On associe généralement l’expression de philosophie scientifique au positivisme logique, lequel se signale par son recours à la logique mathématique dans l’analyse des problèmes philosophiques. Or il apparaît à plus proche examen que cette expression est employée dès 1848 par Ernest Renan. La tentative d’élaborer une philosophie scientifique fait l’objet d’un long débat. Au tournant du xxe siècle, Abel Rey reprend cette question. Or, son livre, La Théorie de la physique chez les physiciens contemporains, exercera une influence forte (...) sur le Cercle de Vienne. Le positivisme absolu que propose Rey présente à la fois des analogies frappantes et des différences notables avec le positivisme logique. Si on y trouve le même souci de clarté et de précision, la logique n’est pas au centre de la démarche philosophique. Les diverses sciences, des mathématiques à la psychologie, sont mises à contribution. Il n’y a pas de hiérarchie, mais un encyclopédisme visant à inclure toutes les données fournies par la recherche scientifique. À travers l’étude comparée de la conception d’Abel Rey et de celle du Cercle de Vienne, il s’agit ici d’interroger la possibilité d’une philosophie scientifique. (shrink)

Having fascinated some of the greatest philosophers from the earliest times, dreaming figures importantly in the history of philosophy, as in Plato’s Theaetetus, Augustine’s Confessions, and, perhaps most famously, Descartes’s Mediations. By far the greatest philosophical focus on dreaming has been epistemic: Socrates suggests to Theaetetus that since he cannot tell whether he is dreaming, he cannot trust his senses to know contingent facts about the world around him. And a similar worry drives Descartes’s radical doubt in the First Meditation. (...) We might think that dream skepticism is, among the radical Cartesian skeptical scenarios, a particularly worrying one, since dreams, unlike evil demons, are a commonplace of everyday life. (shrink)

While scientific inquiry crucially relies on the extraction of patterns from data, we still have a far from perfect understanding of the metaphysics of patterns—and, in particular, of what makes a pattern real. In this paper we derive a criterion of real-patternhood from the notion of conditional Kolmogorov complexity. The resulting account belongs to the philosophical tradition, initiated by Dennett :27–51, 1991), that links real-patternhood to data compressibility, but is simpler and formally more perspicuous than other proposals previously defended in (...) the literature. It also successfully enforces a non-redundancy principle, suggested by Ladyman and Ross, that aims to exclude from real-patternhood those patterns that can be ignored without loss of information about the target dataset, and which their own account fails to enforce. (shrink)

A standard view about the quotation is that ‘the result of enclosing any expression...in quotation marks is a constant singular term’ [Wallace 1972, p.237]. There is little sense in treating the entire complex of an expression flanked by a right and left quotation mark, a quotation term for short, as a ‘constant singular term’ of a language L if that complex is not, in some sense, itself a constituent of L. So, just as (1) contains twenty-seven tokened symbols (including twenty-three (...) roman letters, three spaces and a period), so too, on the standard view about quotation terms, (2) contains twenty-nine tokened symbols (including twenty-two roman letters, four spaces, a left and right quotation mark, and a period). (shrink)

Originally published in 1971. The three contributions collected in this volume deal with different aspects of a single theme—the logical status of scientific theories in their relation to observation. These lectures, authored by different thinkers, treat this theme in connection with some controversies in the philosophy of science. A nonspecialist who reads these lectures should realize that the theme itself is a perennial one with an ancient lineage. It has concerned philosophers from the earliest era of philosophy on down through (...) the centuries. A central philosophical issue at stake in the lectures is the question of whether scientific theories are testable in terms of our observations such that we can know whether some theories are true and others false. Although differing in their emphases, all three contributors seek a more plausible and nonskeptical philosophical account of the status of scientific theories in relation to observation. (shrink)

