Provides historical background on the clash between science and democracy and how previous scholars have approached it. One popular approach is to democratize science by subjecting scientific conclusions to popular review. This approach may work for certain discrete issues but is less successful for ongoing issues that involve substantial political content.

Right- and left-wing challenges to democracy make the problem of expertise especially difficult today. At times these two converge in a challenge to scientific findings and funding, most noticeably in the biomedical area. The United States is an extreme example.

In the Introduction, the need for an interdisciplinary approach to human well-being is presented, focusing on law and the social sciences, to elevate the interests of humanity amid rapid scientific and technological change.

In Chapter 10, the book concludes with a review of the numerous means available in the law to support the well-being of humans in an age of rapid scientific and technological development, emphasizing the need to revisit what it is to be human.

In Chapter 4, a history of the scientific method and the philosophies of science and technology are presented. The relationship between science, technology, and government indicate the impact of scientism and technological determinism on government policymaking, including a growing neglect of human well-being.

Berlin sees the history of philosophy as a history not just of the struggle to find answers to certain questions, but (because of the distinctive nature of these questions) to find the right means of framing them in the first place, as well as of determining the answers’ viability. He concentrates on how Enlightenment philosophers, thrilled by the success of science, sought to apply scientific procedures to ‘all that related to the social life of men’, and he focusses on the variously implemented theory of ‘ideas’, in which ‘the mind was treated as if it were a box containing mental equivalents of the Newtonian particles’. This chapter will argue that the Enlightenment philosophers not only envisaged the mind as a container for ideas, but ideas themselves as containers of ‘ideas’ in the other sense. Hume especially seems to assume that we can use empirical observation (by means of ‘the inner eye’) to discover how the mind functions – that we introspect the idea-particles moved by a Newton-like force of attraction while simultaneously observing the sensory impressions and concepts that they represent.

This chapter examines scientism. Its advocates maintain that there is nothing outside the domain of science, nor is there any area of human life to which science cannot successfully be applied. A scientific account of anything and everything constitutes the full story of the universe and its inhabitants.

This chapter summarizes the aims, scope, and contents of the book. Both science and humanism have evolved over hundreds of years, and both are associated with influential forms of inquiry into the world. Throughout this evolution, humanism and science have been intimately connected, in ways that are crucial for thinking about whether, as a significant strand of humanist thought contends, the sciences can (or can be relied upon to) enhance the welfare of humans, other life, and the environment. It is clear that there is no necessary connection between scientific inquiry and social or moral progress; the sciences have facilitated both significant goods and significant harms. Faced today with pressing challenges to the well-being of people and the planet, our attitudes toward science call for renewed scrutiny. With chapters spanning the history of entanglements of forms of humanism and science up to the present, and case studies of the value implications of the sciences, this book asks us to think about what relationships between science and humanism we should build for the future.

This chapter argues against an interpretation of scientism according to which science determines the limits of objective thinking. Central to the argument is Kuhn’s distinction between normal and extraordinary science. Understanding science as normal science makes science the plausible basis for an “ism” that delimits what counts as objective thinking because normal science has epistemologically and sociologically attractive features. But understanding science this way undermines the idea that a fundamental part of science, extraordinary science, involves objective thinking. Understanding science in a way that includes extraordinary science vindicates extraordinary science. But science understood this way no longer possesses the attractive epistemological and sociological features which made science understood as normal science the plausible basis of an “ism.” So, science cannot constitute an “ism” that determines the limits of objective thinking without undermining a fundamental aspect of itself. The argument is placed within a larger frame, about how to understand the connection between science and humanism. The view that humanism should take the form of scientism is rejected in favor of a view of humanism that takes the presence of interpretation and criticism as fundamental but that embraces science by finding interpretation and criticism within science itself.

This chapter is an extended argument for the existence of value (including moral) properties in the natural world, refusing thereby the equation of nature with what the natural sciences study. The argument turns on considerations of agency, seeking to establish that we could not be said to have the agency we manifestly possess, if value properties were not in the world we inhabit. Appealing to considerations found in Gareth Evans about the nature of belief, the chapter extends those considerations to take in our notion of desires as well, and draws from that extension the chapter’s grounds for saying that only if there are value properties without can our states of mind within possess the motivational power that makes possible our agency.

Humanism, conceived as a worldview concerning, among other things, how we understand ourselves and our relationships with others, and science, conceived as a family of forms of inquiry into the world, are deeply interwoven over our intellectual and cultural histories. This chapter considers their co-evolution as a prelude to the present, reviewing formative aspects of Renaissance humanism and deepening associations of values central to the Enlightenment with precursors to modern science, en route to an arguably peculiar situation today. While some past, humanist conceptions of the aim of science seem intimately connected to the idea of making a better world – one featuring better and more widespread human and planetary flourishing – contemporary thinking seems largely devoid of normative discussions of what science itself is for. This chapter offers reflections on a possible return to a humanist conception of the role and promise of science.

This chapter traces naturalism, a radical outgrowth of realism and one of the earliest movements in modernist theatre, beginning with its first articulations by Émile Zola and his French contemporaries through to manifestations, variations, and subversions of naturalist ideas across Europe, the United States, China, and India. Based in scientific epistemologies and a rejection of aesthetic idealism, naturalism introduced still potent innovations in dramatic form, scenography, audience experience, and the division of labour in theatre. Through confronting depictions of character and agency as fundamentally shaped by physiological, hereditary, and environmental forces, naturalism paved the way for later reformist theatre while seeding subsequent modernist movements that rebelled against its physicalist and materialist accounts of human experience.

Since the early 1930s, a broad acceptance of the need for social planning had been growing in Britain. Neurath naturally became involved in debates on this matter, not only with British and American scholars (C. H. Waddington and James Burnham) but with fellow Central European émigrés in the UK, Karl Mannheim and Friedrich Hayek. Neurath and Mannheim concurred on the possibility of ‘planning for freedom’, whereas Hayek feared that any socialist planning would lead inevitably to totalitarianism. Neurath took issue with this, not least in his reading of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which can be reconstructed from Neurath’s copious notes in his own copy. Neurath’s ideas of the 1920s for a socialized ‘economy in kind’ were moderated by his situation in Britain, with its democratic ‘muddle’ of the 1940s. By contextualizing Neurath’s views in relation to other prominent figures of the era, we point out what made him unique among them.

We tend to think of scientific knowledge as the paradigm case of what knowledge should look like. But the dominant image of science does not reflect what actually goes on in the making of scientific knowledge. Real scientific knowledge relies heavily on human judgment. And it relies heavily on communities.

Humanities scholarship is hard to classify as knowledge because it normally takes a form that is quite different from scientific research, which has become nearly synonymous with knowledge. Our popular picture of scientific knowledge is a based on a caricature — the Scientific Method — which misrepresents the nature of scientific inquiry in a way that makes it look fundamentally at odds with the tenor of the humanities. When we look at how scientific knowledge actually develops, however, we find that both the process by which this occurs and the structure of the scholarly communities that oversee it are surprisingly similar to those that have defined the humanities since antiquity. This book argues for a kind of knowledge — disciplinary knowledge — that is characterized by certain social practices surrounding the production of knowledge. Both the humanities and the natural sciences routinely create disciplinary knowledge.