Working on a grant from Canada’s Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Cosmopolitanism and the Local in Science and Nature project has been establishing a ‘cosmopolitanism’ research network that critiques the eurocentric approach so beloved of Canadian academics and has set up nodes across Canada and in India and Southeast Asia.
I first wrote about the project in a Dec. 12, 2014 posting which also featured a job listing. It seems I was there for the beginning and now for the end. For one of the project’s blog postings in its final months, they’re profiling one of their researchers (Dr. Letitia Meynell, Sept. 6, 2017 posting),
1. What is your current place of research?
I am an associate professor in philosophy at Dalhousie University, cross appointed with gender and women studies.
2. Could you give us some details about your education background?
My 1st degree was in Theater, which I did at York University. I did, however, minor in Philosophy and I have always had a particular interest in philosophy of science. So, my minor was perhaps a little anomalous, comprising courses on philosophy of physics, philosophy of nature, and the philosophy of Karl Popper along with courses on aesthetics and existentialism. After taking a few more courses in philosophy at the University of Calgary, I enrolled there for a Master’s degree, writing a thesis on conceptualization, with a view to its role in aesthetics and epistemology. From there I moved to the University of Western Ontario where I brought these three interests together, writing a thesis on the epistemology of pictures in science. Throughout these studies I maintained a keen interest in feminist philosophy, especially the politics of knowledge, and I have always seen my work on pictures in science as fitting into broader feminist commitments.
3. What projects are you currently working on and what are some projects you’ve worked on in the past?
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4. What’s one thing you particularly enjoy about working in your field?
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5. How do you relate your work to the broader topic of ‘cosmopolitanism and the local’?
As feminist philosophers have long realized, having perspectives on a topic that are quite different to your own is incredibly powerful for critically assessing both your own views and those of others. So, for instance, if you want to address the exploitation of nonhuman animals in our society it is incredibly powerful to consider how people from, say, South Asian traditions have thought about the differences, similarities, and relationships between humans and other animals. Keeping non-western perspectives in mind, even as one works in a western philosophical tradition, helps one to be both more rigorous in one’s analyses and less dogmatic. Rigor and critical openness are, in my opinion, central virtues of philosophy and, indeed, science.
Dr. Maynell will be speaking at the ‘Bridging the Gap: Scientific Imagination Meets Aesthetic Imagination‘ conference Oct. 5-6, 2017 at the London School of Economics,
On 5–6 October, this 2-day conference aims to connect work on artistic and scientific imagination, and to advance our understanding of the epistemic and heuristic roles that imagination can play.
Why, how, and when do scientists imagine, and what epistemological roles does the imagination play in scientific progress? Over the past few years, many philosophical accounts have emerged that are relevant to these questions. Roman Frigg, Arnon Levy, and Adam Toon have developed theories of scientific models that place imagination at the heart of modelling practice. And James R. Brown, Tamar Gendler, James McAllister, Letitia Meynell, and Nancy Nersessian have developed theories that recognize the indispensable role of the imagination in the performance of thought experiments. On the other hand, philosophers like Michael Weisberg dismiss imagination-based views of scientific modelling as mere “folk ontology”, and John D. Norton seems to claim that thought experiments are arguments whose imaginary components are epistemologically irrelevant.
In this conference we turn to aesthetics for help in addressing issues concerning scientific imagination-use. Aesthetics is said to have begun in 1717 with an essay called “The Pleasures of the Imagination” by Joseph Addison, and ever since imagination has been what Michael Polyani called “the cornerstone of aesthetic theory”. In recent years Kendall Walton has fruitfully explored the fundamental relevance of imagination for understanding literary, visual and auditory fictions. And many others have been inspired to do the same, including Greg Currie, David Davies, Peter Lamarque, Stein Olsen, and Kathleen Stock.
This conference aims to connect work on artistic and scientific imagination, and to advance our understanding of the epistemic and heuristic roles that imagination can play. Specific topics may include:
- What kinds of imagination are involved in science?
- What is the relation between scientific imagination and aesthetic imagination?
- What are the structure and limits of knowledge and understanding acquired through imagination?
- From a methodological point of view, how can aesthetic considerations about imagination play a role in philosophical accounts of scientific reasoning?
- What can considerations about scientific imagination contribute to our understanding of aesthetic imagination?
The conference will include eight invited talks and four contributed papers. Two of the four slots for contributed papers are being reserved for graduate students, each of whom will receive a travel bursary of £100.
Invited speakers
Margherita Arcangeli (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Andrej Bicanski (Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London)
Gregory Currie (University of York)
Jim Faeder (University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine)
Tim de Mey (Erasmus University of Rotterdam)
Laetitia Meynell (Dalhousie University, Canada)
Adam Toon (University of Exeter)
Margot Strohminger (Humboldt University, Berlin)
This event is organised by LSE’s Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science and it is co-sponsored by the British Society of Aesthetics, the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society and the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 654034.
I wonder if they’ll be rubbing shoulders with Angelina Jolie? She is slated to be teaching there in Fall 2017 according to a May 23, 2016 news item in the Guardian (Note: Links have been removed),
The Hollywood actor and director has been appointed a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, teaching a course on the impact of war on women.
From 2017, Jolie will join the former foreign secretary William Hague as a “professor in practice”, the university announced on Monday, as part of a new MSc course on women, peace and security, which LSE says is the first of its kind in the world.
The course, it says, is intended to “[develop] strategies to promote gender equality and enhance women’s economic, social and political participation and security”, with visiting professors playing an active part in giving lectures, participating in workshops and undertaking their own research.
Getting back to ‘Cosmopolitanism’, some of the principals organized a summer 2017 event (from a Sept. 6, 2017 posting titled: Summer Events – 25th International Congress of History of Science and Technology),
CosmoLocal partners Lesley Cormack (University of Alberta, Canada), Gordon McOuat (University of King’s College, Halifax, Canada), and Dhruv Raina (Jawaharlal Nehru University, India) organized a symposium “Cosmopolitanism and the Local in Science and Nature” as part of the 25th International Congress of History of Science and Technology. The conference was held July 23-29, 2017, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The abstract of the CosmoLocal symposium is below, and a pdf version can be found here.
Science, and its associated technologies, is typically viewed as “universal”. At the same time we were also assured that science can trace its genealogy to Europe in a period of rising European intellectual and imperial global force, ‘going outwards’ towards the periphery. As such, it is strikingly parochial. In a kind of sad irony, the ‘subaltern’ was left to retell that tale as one of centre-universalism dominating a traditionalist periphery. Self-described ‘modernity’ and ‘the west’ (two intertwined concepts of recent and mutually self-supporting origin) have erased much of the local engagement and as such represent science as emerging sui generis, moving in one direction. This story is now being challenged within sociology, political theory and history.
… Significantly, scholars who study the history of science in Asia and India have been examining different trajectories for the origin and meaning of science. It is now time for a dialogue between these approaches. Grounding the dialogue is the notion of a “cosmopolitical” science. “Cosmopolitics” is a term borrowed from Kant’s notion of perpetual peace and modern civil society, imagining shared political, moral and economic spaces within which trade, politics and reason get conducted. …
The abstract is a little ‘high falutin’ but I’m glad to see more efforts being made in Canada to understand science and its history as a global affair.