John Forge
Visiting Fellow
Spring 1986
Griffith University

2008
Sydney University
Forge is now an honorary associate in HPS at Sydney University. He continues to work on the moral dimension of science and his monograph The Responsible Scientist: A Philosophical Analysis is to be published by Pittsburgh University Press in October.

2009
Forge is now an honorary associate in HPS at Sydney University. Forge's The Responsible Scientist was published by Pittsburg University Press last October. Forge continues to edge away from mainstream philosophy of science: his most recently publication (Science and Engineering Ethics 2009) shows that the proportionality requirement of Just War Theory is compromised by the activity of weapons research, and he is writing a monograph which argues that weapons research is never morally justified.

2010
Forge has been awarded the David Harold Tribe award for his book The Responsible Scientist. He also won the Australian Museum's Eureka Prize in Ethics for the same book. Forge has continued to publish and talk about the morality of weapons research, and is writing a book, tentatively entitled Designed to Kill: The Case Against Weapons Research.

2012

John Forge's book The Responsible Scientist (Pittsburgh 2008) is to be translated into both Japanese and Chinese, languages Forge has, sadly, no hope of ever learning. He is, at present, avidly waiting for the reports from Springer, where he has a contract to publish, on his latest (last?) book Designed to Kill: The Case against Weapons Research. However, Forge mostly just messes about in Sydney, drinking French wine, swimming, and generally having a good time.

2015

Still unable to time travel backward, Forge remains retired. He has published a bit, including "The Case Against Weapons Research".  International Journal of Technoethics. 5, 2014.  Forge also has a website, moralitymatters.net, which has a blog of commentaries on mostly Australian current affairs that, in his view, requires some comment by a philosopher.

2016

Forge was hauled up from his retirement torpor by a request to write something for Annals of Social Responsibility, which he did, and so realised that his assumption that all interesting issues to do with science and social responsibility could be reduced to matters to do with science and moral responsibility may not have been correct after all. This remarkable insight let to his contacting Pitt Press for a second edition of The Responsible Scientist - anyone reading this who has any influence in that quarter would do him a favour by asking them to hurry up with a response. Aside from that, and attempting to sell his house and move round the corner, it's just the same old thing: swimming in a pool beside Sydney harbour in the daytime, drinking burgundy at night, stuff like that.

2017

Forge, now past three score and ten years so maybe on borrowed time (?), is finishing another book on the morality of weapons design, writing the odd paper and some book reviews for Metascience. None of this distracts from important quintessentially Australian activities such as swimming and drinking wine (see previous entries above).