Editorial

Concern in the concepts

Abstract

November 2017 marked the 100th anniversary of the speech "Science as a Vocation," delivered by Max Weber to a crowd of students in Munich, Germany. Against the backdrop of the bureaucratization of academic work and the perplexities produced by scientific-technical progress, Weber elaborated one of the most illuminating and extraordinary defenses of "passion" as the feeling from which the vocation for scientific work is nurtured. The concern that Weber shares with students is of such simplicity and depth: Why engage in the specialized study of phenomena whose outcome cannot provide answers to the questions that really matter to us: what should we do and how should we live? Why spend days, months and years toiling over the analysis of a specific virus, galaxy, or toxin?