This article summarizes how problems in formalizing scientific inference led to the production of social accounts of science, offering Helen Longino’s feminist contextual empiricism as a way forward. Rather than focus on rules of inference that connect knowledge-claims, Longino constructs norms for knowledge-producing communities which, when followed, ensure equitable dialogue and transformative criticism. It is further argued communities engaged in Christian systematic theology would benefit from developing a similar set of norms, given that theological inference is similarly rooted in social cognition and faces many problems analogous to those with which Longino is concerned. Finally, the extent to which Longino’s norms may serve as a starting point for theological communities is explored.

Panpsychists commonly hang onto the ‘realist’ assumption that our world with its structures has an observer-independent, often spatial element to it, even while they claim that those structures are realized by the experiences of subjects. I argue that this assumption is the ‘worm in the apple’ that lurks behind two of panpsychism’s major problems: the subject (de)combination problem and what I call the ‘inner-outer gap problem’. Abandoning this assumption sidesteps those problems, but commits panpsychism to anti-realism.

The Third Reich established a new financial order in Central Europe. This article examines one aspect of these changes, namely the evolution of banking law. After the seizure of power in 1933, Nazi officials weaponized financial and legal institutions to support the rearmament campaign. They initially worked through the Credit Supervisory Office, a regulatory agency created in 1934, to enforce a standardized model of regulation. Driven by more than a desire for self-sufficiency (autarky) and expropriative control, the authorities devised a system of economic governance that perpetuated the conflict and continually supported German financial interests. The politicization and dismantling of the regulatory office, officially dissolved in 1944, reflected the evolving priorities of the Nazi regime. By reinterpreting existing laws and working with a willing state bureaucracy, officials were able to use regulation as a tool for redesigning the banking systems of Germany and the annexed territories.

This article maps out the challenges of public global health communication in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic by providing an overview of the shifting media of health communication from the post-Second World War era to the present. The article explores the communication of science in real-time or live media of film, television, video and digital social media during three emerging infectious-disease (EID) outbreaks to place COVID-19 health communication in historical perspective. Examination of the transition from centralized, top-down communications to distributed, many-to-many, mobile communication illuminates challenges to expertise, authority and control of health narratives and imagery. Through theories of intermediality, the article explores the central function of gaps in communication networks. The article considers three cases of crisis communications amid EIDs: the influenza outbreak of 1957, HIV/AIDS around 1990 and COVID-19 in the early 2020s, and the challenges posed by scientific uncertainty under these circumstances of live, intermedial health communication. The article concludes that ‘liveness’ in intermedial health communications may have an inherently destabilizing effect on scientific authority.

In 1967, the World Meteorological Organisation and the International Council of Scientific Unions launched the Global Atmospheric Research Program (GARP), which lasted until 1982. The primary goals of the programme were international cooperation in global atmospheric observation to improve weather forecasting and to study climatic changes. This article examines the development phase of GARP from approximately 1961 to 1967, focusing on the US meteorologists Jule Charney and Thomas Malone and the Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, who contributed to its organization. It shows a variety of relationships between science and politics, beginning with President John F. Kennedy’s call for scientific cooperation to ease international political tensions, followed by the diverse efforts of Charney, Malone, Bolin and others to help secure political support, and finally the protracted negotiations within the International Council of Scientific Unions to shape and organize the Global Atmospheric Research Program.

P. Kyle Stanford’s Exceeding our Grasp (2006) shows how the problem of unconceived alternatives presents a significant challenge to realism. Stanford argues that the history of science offers repeated instances of scientists failing to conceptualize rational alternatives to ruling scientific doctrines, implying that our present scientific theories are likely to be similarly underdetermined. This article extends Stanford’s argument and provides it with a longer history. It shows how the principle of unconceived alternatives was explicitly deployed during the medieval and early modern periods to undermine scientific realism in particular cases. These arguments typically made reference to divine omnipotence and the principle that God could have produced phenomena in numerous ways inconceivable to finite human minds. In this theological register, unconceived alternatives offered a way of minimizing potential tensions between theological doctrines and prevailing scientific theories. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the applicability of the principle of unconceived alternatives to conceptions of God.

This study considers why public abattoirs of the Republican era failed to function effectively and were unpopular with contemporaneous Chinese people. In the early twentieth century, Chinese officials began to rely on biomedical parameters to define safe food, a critical step in the modernization of social control strategies. Tianjin was among the first Chinese cities to launch government-run slaughterhouses that combined safety inspection with monopolized animal slaughtering. However, how such slaughterhouses operated has received little academic attention. The municipal authorities introduced a series of laws covering slaughterhouses’ construction and operations to ensure meat safety. However, Tianjin’s public slaughterhouses failed to uphold their new duties toward public health and even became menaces to urban sanitation. City officials lacked the ethics of modern public servants, and the slaughterhouses provided them new opportunities for rent-seeking practices. The collection of slaughter tax superseded meat safety inspection as the municipality’s primary concern, which undermined the effectiveness of food hygiene regulation. Therefore, city residents regarded the public slaughterhouses as predatory tax collectors. Taking Tianjin as an example, this article demonstrates the gap between the modernization of governmental agencies modeled on Western countries and the persistence of traditional, exploitive governing practices in Republican China.

This article concerns opportunities for improving systems for processing public finds through digital technology and citizen science, taking England, Estonia, and Finland as case studies. These three countries have differing legislation, but all face a significant growth in hobby metal detecting and consequent increase in archaeological finds being reported, which places pressure on existing resources for recording them. While archaeologists in the different countries all value public finds as items that add to public collections, provide information about sites at risk, and can advance research, their priorities vary. This has an impact on approaches to processing finds, but offers the chance to embrace digital technology and involve the public. This article shows how digital technology and public involvement in archaeology have already facilitated change in all three countries and highlights further opportunities these might provide, given a growing desire to democratize archaeology and share public finds data as widely as possible.

This essay explores a key stage in the legal history of the concepts of consent and guilt in cases of rape, namely in twelfth-century canon law in the work of Gratian and the early canonists who commented on his Decretum. It substantially revises the account that currently exists in scholarship and explains that confusion between raptus and rape and a limited read of the Decretum have combined to provide a problematic picture in which, it has been claimed, neither Gratian nor broader medieval canon law took rape seriously as an offence. The essay focuses on the underexplored Causa 32 in the Decretum and discusses how Gratian very directly addressed forced coitus in that section of his text, both condemning it and exonerating women of all guilt who are forced to have sex without their consent. Gratian and the decretists ended up changing the discourse on rape, in part through their treatment of both Lucretia of Roman legend and an early Christian martyr, Lucia. Their considerations, which intersected with theology, resulted in a legal principle that a raped wife cannot be charged with adultery. Since their considerations could also be applied to any rape victim, their work is important for the development of rape law and legal notions of consent.

The recent phenomenon of anthropomorphizing artificial intelligences (AIs) is uniquely provocative for philosophy of religion because of its tendency to place AIs in an analogous position to divinity vis-à-vis humans in spite of AIs being human artefacts. In the case of divinity, intelligent mental capacities are, and in the case of AIs are sometimes presented as inevitably becoming, not just equivalent but in fact superior to their realization in humans. Philosophers of religion would do well to learn from discussions of anthropomorphism in AI, in conversation with the historical debates over anthropomorphizing divinity, and to remember that evolved cognitive biases may lose their adaptive functions as the cultural context shifts, and even become maladaptive.