Historians have claimed that the two closely related concepts of animism and natural teleology were both decisively rejected in the Scientific Revolution. They tout Robert Boyle as an early modern warden against pre-modern animism. Discussing Avicenna, Aquinas, and Buridan, as well as Renaissance psychology, I instead suggest that teleology went through a slow and uneven process of rationalization. As Neoplatonic theology gained influence over Aristotelian natural philosophy, the meaning of animism likewise grew obscure. Boyle, as some historians have shown, exemplifies this uneven process. There is an unresolved tension between his religious convictions and the implicit animism of his empirical practice.

Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731), the scholar of language, religious writer, art theoretician and collector, and natural philosophy enthusiast, was part of an informal network of Amsterdam-based mathematics and natural philosophy enthusiasts who played a pivotal role in the early diffusion of Newton’s natural philosophical ideas in the Dutch Republic. Because Ten Kate contributed to several areas of research, it is worth asking whether connections can be found between his different scholarly activities and, more specifically, whether his oeuvre as a whole was shaped by his religious views, as has been suggested. In this essay, I shall argue that his oeuvre was indeed shaped by his religious beliefs, which reflect elements typical of Dutch doperdom, but also reflect a more general Christian orientation that transcends confessional divides. More particularly, I aim to show that, if we want to understand why Ten Kate was drawn to the natural philosophy of his day, and especially to Isaac Newton’s (1642-1727), and why he sought to promote it, we also need to pay attention to this broader Christian orientation in his thought. Along the way, I shall add nuance to earlier characterizations of how ten Kate mobilized Isaac Newton’s natural philosophy according to his own agenda.

The paper explores Hermann Weyl’s turn to intuitionism through a philosophical prism of normative framework transitions. It focuses on three central themes that occupied Weyl’s thought: the notion of the continuum, logical existence, and the necessity of intuitionism, constructivism, and formalism to adequately address the foundational crisis of mathematics. The analysis of these themes reveals Weyl’s continuous endeavor to deal with such fundamental problems and suggests a view that provides a different perspective concerning Weyl’s wavering foundational positions. Building on a philosophical model of scientific framework transitions and the special role that normative indecision or ambivalence plays in the process, the paper examines Weyl’s motives for considering such a radical shift in the first place. It concludes by showing that Weyl’s shifting stances should be regarded as symptoms of a deep, convoluted intrapersonal process of self-deliberation induced by exposure to external criticism.

Moreau (2019) has raised concerns about the use of DNA data obtained from vulnerable populations, such as the Uighurs in China. We discuss another case, situated in Europe and with a research history dating back 100 years: genetic investigations of Roma. In our article, we focus on problems surrounding representativity in these studies. We claim that many of the circa 440 publications in our sample neglect the methodological and conceptual challenges of representativity. Moreover, authors do not account for problematic misrepresentations of Roma resulting from the conceptual frameworks and sampling schemes they use. We question the representation of Roma as a “genetic isolate” and the underlying rationales, with a strong focus on sampling strategies. We discuss our results against the optimistic prognosis that the “new genetics” could help to overcome essentialist understandings of groups.

In the United States, scientific knowledge is brought before the courts by way of testimony – the testimony of scientific experts. We argue that this expertise is best understood first as related to the quality of the underlying science and then in terms of who delivers it. Bloodstain pattern analysis (BPA), a contemporary forensic science, serves as the vaulting point for our exploration of objectivity as a metric for the quality of a science in judicial contexts. We argue that BPA fails to meet the minimal standard set by Helen Longino’s social-procedural account of objectivity (1990, 2002). In light of some pressing issues for social-procedural accounts, we offer an infrastructural account of objectivity. This account offers what amounts to a friendly amendment to Longino’s account and adds to the ways in which we might analyze social-procedural objectivity. Finally, we address an issue that is pressing in the legal context: given that scientific knowledge is delivered by individuals, not communities, at least in U.S. courts, we (may) need a way to evaluate individual scientific and epistemic agents. We suggest a means for making this evaluation that is derived from our infrastructural account of objectivity.

This paper provides an introduction to three translations of articles by Soviet philosopher Boris Hessen: “Mechanical Materialism and Modern Physics,” “On Comrade Timiryazev’s Attitude towards Contemporary Science” and “Marian Smoluchowski (On the Tenth Anniversary of His Death)”. It begins by presenting a central tension in Hessen’s work; namely, how even though he is better known for the externalism of his 1931 Newton paper, much of his work has been considered exemplary of an internalist approach. I then show that for Hessen, the history of modern science was defined by the discovery of the dialectical unity in opposition between dynamic and statistical regularity. This not only sheds important light on Hessen’s understanding of causation, but also reconciles the aforementioned tension by showing his approach to the relationship between individuals and collectives in the study of physical phenomena, along with the relationship between individual scientists and socioeconomic conditions.