aeon essays social science

Reason and Meaning

Philosophical reflections on life, death, and the meaning of life, profound essays from aeon magazine.

Over the last year, I have found many good articles at Aeon —a digital magazine of ideas, philosophy, and culture. I had intended to write posts about these many pieces but alas I have not found the time. So instead I will link to some of the thought-provoking pieces they’ve published that I’ve read followed by a single sentence description of their content.

“What Animals Think of Death” (Animals wrestle with the concept of death and mortality.)

“Do We Send The Goo?” (If we’re alone in the universe should we do anything about it?)

“The Mind Does Not Exist” (Why there’s no such thing as the mind and nothing is mental.)

“You Are A Network” (The self is not singular but a fluid network of identities.)

“After Neurodiversity” (Neurodiversity is not enough, we should embrace psydiversity.)

“Lies And Honest Mistakes” (Our epistemic crisis is essentially ethical and so are its solutions.)

“Ideas That Work” (Our most abstract concepts emerged as solutions to our needs.)

“We Are Nature” (Even the Anthropocene is nature at work transforming itself.)

“The Seed Of Suffering” (What the p-factor says about the root of all mental illness.)

“Authenticity Is A Sham” (A history of authenticity from Jesus to self-help and beyond.)

“Who Counts As A Victim?” (The pantomime drama of victims and villains conceals the real horrors of war.)

“Nihilism” (If you believe in nihilism do you believe in anything?)

“The Science Of Wisdom” (How psychologists have found the empirical path to wisdom.)

“The Semi-Satisfied Life” (For Schopenhauer happiness is a state of semi-satisfaction.)

“Bonfire Of The Humanities” (The role of history in a society afflicted by short-termism.)

“How Cosmic Is The Cosmos?” (Can Buddhism explain what came before the big bang?)

“Is The Universe A Conscious Mind?” (Cosmopsychism explains why the universe is fine-tuned for life.)

“Dreadful Dads” (What the childless fathers of existentialism teach real dads.)

“End of Story” (How does an atheist tell his son about death?)

“Buddhism And Self-Deception” (How Buddhism resolves the paradox of self-deception.)

“The happiness ruse” (How did feeling good become a matter of relentless, competitive work?”)

“ How to be an Epicurean” (Forget Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics; try being an Epicurean.)

“The Greatest Use of Life” (William James on whether life is worth living.)

“Anger is temporary madness: the Stoics knew how to curb it” (How to Avoid the triggers.)

“Faith: Why Is the Language of Transhumanism and Religion So Similar?” (AI and religion.)

“Endless Fun” (What will we do for all eternity after uploading?)

“There Is No Death, Only A Series of Eternal ‘Nows'”  (You don’t actually die.)

“Save The Universe” (It’s only a matter of time until it dies.)

“ When Hope is a Hindrance ” (Hope in dark times is no match for action.)

Oh, to have more time to read and learn.

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2 thoughts on “ profound essays from aeon magazine ”.

I discovered this site a year or more ago and enjoy it immensely. Sadly, there’s not enough time in my day to take so many of these articles and videos in. I end up selecting several that interests me the most. I would strongly recommend Aeon and even support it if you agree.

Aeon is a great magazine. But like you, I’m overwhelmed by how much they publish.

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Communication

What is a Social Science Essay?

[Ed. – We present this article, adapted from a chapter of Good Essay Writing: A Social Sciences Guide , as a resource for Academic Writing Month.]

There are different types of social science essay, and essays of different lengths require slightly different approaches (these will be addressed later). However, all social science essays share a basic structure which is common to many academic subject areas. At its simplest, a social science essay looks something like this:

Title | Every essay should begin with the title written out in full. In some cases this will simply be the set question or statement for discussion.

Introduction | The introduction tells the reader what the essay is about.

Main section | The main section, or ‘body’, of the essay develops the key points of the argument in a ‘logical progression’. It uses evidence from research studies (empirical evidence) and theoretical arguments to support these points.

Conclusion | The conclusion reassesses the arguments presented in the main section in order to make a final statement in answer to the question.

List of references | This lists full details of the publications referred to in the text.

What is distinctive about a social science essay?

As you are no doubt aware, essay writing is a common feature of undergraduate study in many different subjects. What, then, is distinctive about essay writing in the social sciences? There are particular features that characterize social science essays and that relate to what is called the epistemological underpinning of work in this area (that is, to ideas about what constitutes valid social scientific knowledge and where this comes from). Among the most important of these characteristics are:

• the requirement that you support arguments with evidence, particularly evidence that is the product of systematic and rigorous research;

• the use of theory to build explanations about how the social world works.

Evidence is important in social scientific writing because it is used to support or query beliefs, propositions or hypotheses about the social world. Let’s take an example. A social scientist may ask: ‘Does prison work?’ This forms an initial question, but one that is too vague to explore as it stands. (This question might be about whether prison ‘works’ for offenders, in terms of providing rehabilitation, or re-education; or it might be about whether it ‘works’ for victims of crime who may wish to see retribution – or any number of other issues.) To answer the question in mind, the social scientist will need to formulate a more specific claim, one that can be systematically and rigorously explored. Such a claim could be formulated in the following terms:

‘Imprisonment reduces the likelihood of subsequent reoffending’. This claim can now be subjected to systematic research. In other words, the social scientist will gather evidence for and against this claim, evidence that she or he will seek to interpret or evaluate. This process of evaluation will tend to support or refute the original claim, but it may be inconclusive, and/or it may generate further questions. Together, these processes of enquiry can be described as forming a ‘circuit of social scientific knowledge’. This circuit can be represented as in this figure.

