to understanding and helping solve social problems wherever they occur--in international aid organizations, British TV studios, American hospitals, or racist enclaves in Eastern Europe, for example. In Exotic No More , an initiative of the Royal Anthropological Institute, some of today's most respected anthropologists demonstrate, in (...) clear, unpretentious prose, the tremendous contributions that anthropology can make to contemporary society. They cover issues ranging from fundamentalism to forced migration, child labor to crack dealing, human rights to hunger, ethnicity to environmentalism, intellectual property rights to international capitalisms. But Exotic No More is more than a litany of gloom and doom the essays also explore topics usually associated with leisure or "high" culture, including the media, visual arts, tourism, and music. Each author uses specific examples from their fieldwork to illustrate their discussions, and 62 photographs enliven the text. Throughout the book, the contributors highlight anthropology's commitment to taking people seriously on their own terms, paying close attention to what they are saying and doing, and trying to understand how they see the world and why. Sometimes this bottom-up perspective makes the strange familiar, but it can also make the familiar strange, exposing the cultural basis of seemingly "natural" behaviors and challenging us to rethink some of our most cherished ideas--about gender, "free" markets, "race," and "refugees," among many others. Contributors: William O. Beeman Philippe Bourgois John Chernoff E. Valentine Daniel Alex de Waal Judith Ennew James Fairhead Sarah Franklin Michael Gilsenan Faye Ginsburg Alma Gottlieb Christopher Hann Faye V. Harrison Richard Jenkins Melissa Leach Margaret Lock Jeremy MacClancy Jonathan Mazower Ellen Messer A. David Napier Nancy Scheper-Hughes Jane Schneider Parker Shipton Christopher B. Steiner. (shrink)

Negative Ecstasies discusses the contribution and significance of the work of Georges Bataille to the contemporary study of religion and theology, collecting essays that examine specific case studies and make connections to other significant scholars in the field.

Der »Grundriss Heidegger« versteht sich als eine Einführung zu Martin Heideggers Leben und vor allem als Nachschlagewerk zu seinen Schriften. Diese haben (Stand Frühjahr 2012) einen Umfang von nahezu 27.000 Seiten, verteilt auf die bisher erschienenen 79 Bände der Gesamtausgabe, wozu noch zahlreiche Einzelveröffentlichungen und Briefbände kommen. Der erste Teil, Synopsis, ist der Versuch, über ein Denken umfassend zu orientieren, das sein Autor unter das Motto »Wege, nicht Werke« gestellt hat. In acht Hauptteilen (Sein, Welt und Sein, In-der-Welt-Sein, Kehre zum (...) Sein, Sein und Nichts, Ereignis und Sein, Bauen am Sein, Haus des Seins) soll die Einheit dieses Denkens sichtbar werden, die durchlaufend nummerierten Paragraphen folgen mit kleineren sachlich bedingten Abweichungen dem chronologischen Ablauf. Der zweite Teil, Lemmata, ist ein Heidegger-Lexikon mit 241 Stichworten von »Abendland« bis »Zwischen«. Um diesen Index in überschaubaren Grenzen zu halten, werden verwandte Stichworte gelegentlich in einem Artikel zusammengefasst; zudem ermöglicht eine Fülle von Verweisstellen eine weitergehende Orientierung. Den Stichworten folgen im Allgemeinen Angaben zur Sekundärliteratur. Der dritte Teil, Daten, umfasst drei Abschnitte: eine Übersicht über die wichtigsten Daten von Heideggers Leben und Wirken, Kurzbiographien wichtiger Personen aus Heideggers engerem Umfeld sowie Kurzbeschreibungen zu allen in den Bänden der Gesamtausgabe enthaltenen und einigen in dieser noch nicht erschienenen kleineren Schriften. Der vierte Teil, Appendices, enthält ein Abkürzungsverzeichnis, ein Verzeichnis aller im Buch zitierten Literatur, das Sachregister zum ersten Teil und das Inhaltsverzeichnis des Grundrisses. (shrink)

It is shown that the basic postulate of utilitarianism does not work when we must decide whether a person should be brought into existence. Utilitarianism must be supplemented by further axioms. Those proposed lead to the consequence that as far as the potential child's utility is concerned, it is morally preferable not to produce children at all. This consequence is accepted. It is still recommended when parents? utility is taken into account.

