The eWaterCycle platform for Open and FAIR Hydrological collaboration

Hutton (2016) argued that computational hydrology can only be a proper science if the hydrological community makes sure that hydrological model studies are executed and presented in a reproducible manner. We replied that to achieve this, hydrologists shouldn't ‘re-invent the water wheel’ but rather use existing technology from other fields (such as containers and ESMValTool) and open interfaces (such as BMI) to do their computational science (Hut, 2017). With this paper and the associated release of the eWaterCycle platform and software package1 we are putting our money where our mouth is and provide the hydrological community with a ‘FAIR by design’ platform to do our science. eWaterCycle is a platform that separates the experiment done on the model from the model code. In eWaterCycle hydrological models are accessed through a common interface (BMI) in Python and run inside of software containers. In this way all models are accessed in a similar manner facilitating easy switching of models, model comparison and model coupling. Currently the following models are available through eWaterCycle: PCR-GLOBWB 2.0, wflow, Hype, LISFLOOD, TopoFlex HBV, MARRMoT and WALRUS. While these models are written in different programming languages they can all be run and interacted with from the Jupyter notebook environment within eWaterCycle. Furthermore, the pre-processing of input data for these models has been streamlined by making use of ESMValTool. Forcing for the models available in eWaterCycle from well known datasets such as ERA5 can be generated with a single line of code. To illustrate the type of research that eWaterCycle facilitates this manuscript includes five case studies: from a simple ‘Hello World’ where only a hydrograph is generated to a complex coupling of models in different languages. In this manuscript we stipulate the design choices made in building eWaterCycle and provide all the technical details to understand and work with the platform. For system administrators who want to install eWaterCycle on their infrastructure we offer a separate installation guide. For computational hydologist who want to work with eWaterCycle we also provide a video explaining the platform from a users point of view. With the eWaterCycle platform we are providing the hydrological community with a platform to conduct their research fully compatible with the principles of Open Science as well as FAIR science.1available on Zenodo: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5119389

Disseminating science: an illustration of present and future scenarios

The last years witnessed an unprecedented use of open access in scientific publishing to disseminate science beyond the border of the academic and research community. In this article, the classic paywall and the more recent open access scenario of publishing are summarized in four key images that may be helpful in illustrating opportunities and challenges for the researchers and academics. Combining their forces with institutions, journalists and life science executive to promote proper science and tackle pseudoscience should be a key priority for the next decade and beyond.

Logic and the Demands of Kantian “Science”

This chapter examines Kant’s account of logic in the Critique, analyzing his claim that pure general logic is formal, properly scientific, and complete. It distinguishes three aspects of formality, in virtue of which this logic differs from particular logic, applied logic, and transcendental logic and thereby satisfies one necessary condition of a proper science, namely having a unique subject matter. The chapter then explicates the completeness claim as a philosophical claim about logic qua strict science. Drawing on Kant’s account of what it takes to prove a system of pure concepts of the understanding as complete and his caution against the dialectical illusion of using formal logic as an organon, the chapter argues that, to avoid begging questions, he needs a sort of transcendental critique to establish his logic as complete in content and restrict its use to that of a mere canon for the formal assessment of our cognitions.

Kant on the Way to His Own Philosophy of Logic

This chapter considers how Kant, from the mid-1760s through the mid-1770s, navigated between existing accounts of logic before finding his own voice. It highlights two breakthroughs that would contribute most to his mature theory of logic. The first breakthrough concerns Kant’s division of logic into two essentially different though complementary branches: a logic for the learned understanding and one for the common human understanding (to make it healthy), precursors to “pure logic” and “applied logic” respectively. This distinction not only marks a clear departure from the Leibnizian-Wolffian take on the relation between artificial and natural logics, but also pays homage to the humanist and Lockean practices of emphasizing certain ethical dimensions of logic. The second breakthrough is the emergence of “transcendental logic” from Kant’s efforts to secure metaphysics—particularly the first part thereof, ontology—as a proper science.

What Was Kant’s Contribution to the Understanding of Biology?

Kant’s theory of biology in the Critique of the Power of Judgment may be rejected as obsolete and attacked from two opposite perspectives. In light of recent advances in biology one can claim contra Kant, on the one hand, that biological phenomena, which Kant held could only be explicated with the help of teleological principles, can in fact be explained in an entirely mechanical manner, or on the other, that despite the irreducibility of biology to physico-mechanical explanations, it is nonetheless proper science. I argue in response that Kant’s analysis of organisms is by no means obsolete. It reveals biology’s uniqueness in much the same way as several current theorists do. It brings to the fore the unique purposive characteristics of living phenomena, which are encapsulated in Kant’s concept of “natural end” and which must be explicated in natural terms in order for biology to become a science. I maintain that Kant’s reluctance to consider biology proper science is not a consequence of his critical philosophy but rather of his inability to complete this task. Kant lacked an appropriate theoretical framework, such as provided later by modern biology, which would enable the integration of the unique features of biology in an empirical system. Nevertheless, as I show in this paper, the conceptual problems with which Kant struggled attest more to the relevance and depth of his insights than to the shortcomings of his view. His contribution to the biological thought consists in insisting on an empirical approach to biology and in providing the essential philosophical underpinning of the autonomous status of biology.

At læse efter generne

Literary Darwinism challenges mainstream literary scholars by claiming that literary phenomena can be explained by biological theory. The Darwinists claim that modern literary studies lack a solid scientific base and that this is due to the influence of the postmodernists. Rather than idle speculations about textual autopoiesis and the death of the author, literary scholars should adopt the methodologies of the natural sciences and thus produce real explanations.This essay argues that even though there is certainly much of so-called postmodernism that can be criticized and that modern literary studies lack a thorough debate about the nature of scientific inquiry, the study of literature remains fundamentally the study of text. Thus, text sets the criteria for proper scientific procedure and methodology in the field of literary studies.This is not to deny that man is the product of natural selection or that bodies and brains are the readers and writers of text. But these facts are but conditions of possibility. Knowledge of biological theory will only to a very limited extent give real explanations of literature and culture: in fact, such explanations are almost always trivial and thus incapable of producing new knowledge.Biology is not only ill suited to give us new insights; it cannot provide a scientific base. This is because in order to obtain objective knowledge of literary phenomena, the object of inquiry is not human nature but real text. Instead, we must look to intertextuality and constructivism to provide the criteria of proper science.

Kant on Chemistry and the Application of Mathematics in Natural Science

In hisMetaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, Kant claims that chemistry is a science, but not aproperscience (like physics), because it does not adequately allow for the application of mathematics to its objects. This paper argues that the application of mathematics to a proper science is best thought of as depending upon a coordination between mathematically constructible concepts and those of the science. In physics, the proper science that exhausts thea prioriknowledge of objects of the outer sense, only motions and concepts reducible to motions can be legitimately coordinated with mathematical constructions. Since chemistry can neither achieve its owna prioriprinciples of coordination nor be reduced to the coordinated doctrine of motion, it is a merely improper science.