Explaining the emergence of stochastic irreversible macroscopic dynamics from time-reversible deterministic microscopic dynamics is one of the key problems in philosophy of physics. The Mori-Zwanzig (MZ) projection operator formalism, which is one of the most important methods of modern nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, allows for a systematic derivation of irreversible transport equations from

Ross Henry Day was an Australian experimental psychologist well known for his research on visual illusions and for his critical role in the establishment of experimental psychology in Australia. This role began with his creation of Australia’s first department of experimental psychology at Monash University in 1965. He also played a leading role in the formation of the Australian Psychological Society

This paper introduces a break with the traditional monolithic view of colonial cartography in Africa, in which cartography as a colonial instrument belonged only to the European powers. These took credit for cartographical projects, without acknowledging the work of non-European powers. It historically contextualizes the Egyptian cartography of Harar (today in Ethiopia) during 1875–1885, and throws

Published in Theology and Science (Ahead of Print, 2022)

In his Confession of Faith, Francis Bacon makes the striking claim that the laws of nature have changed over time. While the connections between this claim and theology are outlined in the Confession itself, it is not clear what role the proposal of mutable laws of nature might play in Bacon’s program of reform for natural philosophy. I argue that the notion that the laws of nature have changed over

Rudolf Schuessler has argued that sixteenth-century thinkers developed a concept of equal probability that was virtually absent before 1500 and that may have contributed to the birth of mathematical probability shortly after 1650. This note uses additional textual evidence to argue that the concept of equal probability was in fact generally available to medieval thinkers. It is true that ascriptions

In examining the roles of the shadow (umbra) in medieval science, this paper analyses a hitherto unstudied early fourteenth-century optical treatise with the incipit Perspectiva cum sit una (PCSU), which, on the basis of medieval evidence, may arguably be attributed to Thomas Bradwardine. The third part of this treatise, on shadows, presents the doctrine of three shadow shapes – a doctrine which was

This article examines the use of astronomical observations of the austral sky in treatises written by Italian astrologers during the sixteenth century. The references made to navigators’ accounts and diagrams of southern stars in the works of Agostino Nifo, Girolamo Cardano, Francesco Giuntini and Francesco Pifferi show their attempts to include previously unknown stars in Ptolemaic framing. Although

This paper explores female networking practices by comparing cases two centuries apart, an experiment made possible by a history of science renewed by a mutually enriching dialogue with science, technology and society studies (STS). The first part analyses the networking strategies of Clotilde Tambroni (1758–1817), a scholar who managed a university career in Bologna under the shadow of the Napoleonic

By examining the 1935 attempt by the Enkeldoorn Town Management Board in Southern Rhodesian (modern-day Zimbabwe) to change the town's name to Charter, this article examines the contentious politics of place renaming and its intersection with struggles over public memory, identity, and belonging. It examines how the Afrikaner population, which was a component of Southern Rhodesia's white society, campaigned

The starting point of this article is the observation that the emergence of the Anthropocene rehabilitates the need for philosophical reflections on the ontology of technology. In particular, if technological innovations on an ontic level of beings in the world are created, but these innovations at the same time create the Anthropocene World at an ontological level, this raises the question how World

The post-war era of the 1940s is known for the birth of global governance, a time when Western nations united in efforts to reconstruct the war-torn world and reflected on the role of science in society. History and philosophy of science (HPS) was one of the early projects that emerged out of the war years. Diana (Ding) Dyason who headed the first HPS department in the southern hemisphere is honoured

Geoffrey Burnstock was a biomedical scientist who gained renown for his discovery that adenosine 5′-triphosphate (ATP) functions as an extracellular signalling molecule. Born in London and educated at King’s and University Colleges, he did postdoctoral work at Mill Hill and Oxford. He moved in 1959 to the Department of Zoology at the University of Melbourne because he sensed there a greater freedom

ABSTRACT Modern theologians are interested in scientific approaches for conceptualizing God and divine action. Emergentist monism is one such attempt, but those models, Clayton and Yong as representative, have been critiqued for appealing to a science that cannot sustain their theological commitments. A different kind of emergentism is required. A comprehensive accounting of spirit maps onto scientific

Published in Theology and Science (Ahead of Print, 2022)

ABSTRACT This essay is a response to Adam Pryor's Russell Family Fellowship Paper from the 2020 RFF Conference at the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences of the Graduate Theological Union. It engages with Pyror's argument, critiquing his view of planetarity as too large. Planetarity is also too small to be limited to a planet, because a planet or a moon that can sustain life, at least life

Published in Theology and Science (Ahead of Print, 2022)

In the late 1930s, the American oil company Aramco helped Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud develop his royal farm outside Riyadh. On the king's request, Aramco introduced new technology to tap the Al Kharj region's rich aquifer water and establish vast fields of wheat, alfalfa, and other water-intensive crops. Saudi Arabia's aquifers have since been pumped dry in service of the ‘Garden of Eden’ idyll promised

