Jonathan Miller

Despite their historical connections, interdisciplinary research between philosophy and social science is relatively infrequent because of the divergent subject matter and disparate aims of these fields of inquiry. Although both may study “norms,” philosophy considers norms in a prescriptive sense, while social science investigates them in a descriptive sense. For such reasons, maintaining a neighborly wall between these disciplines serves both well. There are, however, several points of substantive contact where each may affect the other. After drawing some lessons about the possibilities and pitfalls of such work from previous exemplars, the chapter discusses Pennock and Miller’s interdisciplinary investigation of the scientific virtues. Quantitative and qualitative data from interviews with more than a thousand scientists about the character traits that are important for scientific research provided a rich source of information for the applicability of Pennock’s vocational virtue theory as it applies to science, showing the value of such collaboration.

There are at least two ways of writing the history of philosophy: the first and most common among those self−identified as "philosophers" treats philosophers of the past as if they were in live dialogue with the present. Only the text is dissected, studied, and analyzed as the interpreter attempts to reconstruct, examine, and occasionally challenge the arguments under consideration. Practitioners of this first way assume that systematic and seemingly internally coherent styles of thought are most worthy of the name "philosophy." These thinkers believe that the term "philosophy," as Richard Rorty pointed out long ago, has an "honorific" sense: philosophy as such stands above other forms of thought, it is regulative in scope, and it serves as something that examines the conclusions of other, necessarily less rigorous fields. The second way is more explicitly contextualist, seeking to understand what a past thinker may have meant in his own time, what outside factors may have shaped his arguments, and how his thought may be part of broader historical currents that are none the less worthy of being remembered and studied now. Practitioners of this way are more likely to believe that ambiguities or seeming deficiencies of clarity that we find in the work of a past thinker are unlikely to be resolved by hypothetical, propositional reconstruction; rather the ambiguities are apparent to us because we are differently situated, so that the study of history is a more powerful tool in helping us satisfactorily access the work ofa past thinker than rationalistic reconstruction. (Full disclosure: I am an advocate of the second way.) This volume presents studies that fall into both of the two camps, as Jerome..

¿Cómo reacciona la ciudadanía en un sistema político polarizado ante una emergencia como la pandemia de la COVID-19?, ¿cómo procesa la ciudadanía las narrativas polarizadas que están en conflicto?, y ¿qué imagen se forman de la gestión política de la amenaza de la pandemia? En EE. UU, hay que retrotraerse a la epidemia de la polio de hace 70 años para encontrar una emergencia sanitaria como la pandemia de la COVID-19. No obstante, hay importantes diferencias; en la década de 1950, el clima político de los EE.UU. era mucho más uniforme y consensuado que el actual, profundamente dividido y polarizado. Este trabajo utiliza datos de un estudio longitudinal realizado durante 35 años en personas jóvenes de la Generación X (ahora ya en la cuarentena) y datos provenientes de encuestas realizadas en Estados Unidos durante tres décadas, con el propósito de examinar los patrones de adquisición de la información en la comprensión de una nueva amenaza. Nuestro análisis de los últimos 35 años de la Generación X muestra que, en las elecciones de 2020, el factor predictivo del voto individual que tuvo más fuerza fue una ideología política polarizada, pero, aquellas personas que contaban con una mejor comprensión del coronavirus fueron más críticas con la gestión de la pandemia de la COVID-19 que realizó la administración de Donald Trump y estuvieron más predispuestas a votar por Joe Biden que a votar por Trump. Un análisis paralelo de una muestra probabilística representativa de personas adultas estadounidenses en 2020 reveló el mismo patrón de influencia del partidismo ideológico, la comprensión del coronavirus y la evaluación de la administración de Trump. Los resultados muestran que el conocimiento y la comprensión pueden proporcionar un efecto moderador crítico en un sistema político polarizado y dividido.

This paper takes up and provides three answers to the question “Why study philosophy?” Beginning with a discussion of why this question has been ignored in literature pertaining to the teaching of philosophy, the paper turns to an analysis of what it means to ask about the importance of philosophy, pointing out that the question is ambiguous with other questions like “why should so-and-so study philosophy” or “why does so-and-so study philosophy.” The author then provides three answers that are similar to those provided by Hume: one should study philosophy because it may contribute to the entertainment, instruction, and reformation of mankind. The paper argues for the superiority of these answers over traditional responses and points to the importance of this question in teaching philosophy.