ABSTRACT Cognitive science of religion is sometimes portrayed as having no bearing on the theological doctrines of particular religious traditions, such as Christianity. In this paper, I argue that the naturalistic account of the etiology of religious beliefs offered by the cognitive science of religion undermines the important Christian doctrine of the grace of faith, which teaches that the special

This article summarises the careers of ten women who have made an amazing contribution to our knowledge of Australian coral reefs and their management, and how this contribution has been used by the Great Barrier Reef Committee (subsequently the Australian Coral Reef Society) to conserve and manage our reefs—an ongoing process in the face of climate change.

ABSTRACT An examination of biology through the lens of thermodynamics affirms Aristotelian and Thomistic emphases on the centrality of volitional action in the good life. Life is characterized by far-from-equilibrium homeostasis that requires and enables work. Entropy leads to genetic disorders, senescence, cancers, and emerging pathogens, yet also drives the generation of novelty and freedom, and

ABSTRACT Experience plays an important role in contemporary theology, but the meaning of the term is often unclear. This article presents six different meanings of the term “experience” and how they are related, inspired by the grounded cognition model of the mind. This is then used to show how the four so-called theological sources (Scripture, tradition, experience and reason) are related in systematic

ABSTRACT Science is a socially conditioned enterprise that strives for maximum rationality and objectivity in its explanation of the world. However, since the relativity of its social conditioning opposes its drive for objectivity, there is a philosophical tension at the very heart of science. Given this tension, why does science even work? More precisely, why does science converge to the truth rather

ABSTRACT In March 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, and there was a worldwide race to find an effective drug and/or vaccine. I present the Jewish ethical approach to two quandaries facing researchers: What is the acceptable degree of risk to the sick and to the healthy volunteers who participate in tests of an experimental vaccine? Is it permissible for a healthy person to volunteer for clinical

Craniology – the practice of inferring intelligence differences from the measurement of human skulls – survived the dismissal of phrenology and remained a widely popular research program until the end of the nineteenth century. From the 1970s, historians and sociologists of science extensively focused on the explicit and implicit socio-cultural biases invalidating the evidence and claims that craniology

Our aim is to introduce necroreverence as analytical category into the research on necropolises as particular spaces. The necroreverence, a cultural esteem for the dead, combines local and imported aesthetic-ideological elements and is reflected in space. Within the text, it is used in the context of cemeteries for Soviet soldiers in Central Europe. As case studies were chosen two necropolises: in

This paper unpacks the material practices and narrative strategies surrounding the aerial work of the 1924 Oxford University Arctic Expedition to Spitsbergen (now Svalbard). Examining the fluid nature of British tropes of polar heroic masculinities, the paper illustrates the adaptability of such tropes in the face of technological change. Specifically, it demonstrates how aviation was mobilised to

The United States national park system currently consists of 423 units, but this does not include twenty-eight units removed from the system. Among those lost were eight western national monuments that included two caves, a fossil site, high mountain parks, desert buttes, and a Native Alaskan village. They were typical small monuments created to preserve historic or scientific features. After several

This article analyzes the spatial and temporal patterning of political arrests during the initial years of the fascist regime in Italy, specifically from 1926 to 1928. During these crucial years, Italy's fascists acted rapidly to consolidate their power and to suppress their opponents. A key element of this takeover was the creation of a political court, the Special Tribunal. I examine the work of

Most philosophers take Benacerraf’s argument in ‘What numbers could not be’ to rebut successfully the reductionist view that numbers are sets. This philosophical consensus jars with mathematical practice, in which reductionism continues to thrive. In this note, we develop a new challenge to Benacerraf’s argument by contesting a central premise which is almost unanimously accepted in the literature

Reading the Mind in the Eyes is a psychometric test first published by Simon Baron-Cohen and colleagues in 1997 and revised in 2001. It was designed to measure subjects' ‘mentalizing’ ability, or their capacity to attribute cognitive and emotional states to others. Although originally developed and used for autistic adults, this instrument has proven remarkably durable in the succeeding two decades

Patrick Matthew (1790–1874) regarded natural selection as a force of conformity. Competition between species kept them from dysmorphic chaos. Catastrophes exterminated many species that would otherwise compete. The absence of this competitive natural selection allowed the remnants to ramify (their lineages to split). Matthew thus united elements of catastrophism and transformism in a way opposite to

In this paper the relationship between phenomenology of perception and synthetic phenomenology is discussed. Synthetic phenomenology is presented on the basis of the issues in A.I. and Robotics that required to address the question of what enables artificial agents to have phenomenal access to the environment. Phenomenology of perception is construed as a theory with autonomous structure and domain

