Scientific realism is the optimistic view that modern science is on the right track: that the world really is the way our best scientific theories describe it. In his book, Stathis Psillos gives us a detailed and comprehensive study which restores the intuitive plausibility of scientific realism. We see that throughout the twentieth century, scientific realism has been challenged by philosophical positions from all angles: from reductive empiricism, to instrumentalism and to modern sceptical empiricism. _Scientific Realism_ explains that the (...) history of science does not undermine the arguments for scientific realism, but instead makes it reasonable to accept scientific realism as the best philosophical account of science, its empirical success, its progress and its practice. Anyone wishing to gain a deeper understanding of the state of modern science and why scientific realism is plausible, should read this book. (shrink)

Ontic Structural Realism (OSR) gives ontic priority to structures over objects. In its perhaps most extreme form (captured, admittedly, by a slogan) it states that “all that there is, is structure” (da Costa and French 2003, 189). If this is true, if there is nothing but structure(s) in the world, the very idea of contrasting structure to nonstructure loses any force it might have. Actually, if the slogan is right, the very idea of characterising what there is as structure—as opposed (...) to anything else—becomes incoherent. Traditionally, characterising something as a structure has made full sense —and has served excellent scientific and philosophical purposes—precisely because structure was understood as an entity with slots, which could be occupied by objects and whose individuation-conditions involved objects only qua slot-fillers. If objects altogether go, whatever remains can be called ‘structure’ only if we take ‘structure’ to be a term of art. Well, Ontic Structuralists are happy to ‘mimic’ talk of non-structure, or objects in particular, but they hasten to add that this mimicking does not imply any serious metaphysical commitment to them. Here are a couple of characteristic passages. (shrink)

Enlightenment thought is widely considered to consist of four key features--atheism, democracy, humanism, and modernity. Common to all is an explicit process of desacralization. Yet the intellectual history of these concepts reveals that in the process of desacralization new sacred spaces arose in their name. The aim of Nothing Sacred is to question this second-order sacralization and consider, in a form of negative dialectics, whether (and how) these domains can argue against themselves in order to once again desacralize their own (...) self-sacralization. Secular critique is not simply an attack on religion but rather on the range of society's unavowed self-occlusions. Its object is to elucidate the politics and practices of knowledge that animate them. In the field of religion critique challenges the alleged permanence of political theology and transforms the epistemologies of both sacred and secular. For Stathis Gourgouris the state of nature that he terms political animality critiques political theology much as the anarchy of democracy, inhabited by it, critiques sovereignty. He takes aim at the desacralizing capacity of these historical formations, which produce their own historical conditions for self-sacralization, in order to demonstrate their dynamic subversive power against deeply ensconced conditions of disempowerment and incapacitation and to understand how societies and individuals are driven to self-subversion and self-disempowerment. These forces are alive today in the form of discursive "posts"--posthumanism, postdemocracy, post-truth, postracial--which are just as self-sacralizing. Exposing them is not a nostalgic liberal return to an idealized past but an expansive anarchic ontological affirmation of the political dimensions of human animality on a planetary scale and of a radical politics in which democracy has severed its bind to capitalism. Nothing Sacred thinks across orders, obstacles, and intersectional spaces in a world of warring multipolar oligarchies and psychotic rage. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to sketch an empiricist metaphysics of laws of nature. The key idea is that there are regularities without regularity-enforcers. Differently put, there are natural laws without law-makers _of a distinct metaphysical kind_. This sketch will rely on the concept of a natural pattern and more significantly on the existence of a network of natural patterns in nature. The relation between a regularity and a pattern will be analysed in terms of mereology. Here is the (...) road map. In section 2, I will briefly discuss the relation between empiricism and metaphysics, aiming to show that an empiricist metaphysics is possible. In section 3, I will offer arguments against stronger metaphysical views of laws. Then, in section 4 I will motivate nomic objectivism. In section 5, I will address the question ‘what is a regularity?’ and will develop a novel answer to it, based on the notion of a natural pattern. In section 6, I will raise the question: ‘what is a law of nature?’, the answer to which will be: a law of nature is a regularity that is characterised by the unity of a _natural_ pattern. (shrink)

