•  2
    Wat betekent het dat complottheorieën mainstream worden
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 116 (1): 39-54. 2024.
    What it means for conspiracy theories to become mainstream In debates about conspiracy theories, it is often claimed that conspiracy thinking is on the rise or has even become mainstream. In this article, I want to explore this claim conceptually, and argue that there are at least three ways to interpret the claim that ‘conspiracy thinking has become mainstream’. First, there is the individual level, where it is a matter of counting heads. Mainstream then means that the majority believes in cons…Read more
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  •  6
  •  7
    Techniek, voorbij de nostalgie (review)
    de Uil Van Minerva 35 (4). 2023.
    None.
  •  7
    None.
  •  270
    Self-Organizing Life: Michel Serres and the Problem of Meaning
    In Giuseppe Bianco, Charles T. Wolfe & Gertrudis Van de Vijver (eds.), Canguilhem and Continental Philosophy of Biology, Springer. pp. 209-232. 2023.
    Within continental philosophy of biology the work of Michel Serres has not received a lot of attention. Nonetheless, this chapter wants to argue that Serres was part of a group of thinkers – together with Jacques Monod and Henri Atlan – that started to think about biology in terms of second-order cybernetics and information theory. Therefore, this chapter aims to do four things. First of all, it maps the relation between Serres and Canguilhem, one that was mediated by authors such as Louis Althu…Read more
  •  206
    This article argues that historical epistemology offers the history of philosophy and science more than a mere tool to write the history of concepts. It does this, first of all, by rereading historical epistemology through Michel Foucault's “techniques of the self.” Second, it turns to the work of Léon Brunschvicg and Gaston Bachelard. In their work we see a proposal for what the subjectivity of scientists and philosophers should be. The article thus argues that their work is driven by a normati…Read more
  •  29
    We Have Never Been “New Experimentalists”: On the Rise and Fall of the Turn to Experimentation in the 1980s
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 13 (1): 91-119. 2023.
    The 1980s, it is often claimed, was the decade when experimentation finally became a philosophical topic. This was the responsibility, the claim continues, of one particular movement within philosophy of science, called “new experimentalism.” The aim of this article is to complicate this historical narrative. We argue that in the 1980s, the study of experimentation was carried out not by one movement with one particular aim but rather in a diverse and open-ended way by people with different aims…Read more
  •  4
    Lode Lauwaert, Wij, Robots
    de Uil Van Minerva 35 (1). 2022.
  •  212
    Het analytisch existentialisme van Arnold Burms
    de Uil van Minerva: Tijdschrift Voor Geschiedenis En Wijsbegeerte van de Cultuur 35 (4): 290-305. 2022.
    None.
  •  456
    Een genealogie van het wetenschappelijk onderzoek naar complottheorieën
    Tijdschrift Over Cultuur and Criminaliteit 12 (2): 20-39. 2022.
    This article takes the scientific study of conspiracy theories itself as an object of inquiry. It looks at the three main frameworks to look at conspiracy theories: a psychological, epistemological and a sociological approach. These different approaches exist somewhat separately and often do not get along. The central claim that follows from a genealogy of these research programs is that the conflicts between these different approaches should be understood not merely as disagreements about how t…Read more
  •  1026
    Playing God: Symbolic Arguments Against Technology
    NanoEthics 16 (2): 151-165. 2022.
    In ethical reflections on new technologies, a specific type of argument often pops up, which criticizes scientists for “playing God” with these new technological possibilities. The first part of this article is an examination of how these arguments have been interpreted in the literature. Subsequently, this article aims to reinterpret these arguments as symbolic arguments: they are grounded not so much in a set of ontological or empirical claims, but concern symbolic classificatory schemes that …Read more
  •  507
    History as Engagement: The Historical Epistemology of Raymond Aron
    Perspectives on Science 30 (4): 757-782. 2022.
    Raymond Aron was a student of Léon Brunschvicg, a representative of French historical epistemology. This article explores Aron’s relation to this tradition through three claims. First of all, it contests that Raymond Aron’s philosophy of history constituted a complete break with this tradition. Secondly, resituating Aron in this tradition is valuable, because it highlights how Aron’s own philosophy of history is to be understood as a normative project, seen as an alternative to that of Brunschvi…Read more
  •  9
    Review of Vital Norms: Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Pierre-Olivier Méthot.
  •  1314
    Jean-François Lyotard and Postmodern Technoscience
    Philosophy and Technology 35 (2): 1-19. 2022.
    Often associated with themes in political philosophy and aesthetics, the work of Jean-François Lyotard is most known for his infamous definition of the postmodern in his best-known book, La condition postmoderne, as incredulity towards metanarratives. The claim of this article is that this famous claim of Lyotard is actually embedded in a philosophy of technology, one that is, moreover, still relevant for understanding present technoscience. The first part of the article therefore sketches Lyota…Read more
  •  323
    Gatekeepers and Gated Communities
    Philosophy Today 66 (4): 763-779. 2022.
    In his 2018 essay Down to Earth, the French philosopher Bruno Latour proposes a hypothesis that connects a number of contemporary issues, ranging from climate denialism to deregulation and growing inequality. While his hypothesis, namely that the elites act as if they live in another world and are leaving the rest of the world behind, might seem like a conspiracy theory, I will argue that there is a way to make sense of it. To do so, I will turn to two other authors, Timothy Mitchell and Shoshan…Read more
  •  280
    A Philosophy of First Contact: Stanisław Lem and the Myth of Cognitive Universality
    Pro-Fil: An Internet Journal of Philosophy 3 (22): 65-77. 2021.
