搜索结果：History and Philosophy of Science

Thousands of scholars across Europe faced discrimination for their heritage, especially Jewish heritage, throughout the 1930s. Hundreds of these persecuted academics worked in science and healthcare, often as primary researchers within a medical sub-specialty. In response, in 1933 British professors founded the Society for the Protection of Science and Learning (SPSL) with two objectives: raising funds to provide maintenance grants for displaced scholars and connecting scholars to academic placements worldwide. In this article, I analyze the stories of nineteen physicians fleeing fascist persecution in Europe through their 712 leaves of correspondence within the archive of the SPSL. I selected two medical subspecialties, to compare whether the well-funded field of oncology would have greater success placing refugees compared to the less academically-elevated field of orthopedic surgery. Through the first analysis of two complete medical subspecialty records from the SPSL archives, I examine how the SPSL faced difficulties deciding which colleagues to help financially and triaged levels of support. I also situate the experiences of the analyzed applicants within the context of British interwar medicine and academia, including British skepticism of foreign research and overlaps between SPSL leadership and the British eugenics movement. When funding ran low, the SPSL still assisted scholars through different channels, whether referring to other aid organizations, sending support letters to potential employers, or simply staying in contact. The surge in applications in 1938, five years after the organization's foundation, hindered scholars' chances as persecution increased and funding tapered. Importantly, the British medical establishment distrusted the overall research quality of many fleeing scholars and felt even less confident admitting medical practitioners who were not also researchers. Ultimately, medical scholars from fascist Germany and Austria who applied to the SPSL had a similar experience to other aspiring refugees seeking British assistance before 1939: they could not rely on Britain to support their immigration and predominantly settled elsewhere.

Current challenges in medicine and healthcare raise new questions regarding the moral relations between generations, thus highlighting the increasing relevance of intergenerational perspectives in healthcare ethics. However, the underlying notions of generations often remain vague and heterogeneous. This contribution aims to clarify the scope of conceptual meanings of 'generation' through explication and differentiation in order to advance the analytical potential of intergenerational perspectives in healthcare ethics. We argue that the concept of generations needs theoretical elaboration with regard to the dimensions of collectivity and temporality. We first introduce three approaches towards the theoretical conceptualization of generations: a genealogical, a chronological, and a socio-cultural approach. Regardless of their differences, all three essentially share an understanding of generations as collectives situated in time. Accordingly, we then examine the scope of underlying notions of collectivity and temporality, touching upon fundamental ontological, epistemological, and moral philosophical implications. We distinguish a skeptical individualist, an aggregationist, and an entity view of collectivity, as well as a formal, linear, a subjective, existential-narrative, and a socio-cultural understanding of temporality. The combination of these dimensions allows the development of a systematic matrix of conceptions of generations and intergenerational relations in healthcare ethics whose analytical potential we illustrate with regard to three paradigmatic examples. We provide a systematic summary of our considerations and outline a research agenda that addresses desiderata for intergenerational perspectives in healthcare ethics, encompassing clinical ethics, research ethics, and public health ethics, as well as meta-ethical questions.

Departing from the premise that contemporary psychological knowledge and praxis are dominated by a philosophy of science privileging an individualistic perspective from predominantly Northern and Western industrialized contexts, this article traces an instance of disrupting such epistemic hegemony through a decolonial lens employing podcasting technologies to nurture and grow relational global connections. We weave together our stories of building our global collective of decolonial and critical scholars and developing our cocreated global podcast: Indaba. Through digital platforms, and in-person gatherings, we came together to share alternative and contextually rooted psychological knowledges from our respective, and often isolated, locations. Our explorations through these dialogues and exchanges provide insights into the borderless dynamics of coloniality/Western modernity. The particularities of our struggles across different histories and geographies are premised upon our specific loci of enunciation. Our learnings, through podcast development, reveal how multimodal approaches to knowledge creation disrupt normative listening practices and expand our critical listening positions and ways of representing and engaging with knowledges produced at the margins, iteratively expanding psychological knowledges. Multimodal knowing is part of a process that goes beyond knowledge dissemination and is a democratizing strategy where our practices instead move knowledges beyond the academy through more accessible distributional regimes, opening them to expressions of coloniality and decoloniality in our experiences and encounters in the world. This process itself is a reflection of the everyday "decolonial love" and "creative labor" we need to catalyze and sustain social transformation while at the same time transforming ourselves. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).