"Gregorio Piaia si è formato presso l'Università di Padova, dove si laureò il 17 febbraio 1968 con una tesi coordinata da Carlo Giacon sul tema dell'averroismo politico nel pensiero di Marsilio da Padova. Tra i suoi maestri è da ricordare ancora Giovanni Santinello, del quale fu il principale collaboratore nel guidare il gruppo di lavoro formato da giovani studiosi impegnati nel progetto di una grande Storia delle storie generali della filosofia, uscita in prima edizione in lingua italiana tra il 1979 (...) e il 2004 ed ora in corso di traduzione e aggiornamento in lingua inglese. La vita "pubblica" di Piaia si è svolta essenzialmente nella sua funzione di professore universitario, all'inizio come docente in formazione presso l'Università di Padova, poi quale professore associato presso l'Università di Verona, infine dal 1987 di nuovo a Padova, dove in qualità di professore ordinario tenne per quasi trent'anni la cattedra di storia della filosofia. Padova, Verona, il Veneto: certamente questi sono stati i riferimenti territoriali entro i quali si è compiuta la carriera accademica del bellunese Piaia. Ma egli estese ben presto l'ambito della sua attività di docente oltre questi limiti geografici, in Europa e nelle Americhe. Lo stesso spirito di apertura ha animato l'attività scientifica di Gregorio Piaia, che non si è svolta in limiti territoriali o di scuola precisi ma all'interno di una vasta "repubblica delle lettere" dai contorni più internazionali che nazionali: ne è testimonianza il suo ruolo di direttore o redattore di importanti riviste e la sua presenza nelle più rilevanti società di promozione degli studi filosofici e storico-filosofici. Non meno degna di nota, infine, è la sua costante attenzione e disponibilità nei confronti dei giovani studiosi. Il presente volume intende essere modesto segno della stima di cui gode e dell'ampiezza dei suoi interessi di ricerca." --Contratapa. (shrink)

In a recent series of papers, John Worrall has defended and elaborated a philosophical position – traced back to Poincaré– which he calls structural realism. This view stands in between scientific realism and agnostic instrumentalism and intends to accommodate both the intuitions that underwrite the ‘no miracles’ argument for scientific realism and the existence of scientific revolutions which lead to radical theoretical changes. Structural realism presents itself as the best of both worlds. In this paper I critically examine the epistemic (...) status of structural realism, and argue that it is not the best of both worlds. Yet, I stress that it reveals an insight which, properly understood, can cast new light on the debates over scientific realism. (shrink)

This paper is structured around the three elements of the title. Section 2 claims that (a) structures need objects and (b) scientific structuralism should focus on in re structures. Therefore, pure structuralism is undermined. Section 3 discusses whether the world has `excess structure' over the structure of appearances. The main point is that the claim that only structure can be known is false. Finally, Section 4 argues directly against ontic structural realism that it lacks the resources to accommodate causation within (...) its structuralist slogan. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, Bas van Fraassen has developed a “new epistemology”: an attempt to sail between Bayesianism and traditional epistemology. He calls his own alternative “voluntarism”. A constant pillar of his thought is the thought that rationality involves permission rather than obligation. The present paper aims to offer an appraisal of van Fraassen’s conception of rationality. In section 2, I review the Bayesian structural conception of rationality and argue that it has been found wanting. In sections 3 and (...) 4, I analyse van Fraassen’s voluntarism. I raise some objections about van Fraassen’s reliance on prior opinion and argue that the content of a belief matters to its rationality. In section 5, I criticise van Fraassen’s view that inference to the best explanation is incoherent. Finally, in section 6, I take on van Fraassen’s conception of rationality and show that it is too thin to fully capture rational judgement. (shrink)

This chapter offers a narrative of the basic twists and turns of the realism debate after the realist turn. It starts with what preceded and initiated the turn, viz., instrumentalist construals of scientific theories. It then moves on to discuss the basic lines of development of the realist stance to science, focusing on one of its main challenges: the historical challenge.

Interview with Stathis Psillos regarding realism in the philosophy of science and recent realist trends in Continental Philosophy.

This article attempts to link the notion of absolute ego as the ultimate subjectivity of consciousness in continental tradition with a phenomenology of Mathematical Continuum as this term is generally established following Cantor’s pioneering ideas on the properties and cardinalities of sets. My motivation stems mainly from the inherent ambiguities underlying the nature and properties of this fundamental mathematical notion which, in my view, cannot be resolved in principle by the analytical means of any formal language not even by the (...) addition of any new axioms to a consistent first-order axiomatical system such as the Zermelo-Fraenkel Set Theory. In this phenomenologically motivated approach I deal, to some extent, with the undecidability of a fundamental statement about the cardinality of Continuum inside ZFC theory, namely the Continuum Hypothesis, and also with the underlying root of Gödel’s first incompleteness result.Este artigo procura conectar a noção de ego absoluto enquanto subjetividade última da consciência na tradição continental com a fenomenologia da matemática do contínuo tal como este termo foi estabelecido seguindo as idéias pioneiras de Cantor sobre as propriedades e cardinalidade de conjuntos. Minha motivação deriva basicamente das ambigüidades subjacentes à natureza e propriedades desta noção matemática fundamental as quais, no meu entender, não podem, em princípio, ser resolvidas pelos meios analíticos de qualquer linguagem formal e nem mesmo pela adição de novos axiomas a um sistema axiomático consistente de primeira ordem como a teoria de conjuntos de Zermelo Fraenkel . Neste tratamento fenomenológica-mente motivado eu lido em certa medida com a indecidibilidade de uma tese fundamental sobre a cardinalidade do contínuo em ZFC, a saber, a Hipótese do Contínuo, e também com aquilo que está na base do primeiro resultado de incompletude de Gödel. (shrink)

