WONDER OPENS THE HEART: POPE FRANCIS AND LISA SIDERIS ON NATURE,ENCOUNTER, AND WONDER

This article argues that Pope Francis's invocations of wonder can speak to and at times challenge Lisa Sideris's recent contributions to the interdisciplinary discussion of wonder, science, and religion. Although the importance of wonder to Pope Francis's 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato si’ is acknowledged, it has not been widely recognized that wonder is implicated in and forms connections between multiple concepts and postures acknowledged as defining marks of Francis's papacy: coming out of oneself, encountering others, going to the margins; aversion to doctrinal rigidity; compassion, mercy, tenderness, and humility; to name a few. These defining concepts and stances resonate strongly with certain views on wonder, ethics, and ecology recently articulated by Lisa Sideris. In Francis, however, one finds a more affirming treatment of science‐based wonder and a response to Sideris's criticism of theistic wonder.     

IN DEFENSE OF PUBLICS: PROJECTION,BIAS, AND CULTURAL NARRATIVES IN SCIENCE AND RELIGION DEBATES

John H. Evans's recent book Morals Not Knowledge is a timely argument to recognize broader social and cultural factors that might impact what U.S. religious publics think about the relationship between science and religion and their attitudes toward science and/or religion. While Evans's focus is primarily on what can be classed as moral issues, this response argues that there are other factors that sit within neither the older epistemic conflict model approach nor a moral conflict model approach that also merit further investigation. There is a significant need for further research that examines the social, psychological, (geo)political, and broader cultural factors shaping people's social identities in relation to science and religion debates. When undertaking such research, we need to be wary of creating a binary between scholarly and public space discourse. Social scientific research in this field should be led by public perceptions, attitudes, and views, not by concepts or frameworks that we project onto them.     

SCIENCE AND RELIGION IN NINETEENTH‐CENTURY EUROPE: NON‐ANGLO‐AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

This is an introduction to the thematic section on “The Historiography of Science and Religion in Europe,” which resulted from a symposium held at the eighth Conference of the European Society for the History of Science, University College London, UK, from September 14–17, 2018. The introduction provides a brief argument for the decentering of science and religion from the Anglo‐American discourse. It concludes by previewing the contributions of the section's essays.     

Psychiatry and religion: consensus reached!

ABSTRACT

In December 2015 the Executive Committee of the World Psychiatric Association accepted a position statement on spirituality and religion in psychiatry. In this contribution the author will (briefly) sketch the background of the development of this position statement, and the criteria it needs to fulfil. The aim of the final result will be explained, and some desiderata with regard to its future will be expressed. The full text of the Position Statement as it has been published in World Psychiatry (February 2016) is added as appendix (permission granted by the editor).     

Dialoguing Height Psychology into a life of interconnectedness: Response to commentaries by Hwang,Bhawuk, King & Hodgetts,Kashima, and Xie,Su, & Zhong

Liu (Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 000, 000) attempts to articulate an epistemology for the aspirational practice of Height Psychology as a human science informed by Kantian epistemology in dialogue with other philosophies, especially Confucianism and Taoism. Height Psychology is a framework or metatheory for the practice of teaching, research, and service rooted in Kantian epistemology, in dialogue with other philosophies. It provides a holistic philosophy for social scientists responding to wicked problems unfolding over long periods of time. In responding to commentaries, I suggest a corollary to Shweder's (Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 3, p. 207) ‘One mind, many mentalities’: ‘Many indigenous psychologies, interconnected by one epistemology’. Height Psychology is about holding to an invisible moral centre. The practical postulates are foundational to the moral and ethical practices of human societies: they are for doing, their value is ontological. Human agency, proscribed by natural science epistemologies takes centre stage in Height Psychology by facilitating social scientists to act reflexively from multiple positions (from basic to action research) to benefit society. Height Psychology is dedicated to articulating and actioning the moral and ethical basis of a human science that can assist present and future generations of social scientists to meet the grave situational futures facing us in different parts of the world.     

Philosophy Makes No Progress,So What Is the Point of It?

Philosophy makes no progress. It fails to do so in the way science and mathematics make progress. By “no progress” is meant that there is no successive advance of a well‐established body of knowledge—no views are definitively established or definitively refuted. Yet philosophers often talk and act as if the subject makes progress, and that its point and value lies in its doing so, while in fact they also approach the subject in ways that clearly contradict any claim to progress. This article presents evidence for, and a theoretical explanation of, the view that philosophy makes no progress, concluding with an account of what philosophy is and what the point and value of it is. Philosophy should not be shy about being what it is, nor should it pretend to be what it is not. What it is should be reflected in philosophizing and the way it is taught.     

The mobile frontiers of Piaget’s psychology. From academic tourism to interdisciplinary collaboration / Las fronteras móviles de la psicología de Piaget. Del turismo académico a la colaboración interdisciplinaria

Jean Piaget’s (1896–1980) interdisciplinarity was related to his psychology in several ways. First, he was a simple tourist of other fields: an interested outsider. But as he became increasingly involved in the professionalization of the discipline, he moved through different contexts that constrained the possibilities for successful action in new and different ways. To make these clear, we adopt a little-known aspect of his later epistemological framework: the open hierarchy of levels. This then affords new perspectives of his life, his work, his theory and his location in the history of both Swiss psychology and French psychology. It also outlines his reasoning regarding the necessity of a disciplined approach to interdisciplinary collaboration, institutionalized in the founding of his International Centre for Genetic Epistemology. We therefore come not only to a fuller understanding of how Piaget thought scientific knowledge develops, but also of how the boundaries of scientific disciplines are pushed back.