This article is concerned with one of the notable but forgotten research strands that developed out of French nineteenth-century positivism, a strand that turned attention to the study of scientific discovery and was actively pursued by French epistemologists around the turn of the nineteenth century. I first sketch the context in which this research program emerged. I show that the program was a natural offshoot of French neopositivism; the latter was a current of twentieth-century thought that, even if implicitly, challenged (...) the positivism of first-generation positivists such as Comte. I then survey what French epistemologists—including Ernest Naville, Élie Rabier, Pierre Duhem, Édouard Le Roy, Abel Rey, André Lalande, Théodule-Armand Ribot, Edmond Goblot, and Jacques Picard, among others—had to say about the logic, psychology, and sociology of discovery. My story demonstrates the inaccuracy of existing historical accounts of the philosophical study of scientific discovery. (shrink)

This chapter takes up, in six sections, issues of realism and of ontological and conceptual relativity. Section 1 briefly lays out the kind of absolutist realism of interest in what follows. Section 2 considers arguments against ordinary commonsense entities such as bodies, and for the view that subjects enjoy a superior ontological position. No such argument is found persuasive. I find no good argument against ordinary bodies or other common-sense entities, nor any good argument that subjects enjoy any ontological superiority. (...) Section 3 lays out three options in ontology, opts for a kind of conceptual relativism, and takes up three problems for the proposed view. Section 4 then offers a compromise position based on a kind of existential relativity meant to accommodate our most settled beliefs about what there is, while retaining a fundamentally realist and objectivist ontology. The main argument of that section relies on a distinction between semantical relativity and ontological relativity. Section 5 defends my use of the semantical-ontological distinction against objections to it in the recent literature. Section 6, in conclusion, takes up arguments for the view that, as subjects of consciousness and thought, we must after all occupy a special ontological position in objective reality, one whose status remains mysterious. (shrink)

Although entrepreneurial success is usually attributed to astute financial management in the growth of economic capital, entrepreneurs may also utilize additional sources of inner guidance, creating both tangible and intangible value. This article framed one such source as spiritual capitalism, the juxtaposition of personal spirituality and marketplace dynamics. The soul's currency, or love, is characterized as a manifestation of flow in the entrepreneurial start-up process, which elicits spiritual congruence, harmonious relationships and personal fulfilment. Personal experiences as a Wall Street investment (...) banker and entrepreneur are discussed in exploring methods of leveraging inner guidance and appropriately pursuing material abundance. Participants discussed the demarcation between traditional and spiritual entrepreneurship, and exercises demonstrated how to: identify and value spiritual assets, create spiritual capital, mitigate inhibitors to flow, and harness inner guidance. (shrink)

This volume of _Philosophical Issues_, on normativity, has unusually broad scope, and should have correspondingly broad appeal both because of its issues and because of its contributors. This volume includes pieces on moral psychology, theory of reasons and rationality, political philosophy, ethics, metaethics, and epistemology. Includes a book symposium on Brad Hooker's _Ideal Code, Real World_, with contributions by Richard Arneson and Alison McIntyre, along with Brad Hooker's response.

This book addresses the most important questions asked about higher education: What should its content be? What should we educate for, and why? What constitutes a meaningful liberal education, as distinct from mere training for a vocation? These and many other questions are addressed by Reuben Abel, M.H. Abrams, Robert L. Bartley, Ronald Berman, Also S. Bernardo, Wm. Theodore deBary, Gray Dorsey, Joseph Dunner, Nathan Glazer, Feliks Gross, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Gerald Holton, Sidney Hook, Charles Issawi, Montimer R. Kadish, Paul (...) Oscar Krissteller, paul Kurtz, Herbert I. London, Ernest Nagel, Henry R. Novotny, Frederick A. Olafson, Michael Rabin, Howard B. Radest, Joseph J. Schwab, Robert F. Sexton, Thomas Sowell, John B. Stephenson, and Miro M. Todorovich. (shrink)

-British constitutional monarchy.-British statesmen.-The parliamentary system of government.-The government of the third French republic.-Blackstone on the British constitution.-Burke and his Bristol constituency.-Burke and the French revolution.-The community and the church.