The impact of Philosophy and the philosophy of Impact: A guide to charting more diffuse influences across time.

Reflecting on the complexity of influence an individual research project can have, Adam Briggle, Robert Frodeman and Britt Holbrook try to get a handle on their own research activities and some of their impacts over the last few years. Their project led to a wide variety of results: scholarly articles, a forthcoming book, blogs and a number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’. But what exactly is a share or a like? There is a need for further reflection on how philosophy – and the humanities more generally – can achieve broader impacts

Achieving escape velocity: Breaking Free from the impact failure of applied philosophy

As in the sciences, the humanities also feel the pressure to demonstrate societal relevance. Applied philosophy is a natural place to look. But how has it fared in terms of having an impact? Adam Briggle, Robert Frodeman, and Kelli Barr are investigating the impact of philosophical work on both the STEM disciplines and society. Historically, philosophers have not been particularly self-conscious about how their insights are being taken up outside the academy. They argue the problem is not what they say, but to whom they are speaking and where

Knowing and acting: The precautionary and proactionary principles in relation to policy making

Article discussing the relationship between knowledge (in the form of scientific risk assessment) and action (in the form of technological innovation) as they come together in policy, which itself is both a kind of knowledge and acting

Games

Copyright © 2014 Cengage LearningThe long history of humans playing games to amuse or challenge themselves has been fundamentally transformed by science and technology. Science has studied in detail how games work, and technology has created whole new forms of computer and video games. Computer and video games exhibit two types of relationships to ethics: one concerns the ethics of the games themselves, another the possibility of using games to teach ethics.This work was supported by the US National Science Foundation under Grants No. 1252692 & 1338739. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (NSF)

Media and Communication

This book chapter discusses media and communication. As core features of humanity, communication and media clearly predate academic disciplines. They are in this sense non-disciplinary. Yet, they have for centuries been the subject of inquiry by those concerned to understand and improve human correspondence. This chapter surveys the historical development and present form of multi-, inter-, and transdisciplinary studies of media and communication

Introducing a Policy Turn in Environmental Philosophy

This article discusses policies in environmental philosophy

Dear Facebook

This book chapter is written in the form of a break-up letter from the author to the social networking website, Facebook. It discusses social networking, technological changes, urbanization, globalization, media technology, and philosophical ideas about society

Real friends: how the Internet can foster friendship

Dean Cocking and Steve Matthews’ article “Unreal Friends” (Ethics and Information Technology, 2000) argues that the formation of purely mediated friendships via the Internet is impossible. I critique their argument and contend that mediated contexts, including the Internet, can actually promote exceptionally strong friendships according to the very conceptual criteria utilized by Cocking and Matthews. I first argue that offline relationships can be constrictive and insincere, distorting important indicators and dynamics in the formation of close friends. The distance of mediated friendships mitigates this problem by promoting the courage to be candid. Next, I argue that the offline world of largely oral exchanges is often too shallow and hasty to promote deep bonds. The deliberateness of written correspondence acts as a weight to submerge friendships to greater depths and as a brake to enhance attentiveness to and precision about one’s own and one’s friend’s character. Nonetheless, close friendships may fail to develop on the Internet. Insofar as this failure occurs, however, it would be for reasons other than those identified by Cocking and Matthews