Podcast Episodes
Back to SearchAnjan Chakravartty, “Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology” (Oxford UP, 2017)
A scientific ontology is a view about what a scientific theory says exists. Longstanding philosophical debate on this issue divides into two broad ca…
7 years, 9 months ago
Andrew J. Hogan, “Life Histories of Genetic Disease: Patterns and Prevention in Postwar Medical Genetics” (Johns Hopkins UP, 2016)
How did clinicians learn to see the human genome? In Life Histories of Genetic Disease (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2016), Andrew J. Hogan makes …
7 years, 9 months ago
Albert Müller, ed., “The Beginning of Heaven and Earth Has No Name: Seven Days With Second-Order Cybernetics” (Fordham UP, 2014)
Between his retirement from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne in 1975 and his death in 2002, many cyberneticians made the pilgrimage to …
7 years, 9 months ago
Dorothy H. Crawford, “Deadly Companions: How Microbes Shaped our History” (Oxford UP, 2018)
The history of mankind is interlinked with microbes. As humans evolved and became more advanced, microbes evolved right along with us. Through infect…
7 years, 10 months ago
Joëlle Gergis, “Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia” (Melbourne UP, 2018)
In her new book, Sunburnt Country: The History and Future of Climate Change in Australia (Melbourne University Press, 2018), Joëlle Gergis, a climate…
7 years, 11 months ago
Sabina Leonelli, “Data-Centric Biology: A Philosophical Study” (U Chicago Press, 2016)
Commentators have been forecasting the eclipse of hypothesis-driven science and the rise of a new ‘data-driven’ science for some time now. Harkening …
7 years, 11 months ago
Randi Hutter Epstein, “Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything” (Norton, 2018)
Metabolism, behavior, sleep, mood swings, the immune system, fighting, fleeing, puberty, and sex: these are just a few of the things our bodies contr…
7 years, 11 months ago
Eric Winsberg, “Philosophy and Climate Science” (Cambridge UP, 2018)
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that there is a warming trend in the global climate that is attributable to human activi…
7 years, 11 months ago
Sam Kean, “The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code” (Back Bay, 2013)
In The Disappearing Spoon, bestselling author Sam Kean unlocked the mysteries of the periodic table. In The Violinist’s Thumb: And Other Lost Tales o…
7 years, 11 months ago
Jonathan W. Marshall, “Performing Neurology: The Dramaturgy of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot is perhaps most well known today from the images of his “hysterical” female patients featured in Bourneville’s…
8 years, 1 month ago