Undergraduates may sometimes be asked to conduct their own small-scale research, for instance a small number of interviews, or some content analysis. However, the focus of social science study at undergraduate level, and particularly in the first two years of study, will be largely on the research of others. Generally, in preparing for writing your essays, the expectation will be that you will identify and evaluate evidence from existing research findings. However, the principle holds good: in writing social science essays you will need to find evidence for and against any claim, and you will need to evaluate that evidence.

Theory is important in social scientific writing because the theoretical orientation of the social scientist will tend to inform the types of question she or he asks, the specific claims tested, the ways in which evidence is identified and gathered, and the manner in which this evidence is interpreted and evaluated. In other words, the theoretical orientation of the social scientist is liable to impact upon the forms of knowledge she or he will produce.

Take, for example, the research question we asked above: ‘Does prison work?’ A pragmatic, policy-oriented social scientist may seek to answer this question by formulating a specific claim of the sort we identified, ‘Imprisonment reduces the likelihood of reoffending’. She or he may then gather evidence of reoffending rates among matched groups of convicted criminals, comparing those who were imprisoned with those who were given an alternative punishment such as forms of community service. Evidence that imprisonment did not produce significantly lower rates of reoffending than punishment in the community may then be interpreted as suggesting that prison does not work, or that it works only up to a point. However, another social scientist might look at the same research findings and come to a different conclusion, perhaps that the apparent failure of prison to reduce reoffending demonstrates that its primary purpose lies elsewhere. Indeed, more ‘critically’ oriented social scientists (for example, those informed by Marxism or the work of Michel Foucault) have sought to argue that the growth of prisons in the nineteenth century was part of wider social attempts to ‘discipline’, in particular, the working class.

The issue here is not whether these more ‘critical’ arguments are right or wrong but that a social scientist’s theoretical orientation will inform how she or he evaluates the available evidence. In fact, it is likely that a ‘critical’ social scientist of this sort would even have formulated a different research ‘claim’. For example, rather than seeking to test the claim, ‘Imprisonment reduces the likelihood of reoffending’, the critical social scientist might have sought to test the proposition, ‘Prisons are part of wider social strategies that aim to produce “disciplined” subjects’. The point for you to take away from this discussion is, then, that the theories we use shape the forms of social scientific knowledge we produce (see Figure 2).

There is considerable debate within the social sciences about the exact relationship between theory and evidence. To simplify somewhat, some social scientists tend to argue that evidence can be used to support or invalidate the claims investigated by research and thereby produce theoretical accounts of the social world that are more or less accurate. Other social scientists will tend to argue that our theoretical orientations (and the value judgements and taken-for-granted assumptions that they contain) shape the processes of social scientific enquiry itself, such that we can never claim to produce a straightforwardly ‘accurate’ account of the social world. Instead, they suggest that social scientific knowledge is always produced from a particular standpoint and will inevitably reflect its assumptions.

What you need to grasp is that essay writing in the social sciences is distinguished by its emphasis on: the use of researched evidence to support arguments and on theory as central to the process by which we build accounts of social worlds. Your own writing will need to engage with both elements.

Common errors in essays

Having identified what distinguishes a social science essay we can return to the more practical task of how to write one. This process is elaborated in the chapters that follow, but before getting into the details of this, we should think about what commonly goes wrong in essay writing.

Perhaps the most common mistakes in essay writing, all of which can have an impact on your marks, are:

• failure to answer the question;

• failure to write using your own words;

• poor use of social scientific skills (such as handling theory and evidence);

• poor structure;

• poor grammar, punctuation and spelling; and

• failure to observe the word limit (where this is specified).

Failing to answer the question sounds easy enough to avoid, but you might be surprised how easy it is to write a good answer to the wrong question. Most obviously, there is always the risk of misreading the question. However, it is frequently the case that questions will ‘index’ a wider debate and will want you to review and engage with this. Thus, you need to avoid the danger of understanding the question but failing to connect it to the debate and the body of literature to which the question refers. Equally, particularly on more advanced undergraduate courses, you are likely to be asked to work from an increasing range of sources. The dangers here include failing to select the most relevant material and failing to organize the material you have selected in a way that best fits the question. Therefore, make sure that you take time to read the question properly to ensure that you understand what is being asked. Next, think carefully about whether there is a debate that ‘lies behind’ the question. Then be sure to identify the material that addresses the question most fully.

Writing in your own words is crucial because this is the best way in which you can come to understand a topic, and the only way of demonstrating this understanding to your tutor. The important point to remember is that if you do plagiarize, your essay risks receiving a fail grade, and if you plagiarize repeatedly you risk further sanctions. You must therefore always put arguments in your own words except when you are quoting someone directly (in which case you must use the appropriate referencing conventions). The positive side of what might seem like a draconian rule is that you will remember better what you have put in your own words. This ensures that you will have the fullest possible understanding of your course. If there is an end-of-course exam, such an understanding will be a real asset.

Social science essays also need to demonstrate an effective use of social scientific skills. Perhaps the most obvious of these skills is the ability to deploy theory and evidence in an appropriate manner (as you saw in the previous section, this is what distinguishes social scientific essay writing). However, particularly as you move on to more advanced undergraduate courses, you should also keep in mind the need to demonstrate such things as confidence in handling social scientific concepts and vocabulary; an awareness of major debates, approaches and figures in your field; the ability to evaluate competing arguments; and an awareness of potential uncertainty, ambiguity and the limits of knowledge in your subject. These are important because they indicate your ability to work creatively with the tools of the social scientist’s trade.

