Postcolonial philosophy of science

Are there laws of nature that today’s modern sciences are ill-designed to discover? Does the universal use of these modern sciences require their value-neutrality, or are their social values and interests an important cause of their universality? What resources for scientific knowledge can other cultures’ science projects provide?

Such questions are raised by recent postcolonial global histories that focus analyses on the role of European expansion in the advance of modern science and in the decline of other cultures’ science traditions. These accounts challenge philosophers to re-evaluate unsuspected strengths in other scientific traditions and identify modern science’s borrowings from them. They also identify European cultural features that have, for better and worse, constituted modern sciences and their representations of nature and thus seek to develop more realistic and useful accounts of the values, interests, methods, universality, objectivity and rationality of science.