Andreas Christiansen,Karin Jonch-Clausen,Klemens Kappel | : Many instances of new and emerging science and technology are controversial. Although a number of people, including scientific experts, welcome these developments, a considerable skepticism exists among members of the public. The use of genetically modified organisms is a case in point. In science policy and in science communication, it is widely assumed that such controversial science and technology require public participation in the policy-making process. We examine this view, which we (...) call the Public Participation Paradigm, using the case of GMOs as an example. We suggest that a prominent reason behind the call for public participation is the belief that such participation is required for democratic legitimacy. We then show that the most prominent accounts of democratic legitimacy do not, in fact, entail that public participation is required in cases of controversial science in general, or in the case of GMOs in particular. | : Beaucoup d’avancées scientifiques et de technologies émergentes sont controversées. Bien qu’un certain nombre de personnes, incluant des experts scientifiques, sont favorables à ces développements, la population demeure largement sceptique. Le recours aux organismes génétiquement modifiés illustre une telle situation. Dans les politiques et communications scientifiques, il est largement tenu pour acquis que de telles controverses scientifiques et technologiques requièrent la participation publique dans le processus de prise de décision politique. Nous examinons ce point de vue, que nous appelons le paradigme de la participation publique [Public Participation Paradigm], en nous servant du cas des OGM. Nous suggérons qu’une raison centrale en faveur de l’appel à la participation publique se situe dans la croyance qu’une telle participation est requise par la légitimité démocratique. Nous montrons ensuite que la plupart des principales conceptions de la légitimité démocratique n’impliquent pas, en fait, que la participation publique puisse être requise pour les controverses scientifiques en général, et pour les OGM en particulier. (shrink)

Should scientific facts and methods have an epistemically privileged status in public reason? In Rawls’s public reason account he asserts what we will label the Scientific Standard Stricture: citizens engaged in public reason must be guided by non-controversial scientific methods, and public reason must be in line with non-controversial scientific conclusions. The Scientific Standard Stricture is meant to fulfill important tasks such as enabling the determinateness and publicity of the public reason framework. However, Rawls leaves us without elucidation with regard (...) to when science is and is not ‘non-controversial’ and more importantly, we are left without a justification for a stricture which excludes certain controversial beliefs and methods of inquiry from the realm of political justification. In this article, we offer what we deem to be the most plausible interpretation of Rawls’s Scientific Standards Stricture. We then use Rawls’s general theoretical framework to examine various potential justifications for privileging these ‘non-controversial’ scientific methods and conclusions. We conclude that no viable justification is available to Rawls. (shrink)

Recently Robert B. Talisse has put forth a socio-epistemic justification of liberal democracy that he believes qualifies as a public justification in that it purportedly can be endorsed by all reasonable individuals. In avoiding narrow restraints on reasonableness, Talisse argues that he has in fact proposed a justification that crosses the boundaries of a wide range of religious, philosophical and moral worldviews and in this way the justification is sufficiently pluralistic to overcome the challenges of reasonable pluralism familiar from Rawls. (...) The fascinating argument that Talisse furthers is that when cognitively functional individuals reflect on some of their most basic epistemic commitments they will come to see that, in virtue of these commitments, they are also committed to endorsing key liberal democratic institutions. We argue that the socio-epistemic justification can be reasonably rejected on its own terms and thus fails as a public justification approach. This point is made by illustrating the significance of deep epistemic disagreements in liberal democracies. (shrink)

Die Rassentheorie, die Geschichtsphilosophie, die Ästhetik und die Naturteleologie haben eine Gemeinsamkeit: In all diesen Themengebieten entwickelte Immanuel Kant ein Denken der Zweckmässigkeit. Die Fokussierung auf diesen Strang macht eine Verbindung sichtbar, die von seinen frühen Schriften zu den unterschiedlichen »Rassen« der Menschen hin zur Kritik der Urteilskraft und damit zu seiner Selbstreflexion über die kritische Philosophie reicht. Karin Hostettler arbeitet das mit diesem Denken verbundene Othering und die damit einhergehende Selbstaffirmation heraus und zeigt so die Selbstverortung der kritischen (...) Philosophie in einer kolonialen Episteme auf. (shrink)

In this book, Andrea Clausen intends to reconcile Kripke's point according to which conceptual content has to be considered as being constituted by social, normative practice - by a process of mutual assessments - with the view that the content of empirical assertions has to be conceived as objective. She criticizes approaches that explicate content-constitutive practice in non-normative terms, namely in terms of sanctioning behavior (Haugeland, Pettit, Esfeld). She also rejects a pragmatist reading of Heidegger that proceeds from thoroughly (...) normative but pre-conceptual practice. She develops and defends a particular reading of an approach that conceives normative, conceptually articulated practice - giving and asking for reasons - as primitive (Brandom, McDowell). (shrink)

This book traces and explores the evolution of taste from a design perspective: what it is, how it works and what it does. Karin Tehve examines taste primarily through its recursive relationship to media. This ongoing process changes the relationship between designers and the public, and our understanding of the relationship of individuals to their social contexts. Through an analysis of taste, design is understood to be an active constituent of social life, not as autonomous from it. This book (...) reclaims a term long dismissed from interior design and unveils taste's role as a powerful social and political agent within systems of aesthetics, affecting both its producers and consumers. Each chapter discusses a taste concept or definition, analyzes its reciprocal relationship with media, and explores its implications for interior design. Illustrated with 70 images, taste's relationship to media is viewed through a variety of different lenses, including books, photography, magazines, internet, social media and algorithms. Written for students and scholars of interior design and related design fields, this book will be a helpful resource for all those interested in the question of taste, and is an invitation to produce and consume all media critically. (shrink)

Neo-Scholastic metaphysics plays an outstanding role in 17th century philosophy. The beginnings of the modern scientific view of the world originate from precisely the same time. With reference to the anatomist Francis Glisson (ca. 1597-1677), this study investigates the significance of school metaphysics for the inception of a new form of natural philosophy. It shows that Glisson developed a retrospective theory of substance from his identity as a scientist. In so doing, it casts a surprising light on the formative intellectual (...) conditions governing the emergence of the sciences in the modern age. (shrink)

How does science create knowledge? Epistemic cultures, shaped by affinity, necessity, and historical coincidence, determine how we know what we know. In this book, Karin Knorr Cetina compares two of the most important and intriguing epistemic cultures of our day, those in high energy physics and molecular biology. The first ethnographic study to systematically compare two different scientific laboratory cultures, this book sharpens our focus on epistemic cultures as the basis of the knowledge society.

In Conversation with Karen Barad: Doings of Agential Realism is an accessible introduction to Karen Barad's agential realist philosophy. The authors take on a unique approach to involve the readers in in/formal conversations between Karen, postgraduates, and researchers at a research event held in 2017 at Cape Town, South Africa.

Cultural accounts of scientific ideas and practices have increasingly come to be welcomed as a corrective to previous—and still widely held—theories of scientific knowledge and practices as universal. The editors caution, however, against the temptation to overgeneralize the work of culture, and to lapse into a kind of essentialism that flattens the range and variety of scientific work. The book refers to this tendency as culturalism. The contributors to the volume model a new path where historicized and cultural accounts of (...) scientific practice retain their specificity and complexity without falling into the traps of culturalism. They examine, among other issues, the potential of using notions of culture to study behavior in financial markets; the ideology, organization, and practice of earthquake monitoring and prediction during China's Cultural Revolution; the history of quadratic equations in China; and how studying the "glass ceiling" and employment discrimination became accepted in the social sciences. Demonstrating the need to understand the work of culture as a fluid and dynamic process that directly both shapes and is shaped by scientific practice, Cultures without Culturalism makes an important intervention in science studies. Contributors. Bruno Belhoste, Karine Chemla, Caroline Ehrhardt, Fa-ti Fan,Kenji Ito, Evelyn Fox Keller, Guillaume Lachenal, Donald MacKenzie, Mary S. Morgan, Nancy J. Nersessian, David Rabouin, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Claude Rosental, Koen Vermeir. (shrink)

Generality is a key value in scientific discourses and practices. Throughout history, it has received a variety of meanings and of uses. This collection of original essays aims to inquire into this diversity. Through case studies taken from the history of mathematics, physics and the life sciences, the book provides evidence of different ways of understanding the general in various contexts. It aims at showing how individuals have valued generality and how they have worked with specific types of "general" entities, (...) procedures, and arguments. (shrink)

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz leitete die Bibliothek der Hannoveraner Welfen vierzig Jahre lang bis zu seinem Tod 1716.

Humboldts texttheoretischer Ansatz, dessen Einfluß auf die moderne (Text-)Linguistik größer ist als bisher wahrgenommen, wird im ersten Teil dieses Bandes erstmals zusammenhängend nachgewiesen.

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2012! Contemporary picturebooks open up spaces for philosophical dialogues between people of all ages. As works of art, picturebooks offer unique opportunities to explore ideas and to create meaning collaboratively. This book considers censorship of certain well-known picturebooks, challenging the assumptions on which this censorship is based. Through a lively exploration of children's responses to these same picturebooks the authors paint a way of working philosophically based on respectful listening and creative and authentic interactions, rather (...) than scripted lessons. This dialogical process challenges much current practice in education. The authors propose that a courageous and critical practice of listening is central to the facilitation of mutually educative dialogue. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of education studies, philosophy of education, literacy teaching and learning, children's literature, childhood and pedagogy. (shrink)

In feminist media studies, the growing body of research on media production has indicated that journalism remains divided along gender lines. The purpose of this study is to address the lack of relevant multi-method research on gender inequality in journalism. To assess the structural position of women in the journalistic workforce, the authors conducted a large-scale survey of journalists in Belgium. The survey results were explored in more depth by conducting qualitative interviews with 19 female journalists. The analysis confirms the (...) existence of all traditional barriers that women journalists experience. The added value of this study is that it enumerates several additional difficulties, and offers insight into the strategies that the respondents use to deal with gender-related career obstacles. These strategies were associated with the degree of flexibility in the newsroom for journalists with children, the choice to work part-time or freelance, and the use of new communication technologies. (shrink)

One theme of this special issue is an incitement to reconsider the relationship between pragmatism and critical realism. While their advocates sometimes come into conflict, there are also clearly b...

The Posthuman Child combats institutionalised ageist practices in primary, early childhood and teacher education. Grounded in a critical posthumanist perspective on the purpose of education, it provides a genealogy of psychology, sociology and philosophy of childhood in which dominant figurations of child and childhood are exposed as positioning child as epistemically and ontologically inferior. Entangled throughout this book are practical and theorised examples of philosophical work with student teachers, teachers, other practitioners and children (aged 3-11) from South Africa and Britain. (...) These engage arguments about how children are routinely marginalised, discriminated against and denied, especially when the child is also female, black, lives in poverty and whose home language is not English. The book makes a distinctive contribution to the decolonisation of childhood discourses. Underpinned by good quality picturebooks and other striking images, the book's radical proposal for transformation is to reconfigure the child as rich, resourceful and resilient through relationships with (non) human others, and explores the implications for literary and literacy education, teacher education, curriculum construction, implementation and assessment. It is essential reading for all who research, work and live with children. (shrink)

Dana Villa’s Hannah Arendt: A Very Short Introduction offers the reader an introduction to Hannah Arendt’s thought in five concise chapters. As part of the broader Oxford University Press series of...

This innovative book is one of the first to conduct a systematic comprehensive analysis of the ideals and practices of the evolving green state. It draws on elements of political theory, feminist theory, post-structuralism, governance and institutional theory to conceptualise the green state and advances thinking on how to understand its emergence in the context of climate and sustainability transitions. Focusing on the state as an actor in environmental, climate and sustainability politics, the book explores different principles guiding the emergence (...) of the green state and examines the performance of states and institutional responses to the sustainable and climate transitions in the European and Nordic context in particular. The book's unique focus on the Nordic countries underlines the important to learn from Nordics, which are perceived to be in the forefront of climate and sustainability governance as well as historically strong welfare states. With chapter contributions from leading international scholars in political science, sociology, economics, energy and environmental systems and climate policy studies, this book will be of great value to postgraduate students and researchers working on sustainability transitions, environmental politics and governance, and those with an area studies focus on the Nordic countries. (shrink)

Understanding between care providers and patients with stroke and aphasia: a phenomenological hermeneutic inquiry The present study illuminates the understanding in communication between formal care providers and patients with stroke and aphasia. Five care providers and three such patients participated in the study. Video recordings were made during conversations about pictures (n = 15), and the care providers were also interviewed (n = 15) after the video‐recorded conversations. A phenomenological hermeneutic method of interpretation of the interview text was used. The (...) findings showed that a range of conditions for ‘understanding and being understood’ in the communication on the part of the care providers exists. These different conditions are: lacking both knowledge and understanding; having knowledge but not necessarily accompanied by understanding; and being in understanding. Within the condition ‘being in understanding’, the care providers create a feeling of at‐homeness in a relaxed atmosphere and thus have the opportunity to be in ‘understanding and being understood’ together with the patient. The condition ‘being in understanding’ appears in connection with the care providers’ creating of a ‘calm liturgy of caring’ by mediating humility and calm vitality affects to the patients, and further, when needed, being present on the level of mystery, i.e. caring communion. (shrink)

Recently, Weisbecker and Goswami presented the first comprehensive comparative analysis of brain size, metabolic rate, and development periods in marsupial mammals. In this paper, a strictly energetic perspective is applied to identify general mammalian correlates of brain size evolution. In both marsupials and placentals, the duration or intensity of maternal investment is a key correlate of relative brain size, but here I show that allomaternal energy subsidies may also play a role. In marsupials, an energetic constraint on brain size in (...) adults is only revealed if we consider both metabolic and reproductive rates simultaneously, because a strong trade‐off between encephalization and offspring production masks the positive correlation between basal metabolic rate and brain size in a bivariate comparison. In conclusion, starting from an energetic perspective is warranted to elucidate relations between ecology, social systems, life history, and brain size in all mammals. (shrink)