I argue that the current proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) represents a new stage in a longer historical process of distancing humans from their unique individual psyches and of reducing participation and cultural diversity in music. The argument consists of six parts: (1) reiterating the uniqueness of individual psyches, which are often obscured by cultural norms, but are in the fact a vital source of cultural variation, and require for their proliferation that humans commune with their own psyches and enter into meaningful interaction with others; (2) presenting the presentational/participatory axes of music-making and music ontology, and arguing that the underlying psychology of music is participatory; (3) introducing a new rhetorical device, PECULIAR, which like WEIRD points at presentational forms of music-making as the outlier rather than the norm; (4) describing in brief the historical process through which music-making became less participatory, initially through elitist institutions and later through trade and commerce, and how mass media endangers musical diversity; (5) considering how generative AI technologies detach humans from their individual psyches and lead to the loss of cultural diversity; (6) arguing that AI will accelerate the reduction in musical participation and diversity, and suggesting ways for researchers to investigate the effects of these new technologies on cultures and minds. Finally, I suggest we should be mindful of the substantial social and spiritual benefits of musical participation, and find creative ways to encourage it.

This article proposes a conceptual analysis of Chang's notion of complementary science through a case study on the revival of phage therapy. Complementary science urges historians and philosophers to recover and extend Kuhn losses - prematurely abandoned systems of practice. The revival of phage therapy, which involves aligning not only epistemic but also material, social, regulatory and clinical elements, reveals the need to extend Chang's framework with Ankeny and Leonelli's notion of repertoires. This conceptual shift proves broadly fruitful. For complementary science, it highlights the normative and ethical dimensions involved in identifying Kuhn losses and foregrounds its transdisciplinary nature. It also clarifies how established repertoires can function both as ambivalent inspirations and entrenched obstacles for emerging ones. Finally, it helps reframe the historical trajectory and contemporary assessment of phage therapy, showing a plurality of benefits and of possible developments independently of its full reintegration into the Western pharmacopoeia. More generally, the article illustrates the value of an integrated history and philosophy of science attentive to the interlinked material, epistemic and social elements involved in scientific practices.

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are transforming employment and working conditions in ways that shape the safety, health, and well-being of workers. We describe a protocol for a living systematic review (LSR) that will examine the interrelationship between AI systems, employment and working conditions, and worker safety, health, and well-being. Research questions are: 1. What types of AI systems are being used within workplaces and how do their design and adoption impact worker safety, health, and well-being? 2. How do a worker's employment and working conditions affect the relationship between the adoption of AI systems and worker safety, health, and well-being? 3. How does a worker's social position (e.g., age, gender, race, disability) shape the interrelationship between AI systems at work, employment and working conditions, and their safety, health, and well-being? A comprehensive search of primary qualitative and quantitative research will be conducted. MEDLINE, Embase (OVID), PsycINFO (OVID), and Web of Science will be searched every six to twelve months using database-specific terms and keywords. Title/abstract and full-text screening will be completed independently by two reviewers. Relevant articles will be quality appraised using a mixed method assessment tool adapted for studies of AI. Medium and high-quality studies will be synthesized using a best evidence synthesis approach. To ensure relevancy, applied workplace and AI stakeholders will provide feedback at all stages of the LSR process through dissemination excluding quality appraisal. Annually, we will evaluate the appropriateness of the review process (e.g., frequency of searches, requirement to refine research questions, utility of continuing LSR). Any amendments to protocols will be documented. This LSR will provide timely and evolving evidence on the implications of AI in the workplace that will be disseminated through a publicly available living review dashboard. We will capture the emerging impact AI has on workers. Findings can be used to develop strategies to minimize AI's potential workplace harms while amplifying its potential benefits, address emerging worker inequities, and inform ongoing discussions regarding responsible and safe AI adoption. PROSPERO CRD42024625501.