The interpretation of Parmenides’ Περί Φύσεως is a fascinating topic to which philosophers, historians of philosophy and scientists have dedicated many studies along the history of Western thought. The aim of this paper is to present the reading of Parmenides’s work offered by Federigo Enriques. It is based on several original theses: (1) Parmenides was the discoverer of abstract geometry; (2) his

Facing a dramatic depletion of forests in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, throughout the last decades of colonial rule (between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) the Bourbon administration wrote and published a considerable number of laws, reports, surveys, and ordinances on forest management and conservation. In this paper we examine discourses of forest conservation and the measures

This article provides a detailed account of the shifting places of the black Locust tree (Robinia pseudoacacia) in France, from its introduction as a North American exotic in the early seventeenth century to the present. Three phases or moments are identified, articulating material and discursive dimensions of the trajectory of the tree — and of the spaces where it became prominent: exhortation, instrumentalization

This article focuses on three unique products circulating in the eighteenth-century marketplace – castor, mammoth tusks, and asbestos – and highlights the role of naturalists working for the Royal Society in London and at the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in promoting the consumption of these goods. Naturalists’ scientific investigations of these products were essential to distinguish

This article deals with early modern surgical case literature, more specifically with printed collections of observations in surgery. It examines the work of late seventeenth- to late eighteenth-century Italian practitioners from different backgrounds and of different statuses, and highlights the complexity of cognitive and social purposes pervading the genre, besides that of sharing empirical knowledge

Historical and cultural approaches to climate generally consider climate to be a stabilising concept between weather and culture. Different historical and cultural concepts of climate signify different ways of learning to live with the weather. However, anthropogenic climate change evidences the limit of this approach: instead of stabilising, climates ephemeralise together with the ways we have come

This article explores the consequences of the environmental transformations of the Laurentian Valley on the timber trade uniting the Province of Canada and the industrialization of Great Britain during the nineteenth century. The notion of ghost acres used to describe the ecological footprint of resource consumption from abroad is extended to accommodate landscape transformations and enrich our understanding

This paper demonstrates the value of school logbooks, an unusual and hitherto underused archival source, to the field of the historical geographies of weather and climate. It examines logbooks for schools across the Outer Hebrides, or Western Isles, off the west coast of mainland Scotland, ranging from the late nineteenth century until the early twentieth century. The weather had numerous and varied

Although the centenary of the 1919–1920 Paris Peace Conference reignited interest in this pivotal post-war event, the perspective of East Central European geographical sciences remains little investigated. In 1918 and 1919, rather unexpectedly, geography turned out to be a confidante of the knowledge that shaped the future of the world, and it was geographers from new states that emerged in the Eastern

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This article explores the biographies of two gentlewomen, María de Betancourt (1758–1824) and Joana de Vigo (1779–1855), who lived respectively in Tenerife and Menorca, two crucial nodes in the scientific, commercial and military global networks of the late eighteenth century. Some of their scientific and literary contributions are mapped, paying particular attention to how they became active in contemporaneous

This paper takes a fresh look at Celia Fiennes' account of her tour of England, Wales and Scotland, at the end of the seventeenth century. Travelling on horseback, and sometimes on foot, Fiennes recounted her experiences of journeying through the country, commenting on the physical qualities and characteristics of the landscapes she moved through, together with local customs, industrial and agricultural

In this paper, we defend two claims. First, we argue that a notion of contextuality that has been formalized in physics and psychology is applicable to linguistic contexts. Second, we propose that this formal apparatus is philosophically significant for the epistemology of language because it imposes homogeneous rational constraints on speakers. We propose a Contextuality Principle that explains and

A key question of the ‘maverick’ tradition of the philosophy of mathematical practice is addressed, namely what is mathematical progress. The investigation is based on an article by Penelope Maddy devoted to this topic in which she considers only contributions ‘of some mathematical importance’ as progress. With the help of a case study from contemporary mathematics, more precisely from tropical geometry

The article proposes a novel approach to Brazil's history by radicalising environmental history's call for writing biophysical environments into the human past. We offer three independent narrative experiments centring nonhuman organisms and things and their power to shape human lives, institutions, and documents. Focusing on ants, mosquitoes, and plankton, these stories put Brazil's early modernity

This special issue investigates women's scientific networks in Europe roughly between 1720 and 1830, an interesting period from a gender point of view. The articles analyse the role that networks played in enabling, shaping and circumscribing women in their intellectual pursuits, social aspirations and ideals. They also focus on the nature of the members' relationships, how women negotiated their scientific

Scientific journal publishing has become a lucrative enterprise, for commercial firms and (some) society publishers alike; but it was not always thus. The Royal Society is the publisher of the world's longest-running scientific journal, and for most of the history of the Philosophical Transactions, its publication was a severe drain on the Society's finances. This paper uses the rich archives of the

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In a 2022 paper, Hamami claimed that the orthodox view in mathematics is that a proof is rigorous if it can be translated into a derivation. Hamami then developed a descriptive account that explains how mathematicians check proofs for rigor in this sense and how they develop the capacity to do so. By exploring introductory texts in computability theory, we demonstrate that Hamami’s descriptive account

Published in Theology and Science (Vol. 20, No. 3, 2022)

One of the most influential contemporary authors of the new materialist turn in the social sciences is Karen Barad. Barad’s work in agential realism, based on her interpretations of quantum physics, has been widely cited within a growing body of new materialist publications. However, in translating Barad’s assertions into social domains, there has been increasing critical appraisal of the physics underlying

Published in Theology and Science (Vol. 20, No. 3, 2022)

Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider (1891–1990), a refugee immigrant to Australia in 1938, was a student of Nobel Prize-winning physicists, Einstein, Planck, and von Laue. She combined a background in physics, especially relativity theory, with a philosophical focus on the nature and possibilities of knowledge. As well as working at the University of Sydney to teach science students how to recognise philosophical

Metaphors are found all throughout science: in published papers, working hypotheses, policy documents, lecture slides, grant proposals, and press releases. They serve different functions, but perhaps most striking is the way they enable understanding, of a theory, phenomenon, or idea. In this paper, we leverage recent advances on the nature of metaphor and the nature of understanding to explore how

I propose an approach that expands philosophical views of scientific change, on the basis of an analysis of contemporary biomedical research and recent developments in the philosophy of scientific change. Focusing on the establishment of the exposome in epidemiology as a case study and the role of data as a context for contrasting views on change, I discuss change at conceptual, methodological, material

Known as a translator and illustrator of chemical texts, Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1758–1836) has been often represented as the associate of male savants and especially of her husband, the French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier. This article explores her biography from a different angle and focuses on her trajectories as a secrétaire; namely, someone whose main charge was to store and exchange

Gödel argued that the incompleteness theorems entail that the mind is not a machine, or that certain arithmetical propositions are absolutely undecidable. His view was that the mind is not a machine, and that no arithmetical propositions are absolutely undecidable. I argue that his position presupposes that the idealized mathematician has an ability which I call the recursive-ordinal recognition ability

The paper addresses the problem of imaginative resistance in science, that is, why and under what circumstances imagination sometimes resists certain scenarios. In the first part, the paper presents and discusses two accounts concerning the problem and relevant for the main thesis of this study. The first position is that of Gendler (Journal of Philosophy 97:55–81, 2000), (Gendler, in: Nichols (ed)

In 1781, the first issue of The Lady's Poetical Magazine lauded Queen Charlotte (1744–1818) for her role in furthering the sciences, and indeed, to give but one example, the queen's interest in the geological researches of her reader, Jean André de Luc (1727–1817), induced him to write a treatise on his system for her perusal. Besides assembling a significant library containing volumes on all kinds

ABSTRACT In 1967 a well-known geology Professor at Tehran University, Dr Yadollah Sahabi, published a book entitled The Creation of Man. The main argument of his book was that the Qur’anic view of the creation of human beings is not incompatible with the modern understanding of the evolution of living organisms. Almost a year later, the most prominent Shi‘a exegete of the Qur’an in the twentieth century

Scales and spring balances have been part of the equipment of polar expeditions since the explorations of the nineteenth century, but precision beam balances have also been included, specifically, those made by the London instrument firm of L. Oertling. In this paper, the reasons for taking such delicate instruments into such adverse conditions are discussed, as well as some of the logistical and practical

This paper argues that, insofar as we doubt the bivalence of the Continuum Hypothesis or the truth of the Axiom of Choice, we should also doubt the consistency of third-order arithmetic, both the classical and intuitionistic versions. Underlying this argument is the following philosophical view. Mathematical belief springs from certain intuitions, each of which can be either accepted or doubted in

In 1667, twenty years before Isaac Newton published his mathematization of physics, and more than ten years before the publication of Giovanni Borelli's De motu animalium, the Danish anatomist Nicolaus Steno published an entirely new geometrical theory of muscle motion in the book Elementorum myologiæ specimen. Historians of science have studied this book in recent decades, but the recent rediscovery