An effective structure is important and pragmatic because it helps the person who marks your essay to understand what is going on. By contrast, a list of unconnected ideas and examples is likely to confuse, and will certainly fail to impress. The simplest way to avoid this is to follow the kind of essay writing conventions briefly outlined above and discussed in later chapters of this guide. Chapter 8, on the main body of the essay, is particularly relevant here, but you will also need to keep in mind the importance of a well-written introduction and conclusion to an effectively structured argument.

The ability to spell, punctuate and use grammar correctly is, generally speaking, something you are expected to have mastered prior to embarking on a degree-level course. This is really a matter of effective communication. While it is the content of your essay that will win you the most marks, you need to be able spell, punctuate and use grammar effectively in order to communicate what you have to say. Major problems in this area will inevitably hold down your marks, so if this is an issue in your work, it will be a good idea to seek further help.

Finally, observing the word limit is important – and, as you probably realize, more difficult than it sounds. The simplest advice is always to check whether there is a word limit and what this is, and then to be ruthless with yourself, focusing only on the material that is most pertinent to the question. If you find that you have written more words than is allowed, you will need to check for irrelevant discussions, examples, or even wordy sentence construction. Too few words may indicate that you haven’t provided the depth of discussion required, or that you have omitted essential points or evidence.

In the light of the above, we can identify four golden rules for effective social scientific essay writing.

Rule 1: Answer the question that is asked.

Rule 2: Write your answer in your own words.

Rule 3: Think about the content of your essay, being sure to demonstrate good social scientific skills.

Rule 4: Think about the structure of your essay, being sure to demonstrate good writing skills, and observing any word limit.

Why an essay is not a report, newspaper article or an exam answer

This section has mainly focused on what is distinctive about a social science essay, but there is something distinctive about essays in general that is worth keeping in mind. Many students come from professional backgrounds where report writing is a common form of communication. For other students a main source of information is newspapers or online websites. These are all legitimate forms of writing that serve useful purposes – but, apart from some of the content on academic websites, they just aren’t essays. There are exam conventions that make exam writing – even ‘essay style’ exams – different from essay writing.

In part, this is to do with ‘academic register’ or ‘voice’. Part of what you will develop as you become a stronger essay writer is a ‘voice’ that is your own, but that conforms to the conventions of academic practice. For social scientists, as we have noted above, this practice includes the use of evidence to support an argument and providing references that show where your ideas and evidence have come from. It also includes the ability to write with some confidence, using the vernacular – or language – of your subject area. Different forms of writing serve different purposes. The main purpose of academic writing is to develop and share knowledge and understanding. In some academic journals this can take the form of boisterous debate, with different academics fully and carefully defending, or arguing for, one position or another. For students of social science, however, there may be less at stake, but essays should nevertheless demonstrate knowledge and understanding of a particular issue or area. Conforming to some basic conventions around how to present ideas and arguments, helps us more easily to compare those ideas, just as conforming to the rules of a game makes it easier for one sports team to play against another: if one team is playing cricket and the other baseball, we will find there are similarities (both use bats, have innings, make runs), but there will also be lots of awkward differences. In the end, neither the players nor the spectators are likely to find it a very edifying experience. The following looks at other forms of serious writing that you may be familiar with, but that just aren’t cricket.

Report writing

Reports take a variety of forms, but typically involve: an up-front ‘executive summary’, a series of discussions, usually with numbered headings and subheadings. They are also likely to include ‘bullet points’ that capture an idea or argument in a succinct way. Professional reports may include evidence, arguments, recommendations and references. You may already have spotted some of the similarities with essays – and the crucial differences. Let’s begin with the similarities. Reports and essays both involve discussion, the use of evidence to support (or refute) a claim or argument, and a list of references. Both will have an introductory section, a main body and a conclusion. However, the differences are important. With the exception of very long essays (dissertations and the like), essays do not generally have numbered headings and subheadings. Nor do they have bullet points. They also don’t have executive summaries. And, with some notable exceptions (such as essays around areas of social policy perhaps), social science essays don’t usually require you to produce policy recommendations. The differences are significant, and are as much about style as they are about substance.

Journalistic writing

For many students, journalistic styles of writing are most familiar. Catchy headlines (or ‘titles’) are appealing, and newspapers’ to-the-point presentation may make for easier reading. News stories, however, follow a different set of requirements to essays – a different set of ‘golden rules’. In general, newspaper and website news articles foreground the ‘who, what, where, when and why’ of a story in the first paragraph. The most important information is despatched immediately, with the assumption that all readers will read the headline, most readers will read the first paragraph, and dwindling numbers will read the remainder of the article. Everyday newspaper articles often finish with a ‘whimper’ for this reason, and there may be no attempt to summarize findings or provide a conclusion at the end – that’s not the role of news journalists. (Though there is quite a different set of rules for ‘Op Ed’ or opinion pieces.) Student essays, by contrast, should be structured to be read from beginning to end. The introduction should serve to ‘outline’ or ‘signpost’ the main body of the essay, rather than cover everything in one fell swoop; the main body should proceed with a clear, coherent and logical argument that builds throughout; and the essay should end with a conclusion that ties the essay together.

Exam writing

Again, exam writing has similarities and differences with essay writing. Perhaps the main differences are these: under exam conditions, it is understood that you are writing at speed and that you may not communicate as effectively as in a planned essay; you will generally not be expected to provide references (though you may be expected to link clearly authors and ideas). Longer exam answers will need to include a short introduction and a conclusion, while short answers may omit these. Indeed, very short answers may not resemble essays at all as they may focus on factual knowledge or very brief points of comparison.