In this article I deal with time as a notion of epistemological content associated though with the notion of a subjective consciousness co-constitutive of physical reality. In this phenomenologically grounded approach I attempt to establish a ‘metaphysical’ aspect of time, within a strictly pistemological context, in the sense of an underlying absolute subjectivity which is non-objectifiable within objective temporality and thus non-susceptible of any ontological designation. My arguments stem, on the one hand, from a version of quantum-mechanical theory in view (...) of its formal treatment of two different aspects of time within a quantum context. The discrete, partial-ordering properties and the dynamical-parameter properties reflected in the wave equations of motion. On the other hand, to strengthen my arguments for a transcendental factor of temporality, I attempt an interpretation of some relevant conclusions in the work of J. Eccles and of certain results of experimental research of S. Deahaene et al. and others. (shrink)

This article attempts to broaden the phenomenologically motivated perspective of H. Weyl's Das Kontinuum in the hope of elucidating the differences between the intuitive and mathematical continuum and further providing a deeper phenomenological interpretation. It is known that Weyl sought to develop an arithmetically based theory of continuum with the reasoning that one should be based on the naturally accessible domain of natural numbers and on the classical first-order predicate calculus to found a theory of mathematical continuum free of impredicative (...) circularities only to stumble, to cite a key question, in the evident lack of intuitive support for the notion of points of the continuum. In this motivation, I set out to deal from a Husserlian viewpoint with the general notion of points as appearances reducible to individuals of pre-predicative experience in contrast with the notion of an interval of real numbers taken as an abstraction based on the intuition of time-flowing experience. I argue that the notions of points and of real intervals in the above sense are not by essence related to objective temporality and thus their incompatibility in mathematical terms is ultimately due to deeper constituting reasons independently of any causal and spatio-temporal constraints. (shrink)

The paper offers an account of how the meaning of the concept of “invention” and “inventorship” is not stable and predefined but rather constructed during patent disputes. In particular, I look at how that construction takes place in adversarial settings like the courts of law. I argue that key notions of intellectual property law like invention and inventorship are as constructed as technoscientific claims are in laboratories. Courts should thus be seen as sites of construction through processes framed by specific (...) discursive and evidentiary technologies like bureaucratic paperwork, literary technologies, historiographic accounts of inventorship, and models of artifacts and devices. I draw my examples from the British disputes of the Marconi Company concerning the patenting of wireless telegraph and radio communication technologies in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper tracks Marconi’s circulation of publications, models, historical reconstruction of inventions, and expert witnessing. It unravels the material, discursive, textual, and evidentiary constructions of legality. (shrink)

The plainness of the title need not mislead as to the depth and breadth of the content of the question for it is almost anyone’s knowledge that the question of ontological being is over time the main pillar of philosophical inquiry, in fact the groundwork on which have been generated, elaborated and vindicated various ontological theories starting from the Greek antiquity to our days. And yet what is significantly shaping the discussion in our days is that one can hardly engage (...) and progress in philosophy without taking into account the current epistemological edifice. In a certain sense and to the extent that a host of current scientific theories transcend what a pragmatically minded scientist would affirm as science proper, i.e. the body of knowledge conditioned on a number of empirically founded verifiable laws together with the corpus of the laws of analytical logic or its modifications according with the observational context, the boundaries between science and philosophy have become so blurred that one possibly needs to deal at least to some extent with the question of absolute being in the light of current epistemology. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to rebut two major criticisms of the No-Miracles Argument for Realism. The first comes from Musgrave. The second comes from Colin Howson. Interestingly enough, these criticisms are the mirror image of each other. Yet, they both point to the conclusion that NMA is fallacious. Musgrave’s misgiving against NMA is that if it is seen as an inference to the best explanation, it is deductively fallacious. Being a deductivist, he tries to correct it by turning (...) it into a valid deductive argument. Howson’s misgiving against NMA is that if it is seen as an inference to the best explanation, it is inductively fallacious. Being a subjective Bayesian, he tries to correct it by turning it into a sound subjective Bayesian argument. I will argue that both criticisms are unwarranted. (shrink)

Niiniluoto has offered an incisive and comprehensive review of the recent debates about abduction. There is little on which I disagree with him. So, in this commentary, I shall try to cast some doubts to the attempts to render Inference to the Best Explanation within a Bayesian framework.

