The Meanings of Science
Project
The Project
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Science is our most powerful source of knowledge, but it remains the least accessible domain of learning. New forms of knowledge and scientific breakthroughs happen every day, yet these insights are rarely made available to stakeholders like policy makers, scholars from other fields, or the public.
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​​The Meanings of Science Project was conceived to overcome the failure to integrate the best scholarly insights in and about science, to the betterment of science itself and the public’s understanding of it. The project conceptualized and realized a new approach to science, which was not merely academic, but worked to connect the key academic stakeholders to their colleagues in other areas, and then bring their work to a wide audience.
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Funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Marginalia's Meanings of Science Project integrates science's deepest insights and brings them to everyone.
The project addresses major questions such as the nature and authority of science, its unity, health and progress, its relationship to public policy, and the conditions of its discussion and deployment in democratic societies, in which the citizenry are routinely implicated in decisions and questions that involve science.
This work embodies our core mission, and it is a first-step towards a larger goal: integrating interdisciplnary insights in order to deepen the public understanding of science in the modern world and create a new culture of scientific literacy and debate.
The project produced over 30 publications that created new knowledge, all of which are available to the public on our site. The project's success lead to the Institute for the Meanings of Science.
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Philip Ball
Writer, former editor at Nature, winner of the 2022 Royal Society's Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture,
Marginalia's Contributing Editor for Science, and author of over 25 books, most recently, How Life Works: A User's Guide to the New Biology
Lorraine Daston
Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Permanent Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, regular visiting professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and member of the American Philosophical Society, the German National Academy of Sciences, and corresponding member of the British Academy
Linda Elkins-Tanton
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Principal Investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, the Regents Professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University, and the author of Portrait of The Scientist as a Young Woman
Iain McGilchrist
Psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher, and writer who has contributed to the British Journal of Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, Philosophy, Psychiatry & Psychology, the TLS, The London Review of Books, the LA Review of Books, and the Wall Street Journal, current Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and the author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
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Peter Harrison
Emeritus Professor, of History and Philosophy at the University of Queensland, former Andreas Idreos Professor of Science and Religion at Oxford University, Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a founding member of the International Society for Science and Religion, Fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies (2004-2005), author of seven books, including The Territories of Science and Religion (winner of the 2016 Aldersgate Prize), and the Co-Director of Marginalia's Meanings of Science Project
Vittorio Hösle
Council Member for the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Founding Director of the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study, Paul G. Kimball Professor of Arts and Letters in the Department of German and Russian Languages and Literatures and concurrent Professor of Philosophy and of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, Fellow at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Studies (2004-2005), winner of the Fritz-Winter Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and author of over 20 books, most recently The Philosophical Dialogue
Abraham (Avi) Loeb
Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University, head of the Galileo Project, Founding Director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, and best-selling author whose books include Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth and most recently, Interstellar: The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Our Future in the Stars
Samuel Loncar
Director of the Meanings of Science Project, philosopher, research director, writer, applied ethicist and consultant; and Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books
Tom McLeish
in memoriam
Professor Emeritus of Natural Philosophy in the Department of Physics at the University of York, UK and physicist, academic interdisciplinary leader, writer, and author of Faith and Wisdom in Science, The Poetry and Music of Science and Soft Matter – A Very Short Introduction
Stephen Gaukroger
in memoriam
Historian of Philosophy and Science, Professor Emeritus at School of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, former editor of Intellectual History Review, and author of Civilisation and the Culture of Science: Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1795-1935
Erika Lorraine Milam
Charles C. and Emily R. Gillispie Professor in the History of Science at Princeton University, author of Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America, and Chair of the Editorial Board for Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences
Lisa H. Sideris
Professor and Vice-Chair in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, author of Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection, and President-Elect of the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture
Nick Spencer
Senior Fellow at Theos, author of Magisteria: The Entangled Histories of Science and Religion, and Fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion
