Book Review contributions are single-authored or multiple-authored reviews of recent books in the area of social epistemology.
Believing in Dawkins (2020) by Eric Steinhart is a book that answers a question I would not myself have asked. This makes it both intriguing and frustrating. Steinhart wants to build a ‘new spiritual atheism’ based on two elements which,… Read More ›
I always seem to be reviewing books for the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective while on holiday. My last review was written while on the beaches of South Goa, India. That book was by Michael Gibson and was about… Read More ›
I would like to thank Renia Gasparatou, Philip Goff, and Andreas Vrahimis for contributing to the book symposium on For and Against Scientism: Science, Methodology, and the Future of Philosophy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). I am grateful to James… Read More ›
As the pithy title of this book suggests, it was written by someone with a mission. Susan Neiman’s central aim is to challenge the kind of back-of-the-envelope relativism that she argues is a consequence of too much high theory and… Read More ›
The “question of science” consists of many tiny, though rather complicated questions; but defining science, or at least the continuous attempts to characterize science in a unique way, has always had a peculiar socio-cultural implication. The question of what science… Read More ›
Acts of collective creation are varied and plentiful, but they are commonly overlooked and rendered invisible in a contemporary culture invested in sole authorship and individual ownership. Katerina Cizek and William Uricchio draw our attention to this phenomenon by reminding… Read More ›
My interest in Evgeny Morozov’s new podcast on Project Cybersyn is long-lasting. I come from Chile and have been interested in Project Cybersyn ever since reading Eden Medina’s wonderful book Cybernetic Revolutionaries (2011). Hence, I have been eagerly waiting for… Read More ›
It is perhaps an understatement to say that expertise has undergone something of an assault in recent years. Under the post-truth condition, experts and their knowledge have been under attack from politicians, commentators, and ironically those who oppose politicians and… Read More ›
Academics are fond of the practice of gossip, as campus novels make plain. But the scholarship on gossip, while dispersed across many fields, often seems irrelevant to folks who work in social epistemology. Because it is so often defined in… Read More ›
A few months into the pandemic, and I was surprised so many people explicitly rejected expert advice. Mostly, I was shocked by their arguments: they said that scientists keep changing their minds; that not all scientists agree on what we… Read More ›