ABSTRACT
I recall a history professor at my home institution saying, to the nodding agreement of some natural scientists in the room, that science tells us how things work, but the humanities ask why, and explore what we ought to do with such knowledge. Our hope is that, as the reader engages this last section of the volume, the lines between the how and the why have become fuzzier, less definite. For it is clear that scientific investigation, although empirical, always contains certain presuppositions, which are related to values. For example, the modern Western episteme contains certain ontological commitments, such as the notion that humans are significantly separate from nature and its other inhabitants. These other occupants of our universe are often imagined to hold no moral sway over humans. Solar or lunar cycles, the movement of the stars, strange behaviors of other animals, and some other observations are, in the supposed modern scientific milieu, neither scientific nor morally valid phenomena. So the stuff that usually “counts” as reliable knowledge about the world already contains value judgments and normative presuppositions, often particular to specific social groups of various sizes, which typically remain unexamined. In this section, these presuppositions are exposed, and some of the real-life impacts of these assumptions are explored.