Peter Redman and Wendy Maples

Peter Redman is a senior lecturer in sociology at The Open University. With Stephen Frosh and Wendy Hollway, he edit the Palgrave book series, Studies in the Psychosocial and is a former editor of the journal, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society . Academic consultant Wendy Maples is a research assistant in anthropology at the University of Sussex. Together they co-authored Good Essay Writing: A Social Sciences Guide (Sage, 2017) now in its fifth edition.

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Social Science Space’s sister site, Methods Space, explored the broad topic of Social Good this past October, with guest Interviewee Dr. Benson Hong. Here Janet Salmons and him talk about the Academy of Management Perspectives journal article.

NSF Looks Headed for a Half-Billion Dollar Haircut

Funding for the U.S. National Science Foundation would fall by a half billion dollars in this fiscal year if a proposed budget the House of Representatives’ Appropriations Committee takes effect – the first cut to the agency’s budget in several years.

NSF Responsible Tech Initiative Looking at AI, Biotech and Climate

The U.S. National Science Foundation’s new Responsible Design, Development, and Deployment of Technologies (ReDDDoT) program supports research, implementation, and educational projects for multidisciplinary, multi-sector teams

Digital Transformation Needs Organizational Talent and Leadership Skills to Be Successful

Who drives digital change – the people of the technology? Katharina Gilli explains how her co-authors worked to address that question.

Six Principles for Scientists Seeking Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure

The negative consequences of relying too heavily on metrics to assess research quality are well known, potentially fostering practices harmful to scientific research such as p-hacking, salami science, or selective reporting. To address this systemic problem, Florian Naudet, and collegues present six principles for assessing scientists for hiring, promotion, and tenure.

Book Review: The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries

Candace Jones, Mark Lorenzen, Jonathan Sapsed , eds.: The Oxford Handbook of Creative Industries. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 576 pp. $170.00, […]

Daniel Kahneman, 1934-2024: The Grandfather of Behavioral Economics

Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, whose psychological insights in both the academic and the public spheres revolutionized how we approach economics, has died […]

Canadian Librarians Suggest Secondary Publishing Rights to Improve Public Access to Research

The Canadian Federation of Library Associations recently proposed providing secondary publishing rights to academic authors in Canada.

Webinar: How Can Public Access Advance Equity and Learning?

The U.S. National Science Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science have teamed up present a 90-minute online session examining how to balance public access to federally funded research results with an equitable publishing environment.

• Open Access in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Canada: A Conversation

Five organizations representing knowledge networks, research libraries, and publishing platforms joined the Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences to review the present and the future of open access — in policy and in practice – in Canada

A Former Student Reflects on How Daniel Kahneman Changed Our Understanding of Human Nature

Daniel Read argues that one way the late Daniel Kahneman stood apart from other researchers is that his work was driven by a desire not merely to contribute to a research field, but to create new fields.

Four Reasons to Stop Using the Word ‘Populism’

Beyond poor academic practice, the careless use of the word ‘populism’ has also had a deleterious impact on wider public discourse, the authors argue.

The Added Value of Latinx and Black Teachers

As the U.S. Congress debates the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, a new paper in Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences urges lawmakers to focus on provisions aimed at increasing the numbers of black and Latinx teachers.

A Collection: Behavioral Science Insights on Addressing COVID’s Collateral Effects

To help in decisions surrounding the effects and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, the the journal ‘Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences’ offers this collection of articles as a free resource.

Susan Fiske Connects Policy and Research in Print

Psychologist Susan Fiske was the founding editor of the journal Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. In trying to reach a lay audience with research findings that matter, she counsels stepping a bit outside your academic comfort zone.

Mixed Methods As A Tool To Research Self-Reported Outcomes From Diverse Treatments Among People With Multiple Sclerosis

What does heritage mean to you?

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Working Alongside Artificial Intelligence Key Focus at Critical Thinking Bootcamp 2022

SAGE Publishing — the parent of Social Science Space – will hold its Third Annual Critical Thinking Bootcamp on August 9. Leaning more and register here

Watch the Forum: A Turning Point for International Climate Policy

On May 13, the American Academy of Political and Social Science hosted an online seminar, co-sponsored by SAGE Publishing, that featured presentations […]

Event: Living, Working, Dying: Demographic Insights into COVID-19

On Friday, April 23rd, join the Population Association of America and the Association of Population Centers for a virtual congressional briefing. The […]

Connecting Legislators and Researchers, Leads to Policies Based on Scientific Evidence

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Involving patients – or abandoning them?

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Public Policy

Jane M. Simoni Named New Head of OBSSR

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Canada’s Federation For Humanities and Social Sciences Welcomes New Board Members

Annie Pilote, dean of the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies at the Université Laval, was named chair of the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences at its 2023 virtual annual meeting last month. Members also elected Debra Thompson as a new director on the board.

Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences Names Spring 2024 Fellows

Forty-one leading social scientists have been named to the Spring 2024 cohort of fellows for Britain’s Academy of Social Sciences.

National Academies Looks at How to Reduce Racial Inequality In Criminal Justice System

To address racial and ethnic inequalities in the U.S. criminal justice system, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine just released “Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice: Science, Practice and Policy.”

Survey Examines Global Status Of Political Science Profession

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Report: Latest Academic Freedom Index Sees Global Declines

The latest update of the global Academic Freedom Index finds improvements in only five countries

The Risks Of Using Research-Based Evidence In Policymaking

With research-based evidence increasingly being seen in policy, we should acknowledge that there are risks that the research or ‘evidence’ used isn’t suitable or can be accidentally misused for a variety of reasons. 

Surveys Provide Insight Into Three Factors That Encourage Open Data and Science

Over a 10-year period Carol Tenopir of DataONE and her team conducted a global survey of scientists, managers and government workers involved in broad environmental science activities about their willingness to share data and their opinion of the resources available to do so (Tenopir et al., 2011, 2015, 2018, 2020). Comparing the responses over that time shows a general increase in the willingness to share data (and thus engage in Open Science).

