Philosophy Department Colloquium

Science: The Intellectual Leviathan
From vaccines to climate change, many people are done listening to experts. They ask: why does some intellectual elite get to tell us what to think? But expertise is unavoidable; modern science is so specialized that no single person can understand it all. This lecture argues that we can best understand the frustrating dilemma of scientific authority by looking back to a time when modern science emerged alongside modern views on political authority. Science, it turns out, is surprisingly like the "Leviathan" of Thomas Hobbes' political philosophy, a central authority empowered to coordinate individual choices. Coping with modern science denial requires acknowledging people's reasonable resentment of that authority and offering tools for thoughtfully deciding which authorities to trust.