The article is an exploration into the problem of the ethos of modern science viewed from the representationalist and interventionist perspectives. The representationalist account of science is associated with the position of theoreticism, while the interventionist account pertains to the concept of new experimentalism. The former of these approaches is dominated by the ethos of science which Robert

Despite its being one of Roger Penrose’s greatest contributions to spacetime physics, there is a dearth of philosophical literature on twistor theory. The one exception to this is Bain (2006)—but although excellent, there remains much to be said on the foundations and philosophy of twistor theory. In this article, we (a) present for philosophers an introduction to twistor theory, (b) consider how the

A growing number of linguistic attempts to explain how languages change use cultural-evolutionary models involving selection or drift. Developmental constraints and biases, which take center stage in evolutionary developmental biology or evo-devo, seem to be absent within this framework, even though linguistics is home to numerous notions of constraint. In this paper, we show how these evo-devo concepts

Robert (Bob) Crompton was a towering figure in low energy electron and ion physics in Australia and internationally, as witnessed by his seminal publications on swarm physics, atomic and molecular physics and gaseous electronics generally, his widely-read monograph with Sir Leonard Huxley on the subject of charged-particle transport, and the many personal and professional accolades and awards he received

Warning: This article discusses blood collecting in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It also contains the image of an unnamed Aboriginal man who may be deceased. It is not without justification that the collecting of blood for genetic analysis is frequently associated with race science, but it is not solely or inevitably so. This history of Robert Kirk, a British–Australian population

There is a complex interplay between the models in dark matter detection experiments that have led to a difficulty in interpreting the results of the experiments and ascertain whether we have detected the particle or not. The aim of this paper is to categorise and explore the different models used in said experiments, by emphasizing the distinctions and dependencies among different types of models

Guiding principles are central to theory development in physics, especially when there is only limited empirical input available. Here I propose an approach to such principles looking at their heuristic role. I suggest a distinction between two modes of employing scientific principles. Principles of nature make descriptive claims about objects of inquiry, and principles of epistemic action give directives

We provide a quantitative analysis of the philosophy-neuroscience nexus using citation analysis. Combining bibliometric indicators of cross-field visibility with journal citation mapping techniques, we investigate four dimensions of the nexus: how the visibility of neuroscience in philosophy and of philosophy in neuroscience has changed over time, which areas of philosophy are more interested in neuroscience

Scientific realists don’t standardly discriminate between, say, biology and fundamental physics when deciding whether the evidence and explanatory power warrant the inclusion of new entities in our ontology. As such, scientific realists are committed to a lush rainforest of special science kinds (Ross, 2000). Viruses certainly inhabit this rainforest – their explanatory power is overwhelming – but

In this paper, I explore the relation between actual scientific practice and conceptual interpretation of scientific theories by investigating the particle concept in non-relativistic quantum mechanics (NRQM). On the one hand, philosophers have raised various objections against the particle concept within the context of NRQM and proposed alternative ontologies such as wave function realism, Bohmian

We discuss the challenges that the standard (Humean and non-Humean) accounts of laws face within the framework of quantum gravity where space and time may not be fundamental. This paper identifies core (meta)physical features that cut across a number of quantum gravity approaches and formalisms and that provide seeds for articulating updated conceptions that could account for QG laws not involving

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the visiting nurses of western empires and nation-states performed vital labor in combating tuberculosis (TB). Their hybrid role combined modern nursing and social work, typically benefitting from civil society organizations. In late Ottoman and early republican Turkey, tuberculosis resulted in many fatalities. To overcome this biopolitical challenge

This review article sets Corinne Fowler's new book in the context of the political struggle over Britain's colonial past, often referred to as a ‘culture war’. It identifies this struggle specifically as a right wing backlash against Black Lives Matter, notes how Fowler has been targeted by its protagonists, and examines how she has responded with this a book intended to inform, ameliorate and encourage

The paper examines The Peoples of Austria-Hungary geographical handbook and the accompanying Atlas of Austria-Hungary, published by Britain's Naval Intelligence Division in 1919 and, in greater detail, the antecedent mapping and statistical studies of Bertie Cotterell Wallis, a London schoolteacher, who undertook to study Hungary's nationalities and demography from 1915 as part of the 1:1 M mapping

