S. Marikkar

              SCIENCE AND WONDER Thousands of years ago, our explanations about how the world worked were not very good. Things we couldn't understand were attributed to praise or vengeance from gods, or thinking the world was random. Thanks to science, we have a much better idea about why things are the way they are. Issues concerning scientific explanation have been a focus of philosophical attention from Pre-Socratic times through the modern period. However, modern discussion really begins with the development of the Deductive-Nomological (DN) model. A presupposition of most recent discussion has been that science sometimes provides explanations and that the task of a “theory” or “model” of scientific explanation is to characterize the structure of such explanations. Philosophical literature assumes that there is substantial continuity between explanations found in science and some forms of explanation found in ordinary, non-scientific contexts. Phi...

Gender and Sexuality Sex “Sex” refers to physiological differences found among male, female, and various intersex bodies. Sex includes both  primary sex characteristics  (those related to the reproductive system) and  secondary sex characteristics  (those that are not directly related to the reproductive system, such as breasts and facial hair). In humans, the biological sex of a child is determined at birth based on several factors, including chromosomes, gonads, hormones, internal reproductive anatomy, and genitalia. Biological sex has traditionally been conceptualized as a binary in Western medicine, typically divided into male and female. However, anywhere from 1.0 to 1.7% of children are born intersex, having a variation in sex characteristics (including chromosomes, gonads, or genitals) that do not allow them to be distinctly identified as male or female. Due to the existence of multiple forms of intersex conditions (which are more prevalent than researchers on...

 Race, Ethnicity and Culture  The words race, ethnicity and culture and their various derivatives are all very familiar: indeed the terms race and culture, if not ethnicity, are regularly used in everyday speech. Yet just what do they actually mean? Are they merely synonyms for one another, are do they point to very different dimensions of the social order? Although there can be little doubt that the social phenomena with respect to which these terms are deployed issues are amongst those of the most pressing socio-political importance in the contemporary world, a little reflection soon reveals that their precise meaning is still surrounded by clouds of conceptual confusion. Nor is this confusion limited to popular discourse: sociologists hardly do much better. This is most alarming. If n social scientists lack an analytical vocabulary whose meanings are broadly agreed upon, there is little prospect of them being able to construct viable descriptions – let alone insig...

MORAL PHILOSOPHY  Ethics , also called  moral philosophy , the  discipline  concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of  moral  values or principles. How should we live? Shall we aim at  happiness  or at knowledge,  virtue , or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? And what of the more particular questions that face us: is it right to be dishonest in a good cause? Can we justify living in opulence while elsewhere in the world people are starving? Is going to war justified in cases where it is likely that innocent people will be killed? Is it wrong to  clone  a  human being  or to destroy human embryos in medical research? What are our obligations, if any, to the generations of humans who will come after us and to the nonhuman animals with whom we share the planet? Ethics deals wi...