The contractarian theory elaborated by John Rawls in A Theory of Justice exploits the difference principle in a great many ways. Rawls argues that, when used as part of a set of guiding principles for structuring the basic institutions of society, it simplifies the problem of interpersonal comparisons (91-4)1, helps compensate for the arbitrariness of natural endowments (101-3), promotes a harmony of interests between citizens (104-5), reintroduces the principle of fraternity to democratic society (105-6), and, what is critical to his (...) contractarian theory, it is an essential part of the principles of justice which would be chosen by free, equal, and rational persons in the original position. (shrink)

Most of us believe that partiality applies in a broad range of relationships. One relationship on which there is much disagreement is co-nationality. Some writers argue that co-national partiality is not justified in certain cases, like killing in war, since killing in defense of co-nationals is intuitively impermissible in other contexts. I argue that this approach overlooks an important structural feature of partiality—namely, that its scope is sometimes restricted. In this essay, I show how some relationships that generate reasons of (...) partiality are restricted in scope—that is, they generate reasons within particular contexts or with respect to particular goods. I then argue that co-national partiality is scope restricted. I then show how this fact helps proponents of co-national partiality overcome the aforementioned objection to its application in cases like war. (shrink)

As idealized descriptions of mathematical language, there is a sense in which formal systems specify too little, and there is a sense in which they specify too much. On the one hand, formal languages fail to account for a number of features of informal mathematical language that are essential to the communicative and inferential goals of the subject. On the other hand, many of these features are independent of the choice of a formal foundation, so grounding their analysis on a (...) particular choice of a formal system introduces unnecessary specificity. This chapter begins to map out the design features of mathematical language without descending to the level of formal implementation, drawing on examples from the mathematical literature and insights from the design of computational proof assistants and their libraries. (shrink)

Introduces history's greatest philosophers and explains their major contributions to the field of philosophy, profiling such figures as Francis Bacon, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Bertrand Russell.

We have two aims. The main one is to expound the idea of renormalization in quantum field theory, with no technical prerequisites. Our motivation is that renormalization is undoubtedly one of the great ideas—and great successes--of twentieth-century physics. Also it has strongly influenced in diverse ways, how physicists conceive of physical theories. So it is of considerable philosophical interest. Second, we will briefly relate renormalization to Ernest Nagel's account of inter-theoretic relations, especially reduction. One theme will be a contrast between (...) two approaches to renormalization. The old approach, which prevailed from ca. 1945 to 1970, treated renormalizability as a necessary condition for being an acceptable quantum field theory. On this approach, it is a piece of great good fortune that high energy physicists can formulate renormalizable quantum field theories that are so empirically successful. But the new approach to renormalization explains why the phenomena we see, at the energies we can access in our particle accelerators, are described by a renormalizable quantum field theory. For whatever non-renormalizable interactions may occur at yet higher energies, they are insignificant at accessible energies. Thus the new approach explains why our best fundamental theories have a feature, viz. renormalizability, which the old approach treated as a selection principle for theories. That is worth saying since philosophers tend to think of scientific explanation as only explaining an individual event, or perhaps a single law, or at most deducing one theory as a special case of another. Here we see a framework in which there is a space of theories. And this framework is powerful enough to deduce that what seemed “manna from heaven” is to be expected: the good fortune is generic. We also maintain that universality, a concept stressed in renormalization theory, is essentially the familiar philosophical idea of multiple realizability; and that it causes no problems for reductions of a Nagelian kind. (shrink)

