In the News:
Yves Gingras Recipient of Science and Secularism Prize

Yves Gingras, Prix Science et laïcité 2024, Prix de la Laïcité, Comité laïcité république, 2024-11-07.

As part of its annual Secularism Awards, the Comité laïcité république (CLR) awarded Yves Gingras, Quebec historian and sociologist of science, the 2024 Science and Secularism Award (Prix Science et laïcité). Congratulations to Monsieur Gingras!

Here is a brief excerpt from his acceptance speech:

“Over the last ten years at least, I have observed the rise of a form of neo-romanticism that is within scientific communities themselves, often coupled with the fashionable discourse on decolonialism, which questions science’s support for universalism, all in the name of a confused conception of diversity, equity and inclusion, the DEI mantra wrongly asserted by many leaders of scientific and university institutions.

It has indeed become common in New Zealand, the United States and Canada to affirm the spirituality and traditional and ancestral knowledge of indigenous peoples in opposition to so-called Western science, thus reducing it to a particularism like any other. However, it is obvious that describing knowledge as traditional does not constitute proof of its empirical or even logical validity. After all, bloodletting was indeed a traditional practice in the West for at least a millennium, but it was eventually abandoned as ineffective thanks to the continuous development of scientific knowledge.

We hear more and more talk, not only about indigenous science, but about indigenous ways of knowing, never defined, but which are considered distinct from so-called Western science, condemned for having been at the foundations of all the colonialisms of the earth.”

See also:

• Yves Gingras, Prix science et laïcite 2024. Introduction d’Etienne Klein, the video on vimeo.