Professor Matthew J Brown

Matthew J Brown is the Boydston Professor of American Philosophy and the Director of the Center for Dewey Studies at Southern Illinois University. His research areas include pragmatism, the history of philosophy of science, science and values, trust and expertise, and cultural theories of cognition. He is the author of Science and Moral Imagination: A New Ideal for Values ​​in Science (Pittsburgh, 2020) and Editor-in-Chief of HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science.

To Matt Brown's personal website

In his second visit to SOCRATES, Dr. Brown will be working on the relationship between the philosophy of science in practice (or the "practice turn" in philosophy of science) and the role of values in science. He hopes to show that the practice turn changes the landscape for discussions of values in science that have not yet been fully appreciated, and to further develop his analysis of the practice of scientific inquiry as a unifying framework for thinking about values in science. 

In his first visit to SOCRATES, Dr. Brown worked primarily on two projects. First, he completed a paper addressing the problem of public trust in science and the role of experts in democracy from a pragmatist perspective. Second, he worked on a project on the history of views on values ​​in science in 19th and 20th century philosophy of science.