Science and Culture: Oppenheimer goes center stage

Science and Culture: Oppenheimer goes center stage.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, ambitious leader of the Manhattan Project, struggled with intense ethical dilemmas. To continue to work on the atom bomb, he had to abandon his communist friends in order to prove to military monitors his loyalty to the US government. Later, Oppenheimer faced the moral implications of the project’s success. His struggles with ambition, betrayal, and moral quandaries made ...

Science Studies Goes Public

I believe that tenured historians, philosophers, and sociologists of science— when presented with the opportunity—have a professional obligation to get involved in public controversies over what should count as science. I stress ‘tenured’ because the involved academics need to be materially protected from the consequences of their involvement, given the amount of misrepresentation and abuse tha...

Culture and Cognitive Science

The purpose of this paper is to review the way in which cultural contributions to human nature have been treated within the fi eld of cognitive science. I was initially motivated to write about this topic when invited to give a talk to a Cognitive Science department at a sister university in California a few years ago. My goal, on that occasion, was to convince my audience, none of whom were pr...

Science and Culture.

Science and culture

What we understand today as being ‘modern science’ is in fact not that modern, but was born nearly half a millennium ago at the time of the Renaissance in Europe. But even if we think of great Renaissance thinkers, such as Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci or Sir Isaac Newton, as the first ‘true scientists’, we should not forget that all civilizations throughout history have produced and accum...