From the Science Wars to political emotions: philosophy, biology and justice

by Fabrizzio Mc Manus Nowadays, it is a cliché to invoke biology, psychology or the newest branch of cognitive science to defend the claim that there is such thing as a Human Nature. We find appeals to this notion every time someone explains in terms of intrinsic properties forged by Evolution why some particular group …

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The virtues of moderation, part II

edited by SciSal [This is an excerpt from James Grimmelmann’s paper “The virtues of moderation” published in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology (2015). The relevance to our webzine should be obvious. The excerpt presented below was pieced together by SciSal editor Dan Tippens and is reproduced here with permission from the author. Part …

The virtues of moderation, part I

edited by SciSal [This is an excerpt from James Grimmelmann’s paper “The virtues of moderation” published in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology (2015) [1]. The relevance to our webzine should be obvious… The excerpt presented below was pieced together by SciSal editor Dan Tippens and is reproduced here with permission from the author. …

The debate about funding of basic scientific research

by Massimo Pigliucci On the one hand we have politicians — usually, indeed almost invariably, conservatives and sometimes libertarians; on the other hand we have scientists — usually, indeed almost invariably, people whose work is in the corners of science most remote from any practical application. The debate is about whether, and to what extent, …

The formal Darwinism project

[From time to time the Editors at Scientia Salon select an interesting paper from the primary scientific or philosophical literature to highlight for a broader public. These posts simply include the abstract of the paper and a few choice quotations, occasionally accompanied by brief editorial comments. The idea is to develop an appreciation for what front …

Everyone has moral obligations (And we’re talking about them way too much)

by Daniel A. Kaufman “The most disturbing aspect of ‘morality’ seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation… There is something quite facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to ‘believe’ in …

Yes, terminal patients still have moral obligations

by Daniel Tippens [This is the first of two essays, by Dan Tippens and Dan Kaufman, about the concept of moral obligations. Kaufman’s response to Tippens will appear later this week.] When I was eighteen, my father was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and given a year and a half to live. This prognosis was …

Sam Harris and the Demarcation Problem

by Paul So Sam Harris is known for many things, from being one of the leading figures of the New Atheist movement to a controversial critic of Islam. he is also known for arguing that science can provide answers to questions regarding morality [1]. For him, morality is within the domain of science. How is …

Heritability: a handy guide to what it means, what it doesn’t mean, and that giant meta-analysis of twin studies

by Jonathan M. Kaplan Recently, Nature Genetics published a paper by Polderman et al. entitled “Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies,” [1]. It has already garnered a lot of attention: blog posts and various news sites are trumpeting its conclusions, and putting their own spins on the …