At the end of World War I, peace treaties wiped the Austro-Hungarian Empire off the map, and as a result of the Treaty of Trianon on June 4, 1920, the Kingdom of Hungary was dismembered. As a part of this process, a thin band of mainly German-speaking territory of some 4000 km2, West-Hungary, became a part of Austria. This paper investigates both the arguments used by Hungarian geographers in defence

The visualization of spatial knowledge is so common today that we rarely give it a second thought. But it depends upon the fairly recent recognition that maps are not just representations of the landscape, but also tools of analysis. By the end of the eighteenth century, Americans and Europeans began to use maps and other graphic tools to harvest data about the natural world. In the United States,

This paper analyses the landscape defined by rural settlements, with Hispanic Muslim remnants built in a rammed-earth technique in a valley located in the south-eastern Iberian Peninsula. The aim of this work is to describe the different anthropic points of this particular medieval landscape to contextualize them in the historical literature and then to expose, alongside the methodological innovations

The Lake Pátzcuaro region has recently been a focus of attention of various scholars working in the field of cultural studies. These works have highlighted the role of Lake Pátzcuaro in creating a national culture and identity during the postrevolutionary period in México (1920–1940). However, the cultural production of nature has not been subject to the same attention. Taking a cultural and historical

The Nothing from Infinity paradox arises when the combination of two infinitudes of point particles meet in a supertask and disappear. Corral-Villate claims that my arguments for disappearance fail and concedes that this failure also produces an extreme kind of indeterminism, which I have called plenitudinous. So my supertask at least poses a dilemma of extreme indeterminism within Newtonian point

The aim of this article is to use a model from the origin of life studies to provide some depth and detail to our understanding of exploratory models by suggesting that some of these models should be understood as indeterminate. Models that are indeterminate are a type of exploratory model and therefore have extensive potential and can prompt new lines of research. They are distinctive in that, given

By the late 1880s, the existence of alkyl derivatives of metals such as zinc and mercury was well established but diethyl magnesium had been poorly characterised and obtaining proof of its existence was a reasonable aim for chemists. Professor David Orme Masson and his student, Norman Wilsmore, at the university in the British colonial capital, Melbourne, accepted the challenge despite their distance

Hans Freeman was born in Germany and arrived in Australia with his parents in 1938. A brilliant student at the University of Sydney, he spent a seminal year at the California Institute of Technology before joining the staff at Sydney and initiating research on bioinorganic chemistry, studying metal ion complexes of compounds of biological significance such as amino acids, peptides and proteins. In

This article discusses the participation of women in the development of eighteenth-century French political economy and, more specifically, their role in the network of a prominent group of French economic authors of this period, known as the physiocrats. Our argument is that women played a significant, if seldom visible, role in the creation and dissemination of the ‘new science’ of physiocratic political

(2022). The Believer: Alien Encounters, Hard Science, and the Passion of John Mack. Theology and Science. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Theological progress occurs when explanations are contested, revised, and upgraded. But what are explanations? According to the physicist David Deutsch, an explanation involves the application of knowledge to a problem. The essay will present three models for the operation of explanations within the discipline of theology: the perspectivist, aesthetical, and teleological. Importantly, each

(2022). Spirit tech: the brave new world of consciousness hacking and enlightenment engineering. Theology and Science. Ahead of Print.

The author of this paper discusses the theme of the "simulated body", that is the sense of "being there” in a body that is not one's own, or that does not exist in the way one perceives it. He addresses this issue by comparing Immersive Virtual Reality technology, the phenomenological approach, and Gerald Edelman's theory of Neural Darwinism. Virtual Reality has been used to throw light on some phenomena

The literature on values in science struggles with questions about how to describe and manage the role of values in scientific research. We argue that progress can be made by shifting this literature’s current emphasis. Rather than arguing about how non-epistemic values can or should figure into scientific assessment, we suggest analyzing how scientific assessment can accommodate non-epistemic values

An Australian Bird Book by J. A. Leach, published in 1911, was the first field guide to Australia’s avifauna. Unlike today’s field guides, it was not tightly focussed on identification, instead devoting more than half its words to an expansive dissertation on the natural history of birds. This article scrutinises and contextualises Leach’s Bird Book to illuminate some of the interconnections between

The mid sixteenth century wave of encyclopaedic publications about fish and other water creatures introduced massive numbers of newly made naturalia images. This article concentrates on the phase of image making and collecting that came before print. The focus is on the lost album with fish drawings created before 1551 by the Venetian humanist Daniele Barbaro and his personal painter Maestro Plinio

In 1974 the Nobel laureate Sir Robert Robinson OM PRS (1886–1975) was gathering information for the memoirs he was writing. As part of his research, he recorded a conversation with his former student, fellow Nobel laureate Professor Dorothy Hodgkin OM FRS (1910–1994), during which she outlined the key stages of her career. She explained the principles underlying crystallography and described her work

