Philosophy of science: the energy and excitement of curiosity Observing things we can’t understand: frustrating or intriguing? Delve into how artisanal communities have furthered scientific discovery and challenge your notion of the role of objectivity in scientific inference – listen to this episode of the CORDIScovery podcast. Society © Richard Panasevich, Shutterstock Google Podcasts Apple Podcasts Spotify From rabbits plucked out of hats to dark matter, how do we comprehend the inexplicable or the unobservable? What do particle physicists and a magician’s audience have in common? Do we enjoy being baffled? If so, why? What pushes us to seek to understand? Is objectivity so vital in scientific observation and is subjectivity really its negation – or is the relationship between the two more subtle? As one of our guests puts it: “The energy that drives inquiry is not the pleasure we take in final explanations, but the energy and excitement of curiosity itself.” To find out more about the importance of the communities that foster scientific discoveries and whether objectivity is all it’s cracked up to be, we hear from: Jason Leddington, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, whose book on the philosophy of magic and other arts of impossibility is under contract with MIT Press. He was the principal investigator on the PhiloMagic project. Michela Massimi, Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Edinburgh. Massimi was the coordinator of the Perspectival Realism project and the author of Perspectival Realism, which will come out in January 2022 published by Oxford University Press. And Jan Sprenger, a professor at the Centre for Logic, Language and Cognition at the University of Turin who was the principal investigator on the Objectivity project. Happy to hear from you! If you have any feedback, we’re always happy to hear from you! Send us any comments, questions or suggestions to the usual email address, editorial@cordis.europa.eu. Keywords CORDIScovery, CORDIS, philosophy, curiosity, communities, objectivity, magic, perspectival
