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INTRODUCTION TO THE SYMPOSIUM ON THE REPORT OF THE INTERNATIONAL PANEL ON SOCIAL PROGRESS (IPSP) 2018

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2018

Alexander Raubo
Affiliation:
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RH, UK. Email: [email protected]
Alex Voorhoeve
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. Email: a.e.voorhoeve@ lse.ac.uk. URL: http://personal.lse.ac.uk/voorhoev

Extract

The publication of the first Report of the International Panel on Social Progress is a significant intellectual event, both because of its hugely ambitious aim – of uniting the world's leading researchers from social sciences and the humanities to develop research-based, multi-disciplinary, non-partisan, action-guiding solutions to the central challenges of our time – and because it represents the completion of a mammoth effort in the service of this aim by a diverse set of 269 authors. In its attempt to synthesize and render accessible to social actors a broad range of the latest social scientific knowledge, as well as in its confidence that knowledge can empower those actors to make progress, it recalls D'Alembert and Diderot's famous Encyclopédie. Indeed, one can say that the Report is a quintessential Enlightenment project (cf. Bury 1920). For example, in his famous Outlines of a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind (1796), Condorcet asserts the possibility of an accumulation of empirical and theoretical knowledge and the concomitant expansion in our capacities to alleviate social and natural evils. And Condorcet and many of his contemporaries were motivated to propose political institutions that would enable such an indefinite increase in knowledge so as to bring about the attendant improvement to people's lives.

Type
Review Symposium on the Report of the International Panel on Social Progress 2018
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

REFERENCES

Bury, J.B. 1920. The Idea of Progress: An Inquiry into Its Origin and Growth. London: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Marquis de Condorcet. 1796. Outlines of a Historical View of the Progress of the Human Mind. Trans. and printed by Carey, Philadelphia. Reissued by the Liberty Fund: <http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1669>..>Google Scholar