    Within science fiction the topic of ‘first contact’ is a popular theme. How will an encounter with aliens unfold? Will we succeed in communicating with them? Although such questions are present in the background of many science fiction novels, they are not always explicitly dealt with and even if so, often in a poor way. In this article, I will introduce a typology of five dominant types of solutions to the problem of first contact in science fiction works. The first four solutions are the more …Read more
  •  49
    Massimiliano Simons provides the first systematic study of Serres' work in the context of late 20th-century French philosophy of science. By proposing new readings of Serres' philosophy, Simons creates a synthesis between his predecessors, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Louis Althusser as well as contemporary Francophone philosophers of science such as Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers. Simons situates Serres' unique contribution through his notion of the quasi-object, a concept, he …Read more
  •  263
  •  185
    Een inleiding in de Franse historische epistemologie
    de Uil van Minerva: Tijdschrift Voor Geschiedenis En Wijsbegeerte van de Cultuur 34 (2): 104-118. 2021.
    Verrassend misschien voor filosofen buiten Frankrijk, maar in Parijs is wetenschap altijd een object van filosofische reflectie geweest – niet in de vorm van de analytische wetenschapsfilosofie zoals die buiten Frankrijk wordt onderwezen, maar onder de noemer van historische epistemologie, of soms ook wel kortweg épistémologie genoemd. Dit themanummer wil een inleiding zijn op deze traditie in haar denkers.
  •  19
    Technology and Society
    with Mauritz Kelchtermans and Lode Lauwaert
    Philosophy Today 65 (3): 459-464. 2021.
    It is commonly accepted that technology and society have always been intertwined. The question is rather how we should understand that relation. This introduction to the special issue ‘Technology and Society’ gives a brief overview of the history of the questions related to this intertwinement. The special issue consists of six essays, emanating from presentations at the 2019 conference on Technology and Society at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. It was organized by the Working Group on …Read more
  •  323
    Dreaming of a Universal Biology: Synthetic Biology and the Origins of Life
    Hyle: International Journal for Philosophy of Chemistry 27 91-116. 2021.
    Synthetic biology aims to synthesize novel biological systems or redesign existing ones. The field has raised numerous philosophical questions, but most especially what is novel to this field. In this article I argue for a novel take, since the dominant ways to understand synthetic biology’s specificity each face problems. Inspired by the examination of the work of a number of chemists, I argue that synthetic biology differentiates itself by a new regime of articulation, i.e. a new way of a…Read more
  •  959
    Ian Hacking’s Representing and Intervening is often credited as being one of the first works to focus on the role of experimentation in philosophy of science, catalyzing a movement which is sometimes called the “philosophy of experiment” or “new experimentalism”. In the 1980s, a number of other movements and scholars also began focusing on the role of experimentation and instruments in science. Philosophical study of experimentation has thus seemed to be an invention of the 1980s whose central f…Read more
  •  12
    Fenomenotechniek
    Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 112 (4): 508-512. 2020.
    Amsterdam University Press is a leading publisher of academic books, journals and textbooks in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Our aim is to make current research available to scholars, students, innovators, and the general public. AUP stands for scholarly excellence, global presence, and engagement with the international academic community.
  •  342
    Positivism in Action: The Case of Louis Rougier
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (2): 461-487. 2021.
    In this paper, we investigate how the life and work of Louis Rougier relate to the broader political dimension of logical empiricist philosophy. We focus on three practical projects of Rougier in the 1930s and 1940s: first, his attempts to integrate French-speaking philosophers into an international network of scientific philosophers by organizing two Unity of Science conferences in Paris; second, his role in the renewal of liberalism through the organization of the Walter Lippmann Colloquium; a…Read more
  •  31
    Synthetic biology as a technoscience: The case of minimal genomes and essential genes
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 85 127-136. 2021.
    This article examines how minimal genome research mobilizes philosophical concepts such as minimality and essentiality. Following a historical approach the article aims to uncover what function this terminology plays and which problems are raised by them. Specifically, four historical moments are examined, linked to the work of Harold J. Morowitz, Mitsuhiro Itaya, Eugene Koonin and Arcady Mushegian, and J. Craig Venter. What this survey shows is a historical shift away from historical questions …Read more
  •  12
    In this article, two different claims about nature are discussed. On the one hand, environmental philosophy has forced us to reflect on our position within nature. We are not the masters of nature as was claimed before. On the other hand there are the recent developments within synthetic biology. It claims that, now at last, we can be the masters of nature we have never been before. The question is then raised how these two claims must be related to one another. Rather than stating that they are…Read more
  •  468
    De nieuwe poortwachters van de waarheid
    Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 1 (82): 33-56. 2020.
    The central claim of this article is that post-truth requires a political and socio-economical perspective, rather than a moral or epistemological one. The article consists of two parts. The first part offers a critical examination of the dominant analyses of post-truth in terms of shifting standards of the origin and the evaluation of facts. Moreover, the claim that postmodernism is the cause of post-truth is examined and refuted. In the second part an alternative perspective is developed, cent…Read more