Book Review Forum
Murakami Yoichiro no kagaku-ron: Hihan to outou 村上陽一郎の科学論: 批判と応答 [Yoichiro Murakami’s Science Studies: Critiques and Response]

Koichi Mikami is a project assistant professor of the Science Interpreter Training Program at the University of Tokyo (Japan), and also a visiting research fellow of Making Genomic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh (UK). His work addresses how social and technical platforms have been and are being built in the process of making “new” life sciences and biomedicine, such as genomics and regenerative medicine. His ongoing research investigates historically as well as sociologically the roles of patients and patient support organizations in enabling and shaping medical research on rare diseases and the development of orphan drugs since the 1970s.

Yuya Shimizu is a doctoral student at Hitotsubashi University (Japan) whose research areas include philosophy of social science, metametaphysics, history of sociology, and applied ethics. He is mainly interested in the methodological issues of social science and is currently working on metaphysics and the epistemology of causation. His current study especially examines problems of absence causation and causal selection. In metametaphysics, he defends and develops the program of conceptual engineering. In history of sociology, he investigates a theory of causation Max Weber inherited from Johannes von Kries. He also is concerned with ethics of space development.

Akihisa Setoguchi is an associate professor at the Institute for Research in Humanities, Kyoto University. He has been working on the relationship between technoscience and nature and has published books and articles on the history of biological sciences in Japan. His main work is on the history of economic entomology in Japan, which was published as Gaichū no tanjō (2009). Recently he wrote a chapter on the antiscience movement and science studies in the 1970s in Shōwa kōki no kagaku shisōshi (2016), which was edited by Osamu Kanamori.

Yuki Hagiwara is an associate professor in the Department of Marine Policy and Culture at Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology. His main interests include bioethics, environmental ethics, sociology of environment, and sociology of science. His research task is to consider transdisciplinarily how local residents under the circumstances of globalization achieve better decision making. His current concern is building a resilient system to tackle the issues of contemporary risk in society by examining the relationship between the global and the local dimensions of decision making from the views of ethics and sociology.