Unskilled But Aware: Rethinking The Dunning-Kruger Effect

As a math professor who teaches students to use data to make informed decisions, I am familiar with common mistakes people make when dealing with numbers. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that the least skilled people overestimate their abilities more than anyone else. This sounds convincing on the surface and makes for excellent comedy. But in a recent paper, my colleagues and I suggest that the mathematical approach used to show this effect may be incorrect.

Maintaining Anonymity In Double-Blind Peer Review During The Age of Artificial Intelligence

The double-blind review process, adopted by many publishers and funding agencies, plays a vital role in maintaining fairness and unbiasedness by concealing the identities of authors and reviewers. However, in the era of artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, a pressing question arises: can an author’s identity be deduced even from an anonymized paper (in cases where the authors do not advertise their submitted article on social media)?

Hype Terms In Research: Words Exaggerating Results Undermine Findings

The claim that academics hype their research is not news. The use of subjective or emotive words that glamorize, publicize, embellish or exaggerate results and promote the merits of studies has been noted for some time and has drawn criticism from researchers themselves. Some argue hyping practices have reached a level where objectivity has been replaced by sensationalism and manufactured excitement. By exaggerating the importance of findings, writers are seen to undermine the impartiality of science, fuel skepticism and alienate readers.

Five Steps to Protect – and to Hear – Research Participants

Jasper Knight identifies five key issues that underlie working with human subjects in research and which transcend institutional or disciplinary differences.

New Tool Promotes Responsible Hiring, Promotion, and Tenure in Research Institutions

Modern-day approaches to understanding the quality of research and the careers of researchers are often outdated and filled with inequalities. These approaches […]

There’s Something In the Air…But Is It a Virus? Part 1

The historic Hippocrates has become an iconic figure in the creation myths of medicine. What can the body of thought attributed to him tell us about modern responses to COVID?

Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias 

n this Social Science Bites podcast, Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School and author of the just-released “May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It,” reviews the persistence of confirmation bias even among professors of finance.

Alison Gopnik on Care

Caring makes us human.  This is one of the strongest ideas one could infer from the work that developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik is discovering in her work on child development, cognitive economics and caregiving.

Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict

Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London, researches the intersection of education and conflict around the world.

Gamification as an Effective Instructional Strategy

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Harnessing the Tide, Not Stemming It: AI, HE and Academic Publishing

Who will use AI-assisted writing tools — and what will they use them for? The short answer, says Katie Metzler, is everyone and for almost every task that involves typing.

Immigration Court’s Active Backlog Surpasses One Million

In the first post from a series of bulletins on public data that social and behavioral scientists might be interested in, Gary Price links to an analysis from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Webinar Discusses Promoting Your Article

The next in SAGE Publishing’s How to Get Published webinar series focuses on promoting your writing after publication. The free webinar is set for November 16 at 4 p.m. BT/11 a.m. ET/8 a.m. PT.

Webinar Examines Open Access and Author Rights

The next in SAGE Publishing’s How to Get Published webinar series honors International Open Access Week (October 24-30). The free webinar is […]

Ping, Read, Reply, Repeat: Research-Based Tips About Breaking Bad Email Habits

At a time when there are so many concerns being raised about always-on work cultures and our right to disconnect, email is the bane of many of our working lives.

New Dataset Collects Instances of ‘Contentious Politics’ Around the World

The European Research Center is funding the Global Contentious Politics Dataset, or GLOCON, a state-of-the-art automated database curating information on political events — including confrontations, political turbulence, strikes, rallies, and protests

Matchmaking Research to Policy: Introducing Britain’s Areas of Research Interest Database

Kathryn Oliver discusses the recent launch of the United Kingdom’s Areas of Research Interest Database. A new tool that promises to provide a mechanism to link researchers, funders and policymakers more effectively collaboratively and transparently.

Watch The Lecture: The ‘E’ In Science Stands For Equity

According to the National Science Foundation, the percentage of American adults with a great deal of trust in the scientific community dropped […]

Watch a Social Scientist Reflect on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

“It’s very hard,” explains Sir Lawrence Freedman, “to motivate people when they’re going backwards.”

Dispatches from Social and Behavioral Scientists on COVID

Has the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic impacted how social and behavioral scientists view and conduct research? If so, how exactly? And what are […]

Contemporary Politics Focus of March Webinar Series

This March, the Sage Politics team launches its first Politics Webinar Week. These webinars are free to access and will be delivered by contemporary politics experts —drawn from Sage’s team of authors and editors— who range from practitioners to instructors.

New Thought Leadership Webinar Series Opens with Regional Looks at Research Impact

Research impact will be the focus of a new webinar series from Epigeum, which provides online courses for universities and colleges. The […]

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Ideas that Work (in: Aeon)

Truth, knowledge, justice – to understand how our loftiest abstractions earn their keep, trace them to their practical origins

Related Papers

Journal of the Philosophy of History

Bennett Gilbert

The history of ideas is most prominently understood as a highly specialized group of methods for the study of abstract ideas, with both diachronic and synchronic aspects. While theorizing the field has focused on the methods of study, defining the object of study – ideas – has been neglected. But the development of the theories behind material culture studies poses a sharp challenge to this narrow approaches. It both challenges the integrity of the notion of abstract ideas and also offers possibilities for enlarging the scope of the ways in which we can study ideas historically. It is proposed here to regard ideas as mental relations deeply connected to human communication by both thinking and doing. This connection of ideational thought to human production and behavior is a deep foundation for the history of ideas as an interdisciplinary historiographic means of understanding moral life. http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/18722636/advance https://doi.org/10.1163/18722636-12341371

Jonathan Floyd

Bevir’s view that theories are prior to theorists, just insofar as they are prior to any observations which one might make and, by extension, any facts one might invoke in support of any particular interpretative conclusions, is problematic when applied to intellectual history. This is because, although it is in one sense true that all facts are ineluctably constituted by some or other underlying theory, it is also true that, in a vast number of important situations, all human beings share the same basic theory. The most important implication of this shared stock of concepts, observations and facts, is that we shall often be able to see numerous aspects of a long‐dead author’s world in much the same way as he or she saw it.