The same dataset can be analysed in different justifiable ways to answer the same research question, potentially challenging the robustness of empirical science1-3. In this crowd initiative, we investigated the degree to which research findings in the social and behavioural sciences are contingent on analysts' choices. We examined a stratified random sample of 100 studies published between 2009 and 2018, in which, for one claim per study, at least five reanalysts independently reanalysed the original data. The statistical appropriateness of the reanalyses was assessed in peer evaluations, and the robustness indicators were inspected along a range of research characteristics and study designs. We found that 34% of the independent reanalyses yielded the same result (within a tolerance region of ±0.05 Cohen's d) as the original report; with a four times broader tolerance region, this indicator increased to 57%. Of the reanalyses conducted, 74% reached the same conclusion as the original investigation, 24% yielded no effects or inconclusive results and 2% reported the opposite effect. This exploratory study indicates that the common single-path analyses in social and behavioural research should not be simply assumed to be robust to alternative analyses4. Therefore, we recommend the development and use of practices to explore and communicate this neglected source of uncertainty.

For the past 150 years, Science has become central to public issues, arbitrating all aspects of human life and defining what is natural and rational. Teaching the history of science by emphasising its dynamics as a social institution and the resulting stakes in global, national, and local politics is crucial for understanding the contemporary world. This article describes a course in this discipline that challenges traditional Western perspectives to ask pertinent questions across all time periods and societies. Presented as a guided tour, the course encourages students to critically engage with science as well as its history.

This article examines how hacker culture, often conceptualized as immaterial and virtual, is in fact materially and spatially constituted through its entanglement with physical places. Focusing on Las Vegas and DEF CON, this article shows the emergence of hackerspectacle, a place-bound mode of interfacing that enables the dual-direction seepage of form and power: subcultural acts leave material residues in policies and design, while the city's spectacle economy filters back to script hackers' style, memory, and self-understanding. The article traces how a three-decade coupling between DEF CON and Las Vegas co-produces both the conference and the city. By intervening in hotel systems, accessing controls, and displaying infrastructures, hackers appropriate Las Vegas's visual language and spatial affordances to craft their placed identity. Conceptually, this case advances STS discussions on the materiality of digital cultures. Empirically, it shows a city-level co-construction. The article also diagnoses a drift from subversion to absorption as DEF CON mirrors Las Vegas's streamlining, commercialization, and surveillance. The article is based on original archival research, ethnographic work, and media analysis. It draws on DEF CON programs, hacker zines, public and anonymized interviews, news coverage, and visual materials, and it situates hacker practices within Las Vegas's legal, architectural, and economic history. It also offers a generalizable template for studying how technocultures take place, literally, and will interest readers of infrastructure studies, digital materialities, urban technopolitics, and the socio-spatial dynamics of subcultures.

This article examines how oral histories of twentieth-century human genetics in Brazil reveal the politics of memory of fieldwork. Through a comparative analysis of interviews with prominent geneticist Francisco M. Salzano and technician Girley V. Simões, who worked with him for most of his career, this study explores the narrative strategies each employed to establish their historical accounts. Attending reflexively to the oral history encounters, the analysis examines how each narrator negotiates professional identity and moral legitimacy in light of changing ethical norms surrounding research with Indigenous communities. Simões's vivid recollections foreground invisible forms of technical and logistical labor, offering him the opportunity to recast his position as one of active knowledge-making. Salzano's controlled and diplomatic accounts, by contrast, illustrate how the senior scientist curated memory to stabilize his professional legacy and defend disciplinary ethics in the wake of controversy. Contrasting Salzano and Simões's approaches to describing their shared experiences drives home the complex social and political realities of narrating fieldwork, as well as the political valences of remembering and documenting these histories in the present.

