BJPS Popper Prize 2017

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The Editors of the BJPS and the BSPS committee are delighted to announce that Grant Ramsey and Andreas de Block are the 2017 winners of the BJPS Popper Prize for their article ‘Is Cultural Fitness Hopelessly Confused?’.

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Lakatos Award Lectures

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Endowed by the Latsis Foundation, the Lakatos Award is given to an outstanding contribution to the philosophy of science. Winners are presented with a medal and given the chance to deliver a lecture based on the winning work. To celebrate the 2015 and the 2016 award winners—Thomas Pradeu and Brian Epstein, respectively—they each delivered a lecture at the LSE last week. Introduced by Hasok Chang, Pradeu’s lecture is entitled ‘Why Philosophy in Science? Re-Visiting Immunology and Biological Individuality’ and Epstein’s is ‘Rebuilding the Foundations of the Social Sciences’.

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Making Sense of Scents: The Science of Smell | Ann-Sophie Barwich

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While we have a better understanding of the olfactory pathway today, many of the central questions remain unresolved. How do you classify smells and how do you make their perception comparable? (And how do you control the volatile stimulus, its concentration, and its administration in psychophysical studies?) What are the perceptual dimensions of smell? Are there such things as primary odours? How does the brain represent smells? From this perspective, the discovery of how the sense of smell works presents us with an intriguing, yet untold, history of creativity in scientific reasoning.

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Popper Prize 2015

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The Editors of the BJPS are delighted to announce that the winner of the 2015 Popper Prize is Matthew Slater for his BJPS paper, ‘Natural Kindness’.

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The Sir Karl Popper Prize for 2014

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The decision of the Co-Editors of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science is that the Sir Karl Popper Prize for 2014 should be awarded to Rachael L. Brown for her paper ‘What Evolvability Really Is’ (Br J Philos Sci [2014], 65, pp. 549-72).

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Weekend Reading

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If our new virtual issue on the philosophy of psychology and cognitive science wasn’t enough to keep you busy, here are more new things for your reading pleasure.

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Philosophy of Psychology and Cognitive Science | Daniel Weiskopf

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Psychology emerged within the last two centuries from a long tradition of philosophical speculation about the mind, and it has to a large degree remained entangled with that tradition. Psychological theorizing overlaps with philosophical discourse at many points, and has also produced a host of concepts, methods, and models that shed new light on some of philosophy’s old problems. This combination has made it one of the most fertile sources of material for philosophers of science. The emergence of cognitive science as an organizing conception for the interfield study of the mind is a testament to the reciprocal influence of philosophy on scientific theorizing. As increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the analysis of the practices of particular sciences, the philosophy of psychology, neuroscience, and cognitive science have flourished.

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The ‘Cell State’ Revived? | Jonathan Birch

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What is an organism? Ask any two biologists from any two different sub-disciplines, and you’d probably get two different answers. A physiologist would give you a physiological answer, an immunologist would give you an immunological answer, a developmental biologist would give you a developmental answer, an evolutionary theorist would give an evolutionary answer… and so on. There would, of course, be some important recurring themes (organisms are ‘integrated wholes’, they are ‘organized’, they are in some sense ‘autonomous’) but as soon as we get down to details it’s plurality, not unity, that prevails.

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