Plato is often acknowledged as the first philosophical critic of democracy and his Republic is regularly taken as a paradigm of an anti-democratic work. While it is true that Plato objected to much about the democracy of his own time, Plato’s political theorizing also reveals an interest in improving democratic institutions. This chapter explores three themes in Plato’s thinking about democracy: firstly, Plato's insistence that rulers should be knowledgeable and his claim that most people are politically incompetent (§1); secondly, Plato's (...) criticisms of oratory and the corrupting effects of public rhetoric (§2); thirdly, Plato's use of democratic institutions in the Laws (§3). Once we appreciate these different evaluations of democratic practices, we can see that Plato was not simply ‘anti-democratic’ or ‘pro-democratic’ but thought some democratic practices should be abandoned, some reformed, and some adopted. (shrink)

Shearmur draws on his years as Popper's assistant, on unpublished material in the Hoover archive, and on wider themes within Popper's philosophy to offer striking critical re-interpretations of his ethical and social theory. This title available in eBook format. Click here for more information . Visit our eBookstore at: www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.

Of all the demands that mathematics imposes on its practitioners, one of the most fundamental is that proofs ought to be correct. It has been common since the turn of the twentieth century to take correctness to be underwritten by the existence of formal derivations in a suitable axiomatic foundation, but then it is hard to see how this normative standard can be met, given the differences between informal proofs and formal derivations, and given the inherent fragility and complexity of (...) the latter. This essay describes some of the ways that mathematical practice makes it possible to reliably and robustly meet the formal standard, preserving the standard normative account while doing justice to epistemically important features of informal mathematical justification. (shrink)

The COVID-19 global pandemic has shone a light on several important ethical questions, ranging from fairness in resource allocation to the ethical justification of government mandates. In addition to these institutional issues, there are also several ethical questions that arise at the interpersonal level. This essay focuses on several of these issues. In particular, I argue that, despite the insistence in public health messaging that avoiding infecting others constitutes ‘saving lives’, virus transmission that results in death constitutes an act of (...) killing. Whether this killing is wrongful depends on several factors. I consider one intuitively plausible view—namely, that in many cases, killing via unintentional transmission is not wrongful, because the parties in question have implicitly waived their rights against this harm, often via reciprocal risk imposition. I argue that this view is mistaken, but that its central insight can be better captured by identifying the appropriate standards of blame that we ought to apply during a pandemic. I conclude by showing how these conclusions can be fruitfully applied to certain institutional questions, such as helping to justify restricting government mandates. (shrink)

"Arguing that debates over legitimacy, political violence, freedom, and justice would benefit greatly from cross-tradition theorizing, this book shows how putting analytic and continental political theory in conversation would help us to overcome these intractable problems"--.

The new critical edition of the works and correspondence of Jeremy Bentham is being prepared and published under the supervision of the Bentham Committee of University College London. In spite of his importance as jurist, philosopher, and social scientist, and leader of the Utilitarian reformers, the only previous edition of his works was a poorly edited and incomplete one brought out within a decade or so of his death. Eight volumes of the new Collected Works, five of correspondence, and (...) three of writings on jurisprudence, appeared between 1968 and 1981, published by the Athlone Press. Further volumes in the series since then are published by Oxford University Press. The overall plan and principles of the edition are set out in the General Preface to The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1, which was the first volume of the Collected Works to be published.An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, Jeremy Bentham's best-known work, is a classic text in modern philosophy and jurisprudence. First published in 1789, it contains the important statement of the foundations of utilitarian philosophy and a pioneering study of crime and punishment, both of which remain at the heart of contemporary debates in moral and political philosophy, economics, and legal theory. Printed here in full is the definitive edition, edited by the distinguished scholars J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart. An introductory essay by Hart, first published in 1982 and a widely acknowledged classic in its own right, is reprinted here. It contains an important analysis of Bentham's principle of utility, theory of action, and an account of the relationship between law and morality.A new introduction by the leading Bentham scholar F. Rosen, specially written for this Clarendon Paperback edition, provides students with a helpful survey of Bentham's main ideas and an extensive bibliographical study of recent critical work on Bentham. Professor Rosen's essay also contains a new analysis of the principle of utility in Bentham's philosophy which is compared with its use in Hume and J. S. Mill. (shrink)