This paper reconstructs a forgotten episode in the early history of quantum logic by examining the work of Polish philosopher Zygmunt Zawirski. In the early 1930s, Zawirski developed an original system of many-valued logic explicitly designed to interpret quantum mechanics. Anticipating later views by Reichenbach and Putnam, Zawirski argued that the indeterminacy and probabilistic structure of quantum theory required a departure from classical two-valued logic. Drawing on Łukasiewicz's many-valued logic and Post's formal constructions, he built a system of truth-functional operators capable of representing probabilistic conjunction and disjunction. This article offers a technical and conceptual reconstruction of Zawirski's logic, based on his 1934 monograph and recent interpretations by Garbacz. While the system's practical limitations have been noted, its philosophical ambition and originality remain significant. Zawirski's logic not only constitutes the first formal system of quantum logic but also anticipates contemporary debates on the empirical foundations of logic and the relation between logic and probability. By recovering his overlooked contribution, this paper broadens our understanding of early responses to quantum theory and highlights the role of Polish logicians in shaping 20th-century philosophy of science.

In his writings on the philosophy of science, the German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) constantly claimed that his approach to psychology was characterised by the modern 'Galilean' mode of thought, as opposed to the medieval 'Aristotelian' mode of thought of the rest of the field. In this paper, we examine what Lewin meant by this opposition and how it fits into the disciplinary discourse of psychology and philosophy of science in the first half of the 20th century. We show that Lewin was one of the earliest figures to raise Galileo up to cult status as the pioneer of modern scientific thought: Lewin's invocation of Galileo predates that of Husserl and Koyré, who are often seen as the originators of the 20th-century image of Galileo. We also show that Lewin's opposition of 'Galilean' and 'Aristotelian' thought was a move in controversies of the time about the 'crisis of psychology', and that Lewin intended his opposition above all as an attack on his rival Karl Bühler (1879-1963).

The study of imagination has progressed due to its operationalization through a variety of behavioural tasks, initially designed for human participants and later adapted to non-human animals. However, this behavioural data has proven insufficient for inferring the level and scope of imagination in animals. To better understand human imagination, and its possible manifestations in animals, we trace here the evolutionary origin of the default mode network (DMN), which is central to human imagination. We show that the evolution of the DMN involved significant neural innovations at the base of the mammalian lineage: the emergence of the neocortex and a substantial reorganization of the hippocampus. These two structures underwent parallel evolution, including the emergence of a 3D organization, the establishment of a canonical microcircuit, a significant development of pyramidal neurons, and the emergence of dedicated compartments of granular neurons. We suggest that previous studies have underestimated the importance of hippocampal modifications in shaping the mammalian brain, especially considering its central role in studies of memory consolidation, replay and human imagination more generally. Looking beyond mammals, we expect to find a functionally similar network in birds, convergent with the mammalian DMN. We end with a discussion of findings that could be construed as indicators of imagination within and outside the mammalian clade and the relations of our extraordinary human imagination to language.

In recent years, rewilding theories and initiatives have gained momentum as a credible solution to the loss of ecological diversity and stability. However, rewilding remains a controversial theory that draws our attention to the multiple links between intervention, history, and the value of nonhuman capacity for self-organization. Tracing the history of practices and theoretical frameworks of some emblematic projects and proposals in this field, we focus on the shortcomings and theoretical challenges of functional approaches, including notions of functional equivalence, and the difficulties posed by counterfactual reference points. At the heart of this analysis are the contradictions that some of these approaches pose with the crucial goal of rewilding, which is, in principle, to preserve immanence and spontaneous organization. By way of conclusion, the recommendation to deepen reflection on the past for a genuine and ethically sound incorporation of the feral into everyday life is presented.