In his article, ‘Social constructionism and climate science denial’, Hansson claims to present empirical evidence that the cultural theory developed by Dame Mary Douglas, Aaron Wildavsky and ourselves (among others) leads to (climate) science denial. In this reply, we show that there is no validity to these claims. First, we show that Hansson’s empirical evidence that cultural theory has led to climate

In recent publications we have drawn attention to the fact that if the dynamics of a model is structurally unstable, then the presence of structural model error places in-principle limits on the model’s ability to generate decision-relevant probability forecasts. Writing with a varying array of co-authors, Eric Winsberg has now produced at least four publications in which he dismisses our points as

In 1665, Thomas Sprat's efforts to defend the hospitality bestowed on Samuel Sorbière, when the French savant visited London, were published in his Letter containing some observations on Monsieur de Sorbier's voyage into England. This book, for which Sprat stopped work on his now more famous History of the Royal-Society, challenged Sorbière's account of how he had been ‘entertained’, insisting he ‘be

Häggqvist and Wikforss (2018) argued that in the case of so-called natural kind terms, semantic externalism relies on an untenable metaphysics of kinds: microessentialism. They further claimed that this metaphysics fails, for largely empirical reasons. Focussing on the case of water, Hoefer and Martí European Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 9, (2019) rejoin that suitably construed, microessentialism

This paper is drawn from a chapter of a forthcoming book on Canadian physician Maude Abbott. The excerpt explores how a prominent woman negotiated relationships during the early twentieth century. Abbott spent most of her career at McGill University in Montreal, as curator of its medical museum and as a researcher in congenital heart disease. Nonetheless her network of correspondents was vast. Engaging

(2022). Theology and Science News. Theology and Science: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 137-137.

Matthias Egg (2021) argues that scientific realism can be reconciled with quantum mechanics and its foundational underdetermination by focusing realist commitments on ‘effective’ ontology. I argue in general terms that Egg’s effective realism is ontologically overly promiscuous. I illustrate the issue in relation to both Newtonian mechanics and quantum mechanics.

Neo-Malthusian population planning that links high fertility rate to poverty has been an area that has spawned vast and rich scholarship. In the Indian context, scholars have drawn continuities from late colonial birth control advocacy to the targeted sterilizations in 1975–1977. However, the different iterations of demographic transition theory in the 1950s–1970s are subsumed within a unilinear reading

This paper examines the construction of imperial landscapes in the borderlands of eastern Africa in the early twentieth century. Recent literature has emphasized the haphazard, contingent, and often hybrid nature of mapping imperial frontiers and colonial governance in eastern Africa. This paper looks at the role of photography in the mapping of the Kenya-Somali frontier through the rich photographic

According to van Fraassen, inference to the best explanation (IBE) is incompatible with Bayesianism. To argue to the contrary, many philosophers have suggested hybrid models of scientific reasoning with both explanationist and probabilistic elements. This paper offers another such model with two novel features. First, its Bayesian component is imprecise. Second, the domain of credence functions can

The aim of this paper is to better qualify the problem of online trust. The problem of online trust is that of evaluating whether online environments have the proper design to enable trust. This paper tries to better qualify this problem by showing that there is no unique answer, but only conditional considerations that depend on the conception of trust assumed and the features that are included in

(2022). Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind. Theology and Science: Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 263-264.

ABSTRACT Number and Count Sentences like ‘The number of Martian moons is two’ and ‘Mars has two moons’ give rise to a puzzle. How can they be equivalent if only the truth of Number but not that of Count Sentences requires the existence of numbers? Proponents of Linguistic Deflationism seek to resolve this puzzle by arguing that on their correct linguistic analysis the truth of Number Sentences does

ABSTRACT Several recent authors have suggested that much of the discussion on divine action is flawed since it presupposes that divine and human agency compete. Such authors advocate a re-appropriation of the Scholastic distinction between primary and secondary causation which, it is suggested, solves many problems in the theology of divine action. This article critiques defences of the primary/secondary

It is generally believed that two rival non-relativistic quantum theories, the realist interpretation of quantum mechanics and Bohmian mechanics, are empirically equivalent. In this paper, I use these two quantum theories to show that it is possible to offer a solution to underdetermination in some local cases, by specifying what counts as relevant empirical evidence in empirical equivalence and underdetermination

In the century proceeding the Second World War the historical geography of Korea, increasingly influenced by Imperial Japan, experienced rapid change. From a macroscopic perspective, Korean port cities' unprecedented spatial changes were deeply related to Korea's incorporation process into the capitalist world-system and direct Japanese rule from 1910. This study uses two conceptual categories (the

During the mid-nineteenth century, British naval expeditions navigated the world as part of the most extensive scientific undertaking of the age. Between 1839 and the early 1850s, the British government orchestrated a global surveying of the Earth's magnetic phenomena: this was a philosophical enterprise of unprecedented state support and geographical extent. But to conduct this investigation relied