Images as a multi-faceted topic were used to teach an introductory course in Technological Studies. Nine faculty at Davidson College taught varying modules, as well as laboratory exercises. Widely differing thought patterns between the liberal arts and technologists were observed and are described herein. The syllabus is found in Appendex A.

Any paternalistic obligation a salesperson might have toward a client isnot, as was previously argued, determined or grounded in his/her being in a position of superior knowledge. Rather, the obligation stems first and most basically from the principle of non-maleficence. Beyond that, however, the particulars of any such obligation: who is vulnerable to being harmed, the harm(s) that might occur and even the kinds of actions that can reasonably be taken to protect a client from such harm, all flow from (...) the fact that the salesperson-client relationship is fundamentally one of dependency and trust.Various reasons are given to support this view and to indicate both the comprehensiveness and the fruitfulness of this way of perceiving the sales situation. In particular, the argument rules out of consideration what would, on analysis, be self-defeating or contradictory behavior on the part of the client and it helps explain why a salesperson is not obligated to certain behaviors. (shrink)

For twenty years, the renowned philosopher of science Sandra Harding has argued that science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and feminist critique must inform one another. In The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, Harding puts those fields in critical conversation, assembling the anthology that she has long wanted for classroom use. In classic and recent essays, international scholars from a range of disciplines think through a broad array of science and technology philosophies and practices. The contributors reevaluate conventional accounts (...) of the West’s scientific and technological projects in the past and present, rethink the strengths and limitations of non-Western societies’ knowledge traditions, and assess the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. The collection concludes with forward-looking essays, which explore strategies for cultivating new visions of a multicultural, democratic world of sciences and for turning those visions into realities. Feminist science and technology concerns run throughout the reader and are the focus of several essays. Harding provides helpful background for each essay in her introductions to the reader’s four sections. Contributors Helen Appleton Karen Bäckstrand Lucille H. Brockway Stephen B. Brush Judith Carney Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment Arturo Escobar Maria E. Fernandez Ward H. Goodenough Susantha Goonatilake Sandra Harding Steven J. Harris Betsy Hartmann Cori Hayden Catherine L. M. Hill John M. Hobson Peter Mühlhäusler Catherine A. Odora Hoppers Consuelo Quiroz Jenny Reardon Ella Reitsma Ziauddin Sardar Daniel Sarewitz Londa Schiebinger Catherine V. Scott Colin Scott Mary Terrall D. Michael Warren. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, and Community, and: The Active Life: Miller's Metaphysics of DemocracyShannon KincaidJoseph P. Fell, Vincent Colapietro, and Michael J. McGandy, editors The Task of Criticism: Essays on Philosophy, History, and CommunityNew York: W. W. Norton, 2005. 366 pp.Michael J. McGandy The Active Life: Miller's Metaphysics of Democracy Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 231 pp.I must admit that my (...) first encounter with the philosophy of John William Miller was not a pretty one. I first read of him in these pages a decade or so ago, and even though I was thinking a lot about pragmatism and democratic theory, and shared many of his interests, I didn't much like his philosophy. While I liked his style, the vocabulary seemed awkward. His finite idealism confused me. I had problems with his ontology, and his tendency towards historicism seemed odd. I even wrote an essay critical of The Midworld (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), though I never made an aggressive effort to publish it. [End Page 289]This is a good thing, because I would have regretted publishing that essay. I say this because both Michael J. McGandy's The Active Life: Miller's Metaphysics of Democracy, and the new edited collection of Miller's writings entitled The Task of Criticism, do an excellent job of revealing the contemporary significance of Miller's work. Collectively, they have convinced this skeptic that the midworld and its ontology of functioning objects are an important contribution to contemporary American philosophy.The Task of Criticism faces several challenges. First, George P. Brockway supervised the publication of five volumes of Miller's collected works, and Fell himself edited a 1990 volume on Miller's philosophy (The Philosophy of John William Miller, Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press), followed by Stephen Tyman's Decrying the Ideal (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993). Colapietro published Fateful Shapes of Human Freedom: John William Miller and the Crises of Modernity (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press) in 2003. Do we really need another volume? Second, Miller's brand of idealism is not very fashionable these days. Is there any hope that pragmatic idealism can inform contemporary social theory, and make a contribution to the very real and concrete problems faced by modern democratic institutions?I believe that the answer to both of these questions is "yes." Recognizing the importance of previous volumes devoted to Miller's philosophy, the editors present The Task of Criticism as the first comprehensive introduction to Miller's philosophy, and it attempts to cut a middle ground between a complete collection of essays and a "best of" anthology. The editors want to provide a framework for understanding Miller's philosophy, and in this attempt they succeed admirably.Why? Because the editors have provided a structure for Miller's thought that was lacking in earlier collections, and by focusing on the issues of philosophical method, historiography, and community, they have provided a framework for understanding Miller's philosophy. In so doing, they have also firmly established the continuing relevance of Miller's work. The recent revival of pragmatic idealism (as evidenced by a recent surge in publications on idealists like Royce and Hocking) is an important development in contemporary American philosophy, and I think Miller deserves a significant role in this movement.One of the things I like about this collection is its presentation as a work of three generations of Miller's students, all indebted to the work of Brockway, and all dedicated to the task of demonstrating the fundamental importance of Miller's work. The text itself not only includes a variety of Miller's writing on a wide range of topics, but also a very effective introduction to Miller's philosophy, short introductory passages for each essay, and a comprehensive index, as well as a bibliography of works by and about Miller. This is, in short, the first textbook of Miller's philosophy, and it does a fine job of capturing the breadth and depth of his philosophy.The scope of Miller's philosophical interests is made even more remarkable by the fact that Miller himself showed little interest... (shrink)