This paper investigates the value of trust and the proper attitude lay people ought to have towards scientific experts. Trust in expertise is usually considered to be valuable, while distrust is often analyzed in cases where it is harmful. I will draw on accounts from political philosophy and argue that it is not only public trust that is valuable when it comes to scientific expertise – but also public

We employ a pragmatic model of inquiry to distinguish the epistemological character of exploratory experimentation. Exploratory experimentation is not constituted by any intrinsic characteristics of an episode of experimentation but depends on the context and aims of the experiment and the ways in which these shape decisions about how the experimental inquiry is to be conducted: its tasks, resources

In this paper we examine the changes in the diversity of astronomers working in Australia, particularly the ratio of women compared to men, from 1966, when the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA) was formed, to 2023. This was a pivotal time, as there was a significant change to workplace law that enabled women who worked for Commonwealth departments to retain their permanent position once they

This article studies the virtual world(s) that Belgian audiences encountered through the multimodal mass medium of the projection lantern in the early twentieth century. In contrast to previous work, we move from studying the visual representation of a single place in a small number of projection slides to examining the virtual world(s) that the lantern medium enabled. To achieve this overview, we

The wars that ravaged the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 17th century were among the most destructive events in the history of that part of Europe at the time. It is said that from this point on, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth transitioned from a subject to an object state. Through interdisciplinary research involving the analysis of written, cartographic, and paleoecological data, we aim

This article engages in examining the historical geography of ʾAmba Čara in the modern period of Ethiopia since 1850s. Ethiopian imperial history began in the Aksum era of the first century A.D., when an emperor moved from the country's capital and founded a number of temporary royal towns in order to develop and strengthen his kingdom. ʾAmba Čara was one of these towns. There is a dearth of research

This article explores the relationship between the spatial distribution of elite power and geophysical factors in two regions within the Low Countries between c.1350 – c.1650. It does so through a focus on seigneuries, bundles of territory and rights through which premodern lords and ladies across Europe held jurisdiction and economic prerogatives over local subjects. Historians have often assumed

This article, prompted by first-hand experience of considerable controversy over cruise ships in the Venetian Lagoon, seeks to take forward reasoning around archipelagic wateriness. In light of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals on ‘Clean Water and Sanitation’ and ‘Life below Water’, I shuttle between the twenty-first and nineteenth centuries on an experimental trajectory that brings

While sets are combinatorial collections, defined by their elements, classes are logical collections, defined by their membership conditions. We develop, in a potentialist setting, a predicative approach to (logical) classes of (combinatorial) sets. Some reasons emerge to adopt a stricter form of potentialism, which insists, not only that each object is generated at some stage of an incompletable process

Dr Ferdinand von Sommer (~1800–49) was the first government geologist appointed in Western Australia, a state that today owes its prosperity largely to the discovery and development of its rich mineral deposits. During his relatively short life, Ferdinand left a trail of incredible and diverse achievements, exploits and mystery that extended across the continents of Europe, Asia, Africa and Oceania

This article contributes to a body of scholarship examining the relationship between myth and geography. Specifically, I integrate a posthumanist understanding of assemblage theory to better account for the role that more-than-human entities play in the creation and transformation of mythic landscapes. To support this line of inquiry, I adopt Bowden's geographical traditions model to help trace the

This multidisciplinary study examines the potential causes of a severe and rapid population and settlement decline during the period of transition in the Jawlān and eastern Ḥawrān regions in the province of Damascus. The Jawlān had been part of a relatively small and centralized sultanate in the Mamluk period. However, in the sixteenth century it was incorporated into an empire that ruled over three

The American, Roger Tory Peterson, has been the single most influential figure in the evolution of birding field guides around the world. He was also a major contributor to the awakening of an environmental consciousness among the wider public in the second half of the twentieth century. In Australia, he provided a powerful impetus to the renovation of the field guide genre from the 1960s onward; and

This paper introduces a virtual special issue that explores how monuments have been contested in the past and how they continue to be so in the present. A survey of papers published in this journal from the 1990s to the early-2000s demonstrates an ongoing and rich interest in the interconnections between nationalism, landscape and ritual, with some emphasis on resistance but little sense of the contemporary

Australian astronomy has undergone huge changes since the middle of the twentieth century, when astronomers generally only had access to the observing facilities of their own institution. In this paper, we look at the changes in the context of the membership of the Astronomical Society of Australia (ASA), since its formation in 1966. Initially, the dominant institutions were the Australian National

