Abstract Since the seventeenth century the dream of rendering human life less arduous and of securing it against the whims of fate through the development and deployment of technological devices has been a factor stimulating scientific research and development. This dream rests on a supposition that we live in a universe governed by deterministic laws in which limits on our ability to predict and control are set only by the imperfection of our knowledge and skill. But recent work in chaos (...) theory combined with reminders that human beings themselves form part of the worldin which they live and seek to control suggests that this supposition is unjustified. If this is the case, then the idea that there is a technological solution to every problem, one which can be found by scientists or experts (the modern heroes) is revealed as a magical attitude which should have no place in rational decision making and whose persistence threatens to turn scientists into the high priests of a cult of technology. (shrink)

Science is based onfacts—facts that are systematically gathered by a community of enquirers through detailed observation and experiment. In the twentieth century, however, philosophers of science claimed that the facts that scientists “gather” in this way are shaped by the theories scientists accept, and this seemed to threaten the authority of science. Call this theold worries about science.By contrast, what seemed not to threaten that authority were other factors that shaped the facts that scientists gather—for example, the mere questions scientists (...) pursue. Call this theold nonworries about science.What I suggest is that the old nonworries are turning out to be far more worrisome than the old worries, and I use recent goings-on such as the “Death of Evidence” protests in Canada, the “replication crisis,” and the ongoing feminist critiques of science to illustrate my case. All this raises interesting new questions for philosophers of science to tackle. (shrink)

This sustained and distinctively Buddhist challenge to the ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness resolves the incoherence implicit in the Sartrean conception of nothingness by opening to a Buddhist vision of emptiness. Rooted in the insights of Madhyamika dialectic and an articulated meditative (zen) phenomenology, Nothingness and Emptiness uncovers and examines the assumptions that sustain Sartre's early phenomenological ontology and questions his theoretical elaboration of consciousness as "nothingness." Laycock demonstrates that, in addition to a "relative" nothingness (the for-itself) defined (...) against the positivity and plenitude of the in-itself, Sartre's ontology requires, but also repudiates, a conception of "absolute" nothingness (the Buddhist "emptiness"), and is thus, as it stands, logically unstable, perhaps incoherent. The author is not simply critical; he reveals the junctures at which Sartrean ontology appeals for a Buddhist conception of emptiness and offers the needed supplement. (shrink)

This paper offers a critical response to the claims of Sivin and Lloyd and Mattice to the effect that Greek and Roman philosophy was characterised by a predominance of combat metaphors. Drawing on Plato and Plutarch, as well as contemporary studies led by Nussbaum, I argue that a host of different metaphors was demonstrably used in the Greek tradition to describe philosophy and its subjects, led by the therapeutic or medicinal metaphor of philosophy as ‘therapy of desire’ or of desiderative (...) opinion. I propose that it was the sophists like Protagoras, at least as they are depicted by Plato, who sought to conceive of philosophising as a strategic, warlike activity. In conclusion, I reflect on the invisibility of the medicinal metaphor, outside of certain dedicated studies in the history of ideas, in contemporary thinking about Western philosophy and its past. (shrink)

(1990). Science, technology and bureaucracy: From the discourse of power to the power of discourse. World Futures: Vol. 28, Cross-Cultural Dialogue, pp. 183-201.