Reconsideration of Science and Technology III: An Open World

Drawing on debates from traditional and postmodern thoughts on science and technology, the title builds a new theoretical framework to reconsider science and technology, integrating the opposing viewpoints that either justify science or negate it.

As the third volume of a three-volume set that proposes to reconsider science and technology and explores how the philosophy of science and technology responds to an ever-changing world, this final volume seeks to restore the cultural implications of science. Across the six chapters, the authors probe the prospect of a pluralistic scientific culture, including discussions of diversified value choices, the tension between reason and unreason, other binary characteristics of scientific knowledge, including objectivity and uniqueness, universality and locality, as well as the loss, awakening and reconstruction of scientific culture. The authors call for a transformation of scientific culture from a dominant culture to an affirmative one and envision a free and open world of science and technology.

The volume will appeal to scholars and students interested in the philosophy of science and technology, the ideology of scientism and anti-scientism, modernism and postmodernism, Marxist philosophy and topics related to scientific culture.

Liu Dachun is a Distinguished Professor at Renmin University of China and also a pioneer and leading scholar of Chinese philosophy of science and technology. He specializes in philosophy of science, STS (science, technology and society) and history of scientific thought.

Yang Huili is a Lecturer of Philosophy at the School of Humanities, Southwest Jiaotong University, China. She specializes in the research of philosophy of science, STS and engineering ethics.

Fan Shanshan is a Lecturer at the School of Marxism, Capital Normal University, China. She specializes in the research of philosophy of science, dialectics of nature and Marx’s view of science and technology.