Sometimes it takes more than one discipline to write a book review. Sometimes it even takes more than one book to review a book. My goal in this brief essay is to do some justice (in the form of a… Read More ›
Month: September 2019
Collaborative Review Part 2: What Makes Interdisciplinarity Unique? Samantha Jo Fried
I want to focus in on Amanda’s question: “What does interdisciplinarity look like when it is situated within a discipline, as is the case with Science and Technology Studies?” Then, I will attempt to answer her question: “What, if anything,… Read More ›
Collaborative Review, Part 1, on Being an Interdisciplinary Academic, Amanda K Phillips de Lucas
An oft repeated observation in Catherine Lyall’s recent book, Being an Interdisciplinary Academic, states that the phenomenon she describes are “not unique to interdisciplinarity.” The text, which draws from the analysis of interviews with UK based academics who received awards… Read More ›
Reply to Claus-Christian Carbon: “Conspiracy Theory,” a Valid World-Shaping Scientific and Analytic Category, Lee Basham
“Conspiracy theories” are reviled by some, typically “elites” of limited kinds—political, corporate media and academic—and in many cases suspected to be true and even believed by far, far more people. This reality puzzles some, reassures others … [please read below… Read More ›
The Philosophy of Taking Conspiracy Theories Seriously, Ori Freiman
During the last few decades, the proliferation of interest in conspiracy theories has grown tremendously. What was once a niche interest of the very few is now a widespread phenomenon in our culture—from political campaigns and mainstream news, to the… Read More ›
A Response to “Uptake of a Conspiracy Theory Attribution: Part 1 and 2” by Brian Martin, Samantha Vanderslott
The two-part article by Brian Martin contains two main points. The first is his argument of Conspiracy Theory Attribution (CTA) as a method of denigration, which I have little to disagree with. The second is the example given of the… Read More ›
Native Dance as Epistemology: A Review of Shay Welch’s The Phenomenology of a Performative Knowledge System, Sebastian Purcell
Native dancing practices are not thought to be a philosophical topic, except perhaps as worthy of reflection for specific aesthetic considerations. Shay Welch’s book will convince you otherwise. Dancing does, the book argues, have epistemic properties because, in a philosophically… Read More ›
Chain Reaction: Critical Theory Needs Critical Mass—Contradiction, Crisis and the Value-Form, Mike Neary
Krystian Szadkowski and Jakub Krzeski have written a significant paper, In, Against and Beyond: A Marxist Critique for Higher Education in Crisis (2019), setting out a critical framework ‘to render visible what lies beyond the current form of higher education’ (1)…. Read More ›
The Aims of Reliable Knowledge: A Reply to Seungbae Park, Richard A. Healey
As a scientific realist, Seungbae Park in his (2019) paper “The Disastrous Implications of the ‘English’ View of Rationality in a Social World” seeks to repel an anti-realist attack from Bas Van Fraassen by turning his opponent’s new epistemology against… Read More ›
From Transcendental Dopes to Transhumanists: Prolegomena to a Futurist Take on the History and Philosophy of Science, Steve Fuller
It is now fashionable to condemn our species’ exalted self-regard for precipitating that apocalypse in waiting known as the ‘Anthropocene’. Nevertheless, I shall heretically argue that we really know more than we normally think we do. But I don’t mean… Read More ›