Teun Tieleman

Arthur O. Lovejoy Journal of the History of Ideas Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1940), pp. 3-23

Brett Bowden

As a graduate student, I undertook my doctoral training in a Political Science Program [...]

Bloomsbury History: Theory and Method (ed. Stefan Berger)

Arthur Alfaix Assis

Ideas will always resist single-statement definitions, but in a rough attempt at generalization one can say that they either play or are attributed a very special role in thinking and expressive processes, in perhaps all domains of human culture. People who specialize in creating, receiving, transforming, and disseminating them are usually called “intellectuals”—even if they do not monopolize those social practices. The constitution and circulation of ideas as structures of thinking and expression, the settings in which they originate and to which they respond, the material supports in which they are conveyed as well as the intellectual agents specialized in dealing with them are studied by the history of ideas and its neighboring fields. These include intellectual history, history of concepts, histoire des mentalités, Geistesgeschichte, history of books, and even cultural history, sociology of knowledge, and the histories of science, philosophy, literature, and the humanities. As it is obvious, such labels do not support a clear-cut division of labor, nor can they be lined up in an organogram that would fix constant hierarchical relations between them. They show up with incommensurable frequency, displaying different connotations within different academic cultures. This explains why in some cases—as in Geistesgeschichte, Begriffsgeschichte, or histoire des mentalités—equivalent English terms are considered problematic or unnecessary. Having flourished, spread, and sometimes also decayed within different national, disciplinary, and generational contexts, the fields designated by them can only have intricate and overlapping limits. A good way to understand the traditions connected to the history of ideas is hence to look closely to their messy border zones. The closest and most intricate connections are those between “history of ideas” and “intellectual history,” which is reflected in the fact that these terms are often employed interchangeably—a use that will be noted also in the remainder of the present text. Even so, “intellectual history” clearly emerged as preferential designation in the English-speaking world in the final decades of the twentieth century. A reason for this is the spread of the suspicion that “ideas” are burdened by essentialist traits that would render us insensitive to historical discontinuity. The notion of ideas is also sometimes regarded as much too oblivious of the way language conditions thought, and accordingly some analysts suggest that it would be out of line with the best theoretical intelligence established since the so-called linguistic turn. However, others claim that ideas should not be equaled to expressed words, as they refer to occurrences that are best described with psychological terms such as beliefs and attitudes, and, further, that there would be non-essentialist ways of addressing them. What seems more uncontroversial is that, in comparison to “history of ideas,” “intellectual history” opens up an enlarged space of ambivalence as regards the analytical focus, which can then toggle from intellectual products to intellectual producers, consumers, and the cultural frameworks in which they interact. There are also important crossroads between the history of ideas and conceptual history (or Begriffsgeschichte), as both terms signal to the historical study of basic structures of thought. Conceptual history, however, at least in its most well-known variety, which was very much inspired by social-historical approaches, tends to be less centered on biographical and psychological issues and to introduce concepts as more depersonalized linguistic entities. Such and other connections and disconnections between the various ways of attending to “the reflective communal life of human beings in the past” will be further discussed in the following from the perspective of a geographically multicentered historical synopsis. Hopefully, its many limitations will be compensated by the possibility of bringing to the fore relations that otherwise would not become so salient.

journal of Philosophical Investigations at university of Tabriz

Muhammad Asghari , Sahar Joakim , vahid nejadmohammad , Shirzad Peik Herfeh , M. Zamanlu

full text of journal of Philosophical Investigations 2017/ No.21. Year 11 at university of Tabriz-Iran.pdf http://philosophy.tabrizu.ac.ir/

G. G. Bolich

This 500+ page volume traces 2500 years of Western philosophical thought on the nature and acquisition of knowledge. The 18 chapters cover important thinkers from Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Protagoras, through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Epicureans, Stoics, and Skeptics, to Christian thinkers on revelation, Descartes, the British empiricists, Kant, Hegel, Existentialism and Phenomenology, Pragmatism, Analytic Philosophy, Bergson, and Polyani, ending with surveys of current trends in epistemology.

published in: Religion 43:2 (2013), 252-273.

Wouter J. Hanegraaff

Sydney Studies in Religion

Garry Trompf

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Daily Reads for VARC: Aeon Essays - 100 RCs for Practice - CAT - Formulas, Tricks, Videos & Tests

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• How many attempts does a CAT have? There is no limit for the CAT exam candidates to the number of attempts of giving the exam. A candidate can appear unlimited time throughout his / her entire lifespan. But the candidates should have some criteria for the candidate to hold a minimum of 50 % marks or equal to no CGPA or grade in Graduation.
• Is calculator allowed in CAT? Yes – a calculator is allowed in the CAT exam. But this does not mean that you can carry your own calculator in the exam. You will be allowed to use an on-screen calculator on your computer.
• Is GK asked in CAT? While GK or Business GK has not been part of the CAT testing, it is very important for an aspirant to be comfortable with these. Other examinations – like the XAT – have a section on GK. Barring that, the preparation for CAT does not end with giving the CAT examination.

