The research project PAWOS (Philosophy and/with/of Science) by Eugenio Petrovich, DR2 member, has been awarded the “MSCA Seal of Excellence @ UNISI” grant by the University of Siena. The project aims at investigating the contemporary relationship between philosophy and science by coupling quantitative methods from scientometrics with qualitative methods from Science and Technology Studies.
PAWOS abstract: “In the last decades, the interactions between philosophy and science have become more frequent and stronger. Philosophers do not only investigate the foundational and methodological aspects of science, but they frequently work together with scientists on topics that require both philosophical resources and empirical investigation. In the past, successful philosophy-science collaborations have fostered the emergence of new scientific disciplines. Today, the EU is investing a considerable amount of money in such interdisciplinary research programmes, knowing that the complex challenges that lie in the near future will require fruitful collaboration between the humanities and the sciences. From the meta-philosophical point of view, however, we still do not know what is the specific contribution that philosophy brings to the sciences, nor what are the meta-philosophical conditions that should be met for a successful collaboration between philosophers and scientists. The project PAWOS aims to answer these meta-philosophical questions by adopting an innovative naturalized methodological stance. PAWOS will resort to empirical methods drawn from bibliometrics and STS to investigate the contemporary science-philosophy nexus, integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence in the building of the meta-philosophical theory. Specifically, advanced bibliometric methods will be used to map the extension of the philosophy-science interactions in the scholarly literature, whereas interviews with key actors will be used to investigate the reasons why philosophers and scientists collaborate. Combining empirical evidence with meta-philosophical theorization, PAWOS will offer to the philosophical and scientific community for the first time a meta-philosophical theory comprising both a full-fledged taxonomy of the contributions of philosophy to science and a set of normative meta-philosophical conditions that foster the success of joint science-philosophy research programmes.”
The project will start in October 2021 at the Department of Economics and Statistics of the University of Siena, under the supervision of Prof. Alberto Baccini. You can follow Eugenio’s research on Twitter (@EugenioPetrovi1) and Academia.edu.
