On "The Role of Technology in Human Affairs"
In The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yochai Benkler discusses his vision of the role of technology in historical change. He rejects an overly deterministic vision of technology (which he connects with Lewis Mumford and Marshall McLuhan), but also rejects a view of technology as immaterial to a society’s direction.
First remarks on G. Edward White's The American Judicial Tradition
I’m reading G. Edward White’s The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges as part of my general background reading on American legal history. Lawrence Friedman may argue that “[t]here really isn’t a canon for legal history,” but I think White’s book at least comes close.
Legal reasoning by analogy
My VISU presentation on reasoning in analogy in Warren and Brandeis’ famous 1890 law review article on privacy.
Bayesian networks and criminal defense
I have begun to consider the utility of formal methods of evidential evidence mapping. Even without deep mathematical knowledge, the formulas are useful in any presentation of statistics in a courtroom, and can help avoid common reasoning fallacies (like the “prosecutor’s fallacy”).
Initial reflections on the nature of scientific evidence
For the last week I’ve been a part of the Vienna Institute Summer University (VISU) at the University of Vienna, at a two-week conference on “The Nature of Scientific Evidence.” The program brings together graduate students from a variety of disciplines from around the world to discuss science-related topics.
Cassirer and the Enlightenment
Cassirer’s work on the Enlightenment is quite unlike many of the other works of science studies I have worked on over the last couple of years.
Science and Sociability in Mary Terrall's The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment
For the enlightened of the mid-eighteenth century, the most fundamental aspect of their enlightenment was “sociability,” according to Mary Terrall in The Man Who Flattened the Earth.
Thinking about theories of historiography
Recently, I’ve been struck by the sense that what seems to drive history as a profession is not specifically the investigation of new archives, new materials, new places, or new times, but rather simply the larger desire to always pursue what is new qua new.
RSS Feed
click on x to hide
