Philosophy of science: the energy and excitement of curiosity

From rabbits plucked out of hats to dark matter, how do we comprehend the inexplicable or the unobservable? What do particle physicists and a magician’s audience have in common? Do we enjoy being baffled? If so, why? What pushes us to seek to understand? Is objectivity so vital in scientific observation and is subjectivity really its negation – or is the relationship between the two more subtle? As one of our guests puts it: “The energy that drives inquiry is not the pleasure we take in final explanations, but the energy and excitement of curiosity itself.” From the importance of the communities that foster scientific discoveries to whether objectivity is all it’s cracked up to be, we hear from Jason Leddington, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, whose book on the philosophy of magic and other arts of impossibility is under contract with MIT Press. He’s joined by Michela Massimi. Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh, and Jan Sprenger, a professor at the Centre for Logic, Language and Cognition at the University of Turin. Michela is the author of Perspectival Realism which will come out in January 2022, published by Oxford University Press, and Jan’s area of interest is the relationship between scientific inference, public trust and the role of objectivity. For more info on the projects featured, visit: https://europa.eu/!ThwRg3

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