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Exploring the big questions with aeon.

September 10, 2019 |

A new two-year project will fund dozens of essays and longform pieces published in one of the most innovative and engaging journals of science and thought.

Founded in 2012, Aeon is a digital magazine that provides a forum for writers, thinkers, and scientists to discuss ideas at the cutting edge of science, philosophy, society, and the arts through longform essays, idea pieces, and videos. With editorial offices in Melbourne, London, and New York, Aeon is structured as an international non-profit, relying on individual donations and grant funding to make its articles freely available to an aggregate audience of about 1.3 million web viewers and social media followers.

A new grant from the John Templeton Foundation will provide support for Aeon ’s writers and editors to produce three dozen essays and videos across four general themes: the dialogue between physics and philosophy around cosmology’s leading edge; the ways that new evolutionary insights — including epigenetics, population genetics, and complex systems theory — are enriching the story of life on earth; the cognitive science of consciousness and creativity; and the neuroscience and cognitive connections between spiritual practices, ethics, and mental health.

The current project is a follow-up  from a previous collaboration between Aeon and the Templeton Religion Trust, which provided funding for essays including an exploration of the paradoxes of entangled time , changes in biologists’ ideas of what constitutes an organism , an argument that consciousness is not a thing but rather a process of inference , and an essay on the positive effects of forests and other natural settings on mental health . As with the previous project, Aeon ’s editorial staff and writers retain full control over what’s written — the grant funding merely makes the writing and editing possible.

“One of the things Aeon is best at is providing a forum for truly cutting-edge thinkers to engage with a broader audience,” says John Cunningham, the John Templeton Foundation’s Program Officer for Public Engagement. “This project will allow Aeon ’s editors to work with scientists who may not have written for a popular audience before to make their work — and the important questions it raises — accessible to those outside their field.”

STILL CURIOUS?

Read more at Aeon.co .

Watch three videos that Aeon produced in conjunction with the Templeton Religion Trust:

• Why preparation, not willpower, is the key to mastering self-restraint
• The forgotten (female) quantum physics pioneer, Grete Hermann
• Dance, dance evolution

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When Science Outpaces Ethics

Plus: A ‘West Point for cops’

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

What do you watch or read or see portrayed in the media that is most at odds with your own observations and personal experiences, whether at home, at work, in your dating or family life, or in any other area where your reality and portrayals by others seem incongruous?

Send your responses to [email protected] .

Conversations of Note

What happens when science advances in ways so hard to comprehend that our society’s ethical norms––and the ethical intuitions of many people––aren’t sophisticated enough to encompass them?

The question is brought to mind by a news item in The Guardian about a recent breakthrough in reproductive science:

Scientists have created synthetic human embryos using stem cells, in a groundbreaking advance that sidesteps the need for eggs or sperm. Scientists say these model embryos, which resemble those in the earliest stages of human development, could provide a crucial window on the impact of genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage. However, the work also raises serious ethical and legal issues as the lab-grown entities fall outside current legislation in the UK and most other countries. The structures do not have a beating heart or the beginnings of a brain, but include cells that would typically go on to form the placenta, yolk sac and the embryo itself.

Perhaps an ethicist AI chatbot will supply us with answers in the future.

In National Review , Charles C. W. Cooke objects to Paul McCartney’s decision to use an old John Lennon recording and AI to make what McCartney calls “the last Beatles song.” Cooke writes:

Lennon and McCartney were great friends. They were also passionate enemies. And, like many creative duos, they fought like hell with one another over their work. We have no idea whether Lennon even wanted to release this demo recording, let alone in what manner he would have wanted it prepared for public consumption. Throughout his life, Lennon exhibited strong opinions on structure, production, instrumentation, harmony, and—in his later years—the sound of his own voice (that ethereal, delay-heavy “Lennon sound” you hear throughout his solo work was the product of a profound post-1967 distaste for his own singing). Of all the people in the world, Paul McCartney probably has the best idea of how John would think. And yet, as the cornucopia of information we have about the Beatles’ canon amply demonstrates, McCartney’s tastes were often radically different from John’s. That despite this tension the two men managed to make it work for eight years does not accord to McCartney an open warrant to harvest “John’s voice from a ropy little bit of cassette,” to carve the extracted raw materials into his own image, to simulate with computers what was not there, and then to “print” the results under someone else’s byline.

He predicts many future instances of using AI to simulate the resurrection of dead artists.

Whither Portland?

In City Journal , Michael Totten explains why crime in the city gets so much media attention:

Portland is hardly the most dangerous city in America: the homicide rate in St. Louis is more than four times higher , with 65 murders per 100,000 people, compared with Portland’s 15 in 2022. Portland’s rate peaked at more than double the national average, but of all the cities with higher crime rates than Portland, only Chicago gets as many national headlines. That’s probably because Portland’s increase in crime was the worst in the country. No other city’s homicide rate rose so spectacularly. And unlike St. Louis, Baltimore, and other notorious hot spots, Portland was recently a destination city that touted its high quality of life as a reason to move there. Of late, though, rather than attracting new residents, Portland has actually lost population, either to the suburbs or out of state.