Stephen Tyman introduces the thought of the late philosopher John William Miller and the unique conception of idealism he contributed to the philosophical tradition. A longtime Mark Hopkins Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Williams College featured prominently in Joseph Epstein’s _Masters_: _Portraits of_ _Great_ _Teachers, _John William Miller is now represented by five volumes, only one of which was published during his lifetime. The four posthumous volumes have been compiled by George Brockway, who has skillfully edited certain (...) of Miller’s archival writings into thematically structured works. The Miller Archive, housed in the library of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is a massive collection of papers written for widely various occasions, often in the form of personal letters, and composed over the course of six decades. The collection includes many fragments, a great deal of occasional material, and much duplication. Tyman has based his study on the published writings and on his own extensive research in the Miller Archive. He places Miller firmly in the German idealist tradition of Kant and Hegel, while showing that Miller’s "historical idealism" furnishes a strikingly novel version of this philosophy. Tyman begins with Miller’s most original concept, that of the "midworld," which orients the entirety of Miller’s thinking and represents what may be the only successful resolution of the famous problem of "dualism" that has vexed modern philosophy since Descartes in the seventeenth century. Tyman offers a careful comparison of Miller’s ethics with that of Kant, which leads naturally into a similar treatment of Miller’s extensive reflections on "the philosophy of history." Throughout his discussion, Tyman emphasizes the aptness of Miller’s conception of idealism in relation to contemporary discussion on a wide range of problems, and particularly upon the historical background of the conceptual problems that, both within and without classical idealism, have motivated the questions that characterize the contemporary situation. He has organized the book into chapters that cover the areas that Miller himself had marked off as central, showing how and why this centrality is conceived, and how it constitutes a revision of long-standing cognitive attitudes that have led to an impasse between idealism and its opponents, to the detriment of each. In particular, conceptions of causality, of morality and free will, of metaphysics and epistemology are subjected to critical review, as a wholly new vantage point concerning the nature of the philosophical enterprise arises. (shrink)

A typescript by Claude Shannon, ‘Theorems on statistical sequences’, is examined to shed light on the development of information theory. In particular, it appears that Shannon was still working out the mathematical details of his theory in the spring of 1948, just before he published ‘A mathematical theory of communication’. This is contrasted with evidence from a declassified cryptography report that Shannon’s theory was intuitively worked out in its essentials by the time he filed the report in 1945. Previous interviews (...) with Shannon, and a recent interview with a colleague of his, Brockway McMillan, confirm this picture.Keywords: History of science; History of technology; Claude Shannon; Information theory; Ergodic theory; Electrical engineering. (shrink)

The essays in this volume grew out of a seminar examining the possibility of the emergence of a new consensus in the philosophy of science. While that issue is not resolved, we are presented with the most thorough examination of problems associated with the deductive-nomological model of explanation and its variants since the publication of Hempel's Aspects of Scientific Explanation and other Essays in the Philosophy of Science. The discussion begins with Wesley Salmon's monograph-length review of the past forty years (...) of work in the tradition initiated by Hempel and Oppenheim in their groundbreaking article "Studies in the Logic of Explanation". As one of the major players in the debates, Salmon's personal account is informative; it provides a useful introduction to the topic and covers the recent history of work on explanation in a manner that allows the uninitiated to follow the arguments and intricacies of the essays that follow. A main theme in Salmon's essay, as in much of his work, is the relation between the theory of explanation and the concept of causation. Given that the notion of causal laws plays a dominant role in DN explanations, this discussion is most welcome. Causation is also a clear concern of many of the other papers. The resolution of some of the tensions between Salmon's approach to causation, and the various roles of explanation in the philosophy of science, is, in fact, one of the main objectives of the extended concluding piece by Philip Kitcher. For Kitcher, explanations serve as unifying mechanisms for theories within different disciplines. Unification in turn also serves as a criterion for choosing between competing theories. The interplay between, on the one hand, Salmon's attention to the problems deriving from Hempel's initial formulation of DN and, on the other hand, Kitcher's concerns with Salmon's conceptualization of causation, produces one of the more fascinating dialectics of the volume. By attending to their dialogue, we see just how far the theory of explanation has come in the last forty years and yet how slow progress can be when fundamental problems are deeply entrenched. Causation continues to bedevil us. With one exception, the remaining contributors to this volume seem to confirm that judgment. Matti Sintonen, Paul Humphreys, David Papineau, Nancy Cartwright, James Woodward, and Merilee Salmon explore the many facets of causation as it applies to clarifying our explanatory objectives. Peter Railton is an exception. In his paper Railton reminds us that behind the epistemological and pragmatic concerns of most of the other contributors, Wesley Salmon included, there lies a set of metaphysical concerns. A thorough analysis of causation and, hence, a resolution to many of the DN model's problems requires a logically prior assessment of the relation between the epistemology of causation and the metaphysics of necessity. How one decides that issue or cluster of issues, Railton reminds us, will play heavily in the controversies between realists and nonrealists over the proper use of the principle of inference to the best explanation. (shrink)