Value-Polarizations in Science Research Group

+36 1 224 6778

Details: 07 September 2021; Hits: 2783

Is science free from external values and influences? How to secure the autonomy and freedom of scientific research? Is it possible to safeguard science from the attacks and unwarranted challenges of recent science-denial and science-skepticism? These are among the most important and challenging questions that philosophy of science could and shall answer. In fact, during the last few decades, when socially engaged philosophies of science gained wellestablished institutional foothold among philosophers and academia, these were the questions that philosophers, along with historians and sociologists, addressed in details. The research group VALPOS (Value-Polarizations in Science) will contribute to that field by focusing on two major subjects of inquiries.

First, it aims to provide novel perspectives about general and historical philosophy of science as a basis for further research. This part of the research group (“General and Historical Philosophy of Science Cluster”) will answer such questions as how public and internal-to-science perceptions of science has changed in the twentieth century (historically and systematically) against the background of economic and political crises, how major figures in the history of science and philosophy (e.g. Thomas Kuhn, James Conant, Michael Polanyi) argued for a value-laden conception of the nature and practice of science against the conceived orthodoxy of positivism, and finally, how those historical discourses are relevant to our current debates around science.

The other part of the research group, the “Biomedical Cluster”, utilizing the conceptual and systematic results of the first cluster, will focus on contemporary issues in biomedical research, where – via technological innovations and practically oriented systems of reference – the multidimensional value-ladenness of data and theory are more visible. Within that cluster, a more nuanced notion of “value” shall be developed and through it, three dimensions of research will be related. One of them is the field of bioethics, the other is medical humanities (embedding medical sciences in the valueoriented web of culture), and the third is infant nutrition. All three relate to the notion of how values influence medical sciences within socially conceived interests and aims of science.

Barcsi, Tamás

Email: barcsi.tamas at abtk.hu

Telefon: +36 1 224 6700/4166

Bárdos, Dániel

Email: bardos.daniel at abtk.hu

Telefon: +36 1 224 6700/4166

Bíró, Gábor István

Email: biro.gabor.istvan at abtk.hu

Telefon: +36 1 224 6700/4166

Demeter, Tamás

Email: demeter.tamas at abtk.hu

Telefon: +36 1 224 6700/4164