He goes on to argue that its residents may be turning things around:

Shootings and homicides exploded 300 percent between 2019 and 2022, robberies rose 50 percent in 2022 alone, vehicle thefts hit record highs , and work-order requests for graffiti removal shot up 500 percent between 2020 and 2022. The City of Roses suffered 413 shootings in 2019 but 1,306 in 2022 and nearly twice as many homicides as San Francisco, though Portland is only three-fourths its size. Meantime, statewide crime actually declined from 2019 to 2021. The homelessness crisis also intensified. The slow-motion collapse of Oregon’s mental-health infrastructure, a dramatic surge of cheap and deadly fentanyl and a far more potent and addictive form of psychosis-inducing meth , and a crippling housing shortage led to the formation of more than 700 tent cities in residential neighborhoods and business districts across the city. But while it’s too soon to declare that Portland’s troubles have passed, the worst may now be over. Despite ongoing woes, Portland looks and feels much better than it did in dystopian 2020. The riots stopped, and the crime wave seems to have peaked, with shootings down by nearly 40 percent and homicides down more than 50 percent in the early months of 2023. A sober mood shift has taken over the city. Voters passed a ballot measure to restructure city government, while the three newest elected officials on the city council are steering Portland in a different direction. The city, county, and state are taking steps to reverse the decline.

How to Improve Policing and Reduce Crime

Megan McArdle has an idea: establish a national academy for police officers. In The Washington Post , she writes :

A West Point for cops could serve as a research center for learning what works in policing, and as a place to transmit that information to new generations of officers, who can be attracted to the profession through a combination of free, high-quality education and opportunities for elite public service. As a condition of receiving this education, recruits would promise to serve for eight years—as West Point officers do—on a major urban police force. The federal government could pay their salaries during that time, possibly including hazard pay for more difficult assignments. This would inject more federal money into policing and spread the lessons graduates have learned into police departments across the country. A graduate program, something like the War Colleges, could also be established for mid-career and senior police officers. This would not only improve training but also create a new national network of elite officers through which best practices could be shared.

The Sexual Revolution, Feminism, and the Pill

Louise Perry is the author of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century . The economist Bryan Caplan wrote a critical review of the book at his Substack . And Perry responded with a critical review of the review . I love too-rare back-and-forths like this, where two intellectuals are uncompromising in setting forth their unusual views, where there is a real clash of viewpoints, and where the conflict remains on the level of ideas. I always learn from such exchanges, especially when, as here, all involved keep their sense of humor.

Meanwhile, UnHerd ’s Kat Rosenfield is weighing in on “the contraception wars.” She writes :

Two things are true. First: hormonal contraception has been unequivocally a tool of female empowerment. It gives women an unprecedented and invaluable level of control over their fertility, and, by extension, their lives. Second: the utility of the pill for women in general does not mean that it is right for every woman individually. And in the mad rush to celebrate hormonal contraception for the world-changing invention it is, some women have been silenced, and side-lined.

More on Kids, Smartphones, and Social Media

My colleague Kelli María Korducki opines on what the debate says about adults:

Those of us old enough to remember navigating jobs and social lives before everyone carried around a tiny pocket computer are wont to idealize that now-improbable-seeming before time … Nostalgia colors perspective, and all but certainly shapes widespread hypotheses of the clear and present dangers young people face. Because of this, adults across generations, and in every day and age, have demonstrated a knack for neglecting to apply the lessons of prior eras’ panics to the present moment. Today’s Gen X and Millennial parents fretting about their children’s social-media use may or may not be comforted to learn that, according to some studies, the overconsumption of TV and video games that marked many of their late-20th-century childhoods likely had a comparable impact on their tender, developing brains—for better and for worse.

After a decade of work and hundreds of studies on the relationship between mental health and social media, my colleague Kaitlyn Tiffany writes , the science isn’t as settled as many Americans seem to think:

Social media’s effects seem to depend a lot on the person using it. It may play a different role for different demographics, and the role it plays may also change for people at different stages of life. It surely doesn’t affect everyone in the same way … If social media isn’t bad for all teenage girls, we need to know which ones it is bad for, and what makes a specific girl susceptible to the risks. Some girls are suffering, and social media is exacerbating their pain. Some girls use the internet to find community that they don’t have offline, or to express creative impulses and questions about their identity that their families aren’t open to. We also need to know which aspects of social media are riskiest. Is it harmful because it cuts into sleep hours or IRL friend time and exposure to sunlight, or is it the envy-inducing images that invite comparison and self-doubt? Is it bullying we should worry most about, or the more ambient dread of being liked but not liked enough?

Provocation of the Week

In an Aeon essay on experimental data in quantum physics that seems consistent with the possibility of multiple worlds, Timothy Andersen argues :

The most powerful reason why the multiverse has infiltrated culture is because people are storytellers. Research shows that this tendency is universal and appears in early childhood. It is written in our DNA. Implicit in storytelling is the modification of details such that one possible world becomes another. Such narratives are essential to how our species has understood the world for millennia. Meta-stories containing conflicting possible worlds simultaneously become not only plausible but essential to how we interpret our perceptions: personal, nonlinear and qualitative, rather than objective, linear and quantitative. The human mind even creates its own multiverses through dreams, where alternative realities appear. Who hasn’t dreamed of a loved one acting in ways they never would, or living in a house that they’ve never seen before? Fundamentally, the human mind has evolved to imagine multiple possible futures branching out from the present. Whether this is actually the case is an open question that physics still must resolve, if it ever can. While the many-worlds interpretation has at times been overused, the pervasiveness of the multiverse in culture is a shift with benefits. There is more than one way to see the world, and every conscious mind may create its own version of reality. In a world awash with data, hard facts have become difficult to come by, and everyone needs to have their minds open to the possibilities that what they believe or have been told is only one of many possible worlds. On the other hand, when we start longing to live in one of those alternative realities, it can make us desperately unhappy. This is the curse of imagining all these branching pathways in our lives. As the American novelist James Branch Cabell wrote in The Silver Stallion (1926): ‘The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.’ What greater despair than to believe you are living the wrong life?

That’s all for today––see you next week.

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