Ideas of islands shaped Britain's self-identity and its relationship with the wider world in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Existing interpretations of Anglo-Japanese relations have emphasized the development of the idea of Japan as the ‘Britain of the East’ in the late nineteenth century with the significance of Japan adopting a western model of development. This article argues for a critical

Canonically, ‘classic’ tests of general relativity (GR) include perihelion precession, the bending of light around stars, and gravitational redshift; ‘modern’ tests have to do with, inter alia, relativistic time delay, equivalence principle tests, gravitational lensing, strong field gravity, and gravitational waves. The orthodoxy is that both classic and modern tests of GR afford experimental confirmation

This article argues that the spatial subjectivity of the map maker is a crucial component of historical geography and uses maps in post-Holocaust yizker bikher to demonstrate how these hand-drawn geographies are invaluable counterweights to perpetrator mapping projects. To develop the argument, the article analyzes three selected yizker bikher maps, renderings of towns inhabited by Jewish and non-Jewish

There has been in recent years a huge surge of interest in the so-called extended Wigner’s friend scenario (EWFS). In short, a series of theorems (with some variation in detail) puts pressure on the ability of different agents in the scenario to account for each of the others’ measured outcomes: the outcomes cannot be assigned single well-defined values while also satisfying other reasonable physical

This study geolocates the place of residence for a majority of free residents in Washington, D.C. in the year 1860 using archival data and evaluates their spatial distribution with respect to racialized residential segregation patterns. Transcribed individual census entries were joined to city directory records and geocoded at the household level using a customized historical address locator derived

Acclimatisation has been a profoundly important force in Australia’s history, yet scholars have routinely ignored or denigrated it, leaving it under-studied and misunderstood. Most accounts frame acclimatisation as a fad, briefly flourishing around the 1860s; scholars typically blame the spread of animal pests such as the rabbit for the sudden loss of interest in this branch of science. This article

This article delves into the urban environmental history of early modern Amsterdam through the examination of water access. In this coastal city, environmental change combined with the late 16th and especially 17th century urban growth made ground and surface waters brackish and polluted. As a result, access to clean drinking water required substantial efforts. A combined system of mainly rain containers

Hempel never met Ramsey, but he knew his work. In his 1958 The Theoretician’s Dilemma: a study in the logic of theory construction, Hempel introduces the term Ramsey sentence, referring to Ramsey’s attempt in Theories to get rid of theoretical terms in formal accounts of scientific theories. In this paper, I draw the attention to another connection between Ramsey’s and Hempel’s works. Hempel’s Deductive-Nomological

Although the philosophical literature on science and values has flourished in recent years, the central concept of “values” has remained ambiguous. This paper endeavors to clarify the nature of values as they are discussed in this literature and then highlights some of the major implications of this clarification. First, it elucidates four major concepts of values and discusses some of their strengths

Early-nineteenth century Russian accounts of the coastline between Alaska and Fort Ross are rare. This article helps fill this gap, providing diary accounts by Russian American Company employee, Afanasy Shvetsov, of two joint Russian-American sea otter hunting trips along the Oregon and northern California coasts in 1808-09. Recently recovered and translated, these accounts aptly describe landscapes

As a geographically isolated and island continent, Australia has historically been protected from the impact of many damaging plant pests found overseas. However, the advent of modern transport systems and greater global trade in live plants, seed and plant products is increasing the movement of pests including invertebrates, pathogens, and weeds. Exclusion of these threats through an effective biosecurity

When myxoma virus was first released in Australia it was seen not only as a means of controlling rabbits but also an opportunity to understand the evolution of a disease in a new host. The virus quickly attenuated into less virulent variants while simultaneously rabbits built heritable resistance to the disease. Nonetheless, rather than rabbits quickly outstripping virus virulence, myxoma viruses have

The journal Theology and Science assembled a group of four academics to comment on Andrew Davison's 2023 monograph Astrobiology and Christian Doctrine (Cambridge University Press, 2023). In this pa...

In the first half of the 19th century, Adriano Balbi (1782–1848) was one of the greatest geographers in Italy and Europe, having an extremely vast and constantly updated scientific output. He tried to keep up with new discoveries of ‘unknown and unexplored' territories. His work influenced geographers and cartographers, who used it as a source. Evangelista Azzi (1793–1848), a cartographer and military