By offering an organic reading of the tenth-century medical miscellany BnF, Lat. 7028, this article questions assumptions about the erratic and rudimentary nature of early medieval medicine, highlighting the compiler's purposeful selection and manipulation of contents. Following the tenets of the ancient sect of Rationalists, as described in Celsus' De medicina, the compiler gathered a consistent yet non-linear compendium, blending texts about the mythological Greek origins of medicine, anatomical parts, natural philosophy and different sets of therapeutical options, encompassing regimen, medications, and surgery. The Greek-Latin monk Johannes Philagathos is arguably the intellectual author of this eclectic miscellany, which he assembled thanks to networks of people and books that circulated between Byzantine and Ottonian areas. While preserving ancient and late antique medical traditions and visual models, this manuscript witnessed the reception of medicinal drugs from eastern lands and their inclusion in recipes, a few centuries before the flourishing of the School of Salerno.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM), with meta-analysis of randomized clinical trials as its gold standard, has been criticized for failing to represent the individuality and variability of disease. Precision medicine (PM) has been proposed as an alternative to EBM's "averaging approach", leveraging genomic and other biological information at the individual level. However, PM is still an emerging and changing concept. It is unclear what constitutes acceptable evidence, when the number of patients with a specific condition approaches one. Despite large investments, PM´s overall capacity to predict and improve treatment responses remains limited. This raises the question of whether PM has failed, or whether another strategy can improve the situation. Here, we examine the implications of functional precision medicine (FPM), a strategy aiming to bridge the gap between genomic information and phenotypic complexity through functional testing of treatments on patient-derived organoid (PDO), an advanced form of cell culture. We unpack how observed treatment effects in such personalized models are emerging as a means to predict treatment efficacy in individual patients. Drawing on exploratory interviews with scientists at the forefront of clinical implementation, we examine the philosophical implications of FPM in the contexts of cystic fibrosis and cancer. We unpack how the "functional approach" addresses biological complexity by black boxing many mechanistic details and focusing on phenotypic responses in PDOs. Moreover, we show that, to work as personalized models, they paradoxically must be validated by developing the same type of population-based evidence they aim to reduce reliance on.

Recently, many scientific studies have discussed multiverse models based on the string theory landscape. However, from the perspective of the philosophy of science, there has been a great debate on the falsifiability of the multiverse models. As there is no consensus among scientists and philosophers on the criteria of falsifiability, whether the string-based multiverse theory is a legitimate scientific theory or not is found to be inconclusive. In this article, I have used Lakatos's idea of a scientific research programme to evaluate the string-based multiverse theory developed over the past few decades. From the perspective of the history of science, I show that the string-based multiverse research programme is close to being a degenerating research programme, which means that this line of research did not generate any substantial growth of truth content.

This article examines Redcliffe N. Salaman's (1874-1955) efforts to establish a national system for producing virus-free seed potatoes in 1930s Britain. It explores how scientific authority was mobilized to reshape agricultural practices and assert regulatory control over seed production. Although Salaman's proposals were never fully realized, they laid the groundwork for enduring strategies to improve potato crop health by protecting seed from infectious agents and their insect vectors. Salaman's work drew on both traditional horticultural knowledge and emerging microbiological techniques, spanning field and laboratory settings. He exemplifies how diverse modes of science making shaped a period of increasing professionalization and institutionalization in the biological sciences. By tracing interactions between scientists and other actors - including growers, seedsmen and government officials - the article shows how plant virus control was gradually redefined from a craft-based practice to a scientific domain. This article contributes to the early history of virology from an agricultural perspective, as well as to broader historiographical debates on the role of science in agriculture, the professionalization of expertise and the construction of regulatory authority in twentieth-century Britain.

Human collective intelligence (CI)-the capacity of groups to solve problems, make decisions and acquire knowledge beyond individual capabilities-is here understood as an emergent phenomenon that evolved in our lineage from a distinct trajectory of epistemic niche construction (ENC), and progressively sustained the latter. Humans systematically alter their informational landscapes in materially visible ways by creating enduring spatial and artefactual scaffolds for improved cognitive performance and social coordination. In this paper, we propose a set of criteria to define ENC and track its emergence in the archaeological record. These criteria highlight the importance of persistent, publicly accessible and evolutionarily incremental modifications that sustained behavioural coordination among individuals in space and time. We apply this framework to three major domains of material culture: the structuring of space for collective action, the culturalization of the human body and the emergence of exosomatic artefacts to store coded information. We argue that these practices did not merely externalize knowledge but progressively transformed material culture and environments into targeted epistemic infrastructures able to scaffold and amplify group-level performances characteristic of CI, thus shedding light on the evolution of human cognition and social organization. This article is part of the theme issue 'The evolution of collective intelligence'.