I began this study with Laudan's argument from the pessimistic induction and I promised to show that the caloric theory of heat cannot be used to support the premisses of the meta-induction on past scientific theories. I tried to show that the laws of experimental calorimetry, adiabatic change and Carnot's theory of the motive power of heat were independent of the assumption that heat is a material substance, approximately true, deducible and accounted for within thermodynamics.I stressed that results and were (...) known to most theorists of the caloric theory and that result was put forward by the founders of the new thermodynamics. In other words, the truth-content of the caloric theory was located, selected carefully, and preserved by the founders of thermodynamics.However, the reader might think that even if I have succeeded in showing that laudan is wrong about the caloric theory, I have not shown how the strategy followed in this paper can be generalised against the pessimistic meta-induction. I think that the general strategy against Laudan's argument suggested in this paper is this: the empirical success of a mature scientific theory suggests that there are respects and degrees in which this theory is true. The difficulty for — and and real challenge to — philosophers of science is to suggest ways in which this truth-content can be located and shown to be preserved — if at all — to subsequent theories. In particular, the empirical success of a theory does not, automatically, suggest that all theoretical terms of the theory refer. On the contrary, judgments of referential success depend on which theoretical claims are well-supported by the evidence. This is a matter of specific investigation. Generally, one would expect that claims about theoretical entities which are not strongly supported by the evidence or turn out to be independent of the evidence at hand, are not compelling. For simply, if the evidence does not make it likely that our beliefs about putative theoretical entities are approximately correct, a belief in those entities would be ill-founded and unjustified. Theoretical extrapolations in science are indespensable, but they are not arbitrary. If the evidence does not warrant them I do not see why someone should commit herself to them. In a sense, the problem with empricist philisophers is not that they demand that theoretical beliefs must be warranted by evidence. Rather, it is that they claim that no evidence can warrant theorretical beliefs. A realist philosopher of science would not disagree on the first, but she has good grounds to deny the second.I argued that claims about theoretical entities which are not strongly supported by the evidence must not be taken as belief-worthy. But can one sustaon the more ambitious view that loosely supported parts of a theory tend to be just those that include non-referring terms? There is an obvious excess risk in such a generalisation. For there are well-known cases in which a theoretical claim was initially weakly supported by the evidence. (shrink)

A great deal of violence in civil wars is informed by the logic of terrorism: violence tends to be used by political actors against civilians in order to shape their political behavior. I focus on indiscriminate violence in the context of civil war: this is a type of violence that selects its victims on the basis of their membership in some group and irrespective of their individual actions. Extensive empirical evidence suggests that indiscriminate violence in civil war is informed by (...) the logic of terrorism. I argue that under certain conditions, that tend to be quite common, such violence is counter productive. I specify these conditions and address the following paradox: why do we sometimes observe instances of indiscriminate violence evenunder conditions that make this strategy counterproductive? I review four possible reasons: truncated data, ignorance, cost, and institutional constraints. I argue that indiscriminate violence emerges because it is much cheaper than its main alternative – selective violence. It is more likely under a steep imbalance of power between the competing actors, and where and when resources and information are low; however, most political actors eventually switch to selective violence. Thus, given a balance of power between competing actors, indiscriminate violence is more likely at early rather than late stages of the conflict. Overall, the paper suggests that even extreme forms of violence are used strategically. (shrink)

Henri Poincaré’s views on the foundations of mechanics and the nature of mechanical explanation were influenced by the work of two of the most renowned nineteenth century scientists, James Clerk Maxwell and Heinrich Hertz. In order then to unravel Poincaré’s views and own contribution to the subject it is important to see the connection between Maxwell ’s and Hertz’s researches on the one hand and Poincaré’s on the other. Consequently, I start this paper with a brief account of Poincaré’s encounter (...) with Maxwell ’s work in electromagnetism. Then, in section 2, I move on to show how Hertz’s work on the foundations of mechanics shaped Poincaré own views. In sections 3 and 4, I formulate Poincaré’s own conventionalist philosophy of mechanics and show how several methodological considerations, especially the search for unity, mitigated his conventionalism. Having thus examined Poincaré’s views on the foundations of mechanics, in section 5 I turn my attention to his notion of mechanical explanation and his proof that a mechanical explanation of a set of phenomena is possible if the principle of conservation of energy is satisfied. I then go on to show how Poincaré secured the possibility of a mechanical explