International Relations

Serious nuclear accidents are rare but potentially devastating to people, land, and agriculture. (It appears that minor to moderate nuclear accidents are not nearly so rare, as James Mahaffey shows in  Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima .) Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima are disasters that have given the public a better idea of how nuclear power reactors can go wrong, with serious and long-lasting effects. Reactors are also among the most complex industrial systems around, and accidents are common in complex, tightly coupled industrial systems. So how can we have reasonable confidence in the safety of nuclear reactors? One possible answer is that we cannot have reasonable confidence at all. However, there are hundreds of large nuclear reactors in the world, and 98 active nuclear reactors in the United States alone. So it is critical to have highly effective safety regulation and oversight of the nuclear...

Hegel provided a powerful conception of human beings in the world and a rich conception of freedom. Key to that conception is the idea of self-creation through labor. Hegel had an "aesthetic" conception of labor: human beings confront the raw given of nature and transform it through intelligent effort into things they imagine that will satisfy their needs and desires. Alexandre Koj�ve's reading of Hegel is especially clear on Hegel's conception of labor and freedom. This is provided in Koj�ve's analysis of the Master-Slave section of Hegel's Phenomenology in his  Introduction to the Reading of Hegel . The key idea is expressed in these terms: The product of work is the worker's production. It is the realization of his project, of his idea; hence, it is he that is realized in and by this product, and consequently he contemplates himself when he contemplates it.... Therefore, it is by work, and only by work, that man realizes himself objectively as man. (Koj...

There was a time in the philosophy of science when it may have been believed that scientific knowledge develops in a logical, linear way from observation and experiment to finished theory. This was something like the view presupposed by the founding logical positivists like Carnap and Reichenbach. But we now understand that the creation of a field of science is a social process with a great deal of contingency and path-dependence. The institutions through which science proceeds -- journals, funding agencies, academic departments, Ph.D. programs -- are all influenced by the particular interests and goals of a variety of actors, with the result that a field of science develops (or fails to develop) with a huge amount of contingency. Researchers in the history of science and the sociology of science and technology approach this problem in fairly different ways. Scott Frickel's 2004 book  Chemical Consequences: Environmental Mutagens, Scientist Activism, and the Rise of Genetic Toxicol...

It is intriguing to observe how pervasive organizational and regulatory failures are in our collective lives. Once you are sensitized to these factors, you see them everywhere. A good example is in the business section of today's print version of the New York Times , August 1, 2019. There are at least five stories in this section that reflect the consequences of organizational and regulatory failure. The first and most obvious story is one that has received frequent mention in Understanding Society , the Boeing 737 Max disaster. In a story titled �FAA oversight of Boeing scrutinized", the reporters give information about a Senate hearing on FAA oversight earlier this week.  Members of the Senate Appropriations Committee questioned the process of certification of new aircraft currently in use by the FAA. Citing the Times story, Ms. Collins raised concerns over �instances in which FAA managers appeared to be more concerned with Boeing�s production timeline, rather than the saf...