FROM ARISTOTELIANISM TO EXISTENTIALISM: THE PROBLEM OF BEING

Being has been the central and dominating concept of twenty-five hundred years of Western philosophy. Ontology is the branch of metaphysics that concerns itself with the nature of being. In this sense it is at the core of metaphysics and is the central problem of philosophy. As Aristotle has put it, “That which now and always has been asked and now and always perplexes us is the question: ‘what is being?’” Aristotle did not use the word ontology, but called the study of being, “First Philosophy”. The special sciences study being “in some way”, το ον πως, whereas “first philosophy” studies being as being, being qua being, being as it is in itself; το ον η ον, or as Plato had put it before him, the being of being, το όντως ον. First philosophy, therefore, is a science which is prior to all the other sciences and is therefore termed the science of sciences, επιστήμη επιστημών

Report on a Boston University Conference December 7-8, 2012 on 'How Can the History and Philosophy of Science Contribute to Contemporary U.S. Science Teaching?'

This is an editorial report on the outcomes of an international conference sponsored by a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) (REESE-1205273) to the School of Education at Boston University and the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University for a conference titled: How Can the History and Philosophy of Science Contribute to Contemporary U.S. Science Teaching? The presentations of the conference speakers and the reports of the working groups are reviewed. Multiple themes emerged for K-16 education from the perspective of the history and philosophy of science. Key ones were that: students need to understand that central to science is argumentation, criticism, and analysis; students should be educated to appreciate science as part of our culture; students should be educated to be science literate; what is meant by the nature of science as discussed in much of the science education literature must be broadened to accommodate a science literacy that includes preparation for socioscientific issues; teaching for science literacy requires the development of new assessment tools; and, it is difficult to change what science teachers do in their classrooms. The principal conclusions drawn by the editors are that: to prepare students to be citizens in a participatory democracy, science education must be embedded in a liberal arts education; science teachers alone cannot be expected to prepare students to be scientifically literate; and, to educate students for scientific literacy will require a new curriculum that is coordinated across the humanities, history/social studies, and science classrooms.Comment: Conference funded by NSF grant REESE-1205273. 31 page

How should novelty be valued in science?

Scientists are under increasing pressure to do "novel" research. Here I explore whether there are risks to overemphasizing novelty when deciding what constitutes good science. I review studies from the philosophy of science to help understand how important an explicit emphasis on novelty might be for scientific progress. I also review studies from the sociology of science to anticipate how emphasizing novelty might impact the structure and function of the scientific community. I conclude that placing too much value on novelty could have counterproductive effects on both the rate of progress in science and the organization of the scientific community. I finish by recommending that our current emphasis on novelty be replaced by a renewed emphasis on predictive power as a characteristic of good science.</jats:p

Philosophy, globalization and the future of the university: A conversation between Sharon Rider and Michael A. Peters

Sharon Rider is Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the Department of Philosophy at Uppsala University. She is currently Vice Dean for the Faculty of Arts and Director for Higher Education Studies at the Center for Science and Technology Studies. She studied Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University, the University of Louvain and Uppsala University, and has taught as Visiting Professor at Åbo Academy and Turku University (Finland) and Gävle University College (Sweden)

Models and Simulations in Material Science: Two Cases Without Error Bars

We discuss two research projects in material science in which the results cannot be stated with an estimation of the error: a spectro- scopic ellipsometry study aimed at determining the orientation of DNA molecules on diamond and a scanning tunneling microscopy study of platinum-induced nanowires on germanium. To investigate the reliability of the results, we apply ideas from the philosophy of models in science. Even if the studies had reported an error value, the trustworthiness of the result would not depend on that value alone.Comment: 20 pages, 2 figure

Ethics of conducting qualitative social science research in the emerging field of nanotechnology

In educational research, qualitative studies have varied meanings. This short paper reviews the conceptual underpinnings of ethics in qualitative social science research and its importance to the emerging field of nanotechnology. The paper is aimed at showing a pathway by which the researcher might tackle ethics in a more effective way to achieve the desired results and whether different ethical values are needed in qualitative social science research of nanotechnology.Ethics, Philosophy, Nanoscale, Humanists, Societal implications

Cosmology, Particles, and the Unity of Science

During the last three decades, there has been a growing realization among physicists and cosmologists that the relation between particle physics and cosmology may constitute yet another successful example of the unity of science. However, there are important conceptual problems in the unification of the two disciplines, e.g. in connection with the cosmological constant and the conjecture of inflation. The present article will outline some of these problems, and argue that the victory for the unity of science in the context of cosmology and particle physics is still far from obvious.Comment: 23 pages, no figures. To appear in Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physic

In search of relativistic time

This paper explores the status of some notions which are usually associated to time, like datations, chronology, durations, causality, cosmic time and time functions in the Einsteinian relativistic theories. It shows how, even if some of these notions do exist in the theory or for some particular solution of it, they appear usually in mutual conflict: they cannot be synthesized coherently, and this is interpreted as the impossibility to construct a common entity which could be called time. This contrasts with the case in Newtonian physics where such a synthesis precisely constitutes Newtonian time. After an illustration by comparing the status of time in Einsteinian physics with that of the vertical direction in Newtonian physics, I will conclude that there is no pertinent notion of time in Einsteinian theories.Comment: to appear in Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physic