Philip Kitcher recently gave two lectures at the opening of the University of Western Ontario’s Rotman Institute of Philosophy. His first talk was entitled “Authority, Responsibility, and Democracy”, and his second “Alienation and its Dangers”. Both should be of interest to Bubble Chamber readers. (The audio quality on the first is somewhat poor though.)
Heather Douglas, author of Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal, recently spoke at Muhlenberg College’s Center for Ethics. Amid charges from both sides of the ideological spectrum that science is being politicized, Douglas asks, when are values acceptable in science, which values are those, and what role should they play? This becomes most interesting when judging scientific evidence rather than merely picking research directions: in the context of unavoidable uncertainty, how should values affect our evidential judgements?
Combining numerous academic accolades with newspaper editorials and public lectures, Naomi Oreskes is an exemplar of the public intellectual. In this March 2010 lecture at the University of Rhode Island, Oreskes discusses climate change and her new book, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.