Greetings from your humble new S-USIH Secretary!
We are thrilled to announce the winner of the 2021 John Dewey Prize: Andrew Jewett, for Science Under Fire: Challenges to Scientific Authority in Modern America (Harvard University Press, 2020)
The John Dewey Prize is a triennial award for the best book on the history of American philosophy, broadly understood. Funded by a generous grant from the John Dewey Foundation, this prize includes a cash award of $500 and honors the legacy of the Dewey Foundation and its commitment to the scholarly study of the work of Dewey and American philosophy.
In making their determination, the 2021 Dewey Prize Committee of Bruce Kuklick (chair), Amy Kittelstrom, and Hunter Heyck wrote the following:
We found Science Under Fire, which is a study of various critiques of science in America, an impressive achievement. Its scope is ambitious, and it makes good on its promises. Jewett writes in a clear, persuasive, creative way about science as a contested category in the United State. This framing of the book is subtly, but significantly, different from many works on science in the modern world in that Science Under Fire takes science to be as much a cultural force as a secure form of knowledge. This premise opens the door to asking: what did the various groups that saw science as a threat perceive ‘science’ to be, and why did they see it as a danger? To answer these questions, Jewett uses a remarkably wide range of sources, from formal philosophy itself, theology, humanistic fields, the social sciences, and political commentary. The author integrates these disparate materials into an original and sometime even elegant synthesis. He looks at the negative evaluations not as irrational, paranoid, or expressions of benighted prejudice, but as serious attempts to deal with a power that many people saw as changing their world in disturbing ways. New clarity and insight are brought to bear on issues, including the peculiarly central role of the social sciences as foils for critics of science and scientism. I will say the book opened the eyes of the three judges to how the alleged value neutrality of science has cut across our civic landscape and shaded into surprising areas of American life. Jewett sheds new light on how our present discourse about science came to be.
Congratulations to Andrew, who also won this year’s S-USIH Annual Book Prize, and many thanks to the Dewey Prize Committee members.
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