Science Matters, Robotics Matters [From the Editor's Desk]

Musings from the Editors' Desk

Editors' Introduction: Why Repeat Victimization Matters

The basic facts of repeat victimization are well known. Substantial proportions of differences in rates of crime are attributable to differences in their concentration on particular targets, whether those targets are defined in terms of people, organizations or households. Four of the chapters in this collection detail the extent and correlates of such rates in continental Europe and worldwide ...

Philosophy matters in brain matters

PURPOSE Although most neuroscientists and physicians would argue against Cartesian dualism, Descartes's version of the psyche/soma divide, which has been controversial since he proposed it in the seventeenth century, continues to haunt contemporary neurological diagnoses through terms such as functional, organic, and psychogenic. Drawing on my own experiences as a person with medically unexplai...

Matters of sex: sex matters.

Despite the popular concept that heart disease preferentially affects the male population, in every year for the past 16 years, cardiovascular disease has killed more women than men.1 Unfortunately, a disparity still exists between men and women in the diagnosis and aggressive treatment of heart disease. The perception that women are relatively protected is reflected by the fact that women are ...

Feminist Philosophy of Science : Standpoint Matters

Feminist standpoint theory has a contentious history. It is an explicitly political as well as social epistemology, characterized by the thesis that those who are marginalized or oppressed under conditions of systemic inequity may, in fact, be better knowers, in a number of respects, than those who are socially or economically privileged. Their epistemic advantage arises from the kinds of exper...