【Philosophy】African philosophy cannot be a thing
This essay unpacks several arguments about the metaphilosophic nature of African philosophy and charts a way through the problems these arguments enco... [more]
【Philosophy】Fusion Philosophy and Epistemic Injustice
I use the concept of epistemic injustice to think through the practice and methodology of comparative, or fusion, philosophy. I make two related claim... [more]
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On the value-neutrality of the concepts of health and disease: Unto the breach again
A number of philosophers of medicine have attempted to provide analyses of health and disease in which the role that values play in those concepts is restricted. There are three ways in which values can be restricted in the concepts of health and disease.
On the value of the panentheistic analogy: A response to Willem Drees
The author expresses appreciation to Professor Drees for his careful and mostly accurate reading of God and Contemporary Science. The exchange provides che opportunity to step back from the specifics of the debate and clarify what it is that gives rise to
Cosmological singularity and the creation of the universe
One of the most important and most frequently discussed theological problems related to cosmology is the creation problem. Unfortunately, it is usually considered in a context of a rather simplistic understanding of the initial singularity (often referred
God, freedom, and evil: Perspectives from religion and science
This paper develops analogies concerning the evolution of dissipative structures in nonequilibrium thermodynamics to interpret irrational human behavior in which one finds a lack of correspondence between the invested means and the consequences observed.
Higher pantheism
Romantic sensibility and political necessity led Humphry Davy, Britain's most prominent scientist in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, to pantheism: nature worship, involving for him a fervent belief in the immortality of the soul. Rapt with a
Crossing the Olentangy River: The figure of the earth and the military-industrial-academic-complex,
This paper explores the history of a unique assemblage of researchers in the geodetic and allied sciences organised at Ohio State University (OSU) in 1947 at the beginning of the Cold War. From about 1950 to 1970, the OSU geodetic sciences group was the m
Science and security before the atomic bomb: The loyalty case of Harald U. Sverdrup
In the summer of 1941, Harald Sverdrup, the Norwegian-born Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) in La Jolla, California, was denied security clearance to work on Navy-sponsored research in underwater acoustics applied to anti-submarin
T. C. Chamberlin, climate change, and cosmogony
This paper examines the life and work of T. C. Chamberlin, a prominent glacial geologist who developed an interest in interdisciplinary earth science. His work on the geological agency of the atmosphere informed his understanding of climate change and oth
The assembly of geophysics: Scientific disciplines as frameworks of consensus
What makes any investigative field a scientific discipline? This article argues that disciplines are ever-changing frameworks within which scientific activity is organised. Moreover, disciplinarity is not a yes or no proposition: scientific activities may
Imagining membership: The conception of Europe in the political thought of T. G. Masaryk and Vaclav
A decade after the fall of Communism in Europe, the Czech Republic's membership in the European Union is still a matter of a relatively short waiting period of 4 years. Not so the imagination of this membership and the creation of a political concept cre
An american philosopher at Moscow State University, 1964-1965
For an American philosopher participating in a cultural exchange program with the Soviet Union in 1964-65, a year spent in the Philosophy Faculty of Moscow State University, studying and doing research in the history of Russian philosophy, provided many i
The challenge of postmodernism and the health of theology
This article addresses the situation of contemporary theological thinking in relation to postmodernism, or contemporary Continental philosophy. Using a criterion of health from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it argues that theology should avoid eit
Complexity versus uncertainty: The question of staying alive
Some real objects show a very particular tendency: that of becoming independent with regard to the uncertainty of their surroundings. This is achieved by the exchange of three quantities: matter, energy and information. A conceptual framework, based on bo
Two explanations of evolutionary progress
Natural selection explains how living forms are fitted to their conditions of life. Darwin argued that selection also explains what he called the gradual advancement of the organisation, i.e. evolutionary progress. Present-day selectionists disagree. In t
The revival of rejective negation
Whether assent )'acceptance') and dissent ('rejection') are thought of us speech acts or as propositional attitudes, the leading idea of rejectivism is that a grasp of the distinction between them is prior to our understanding of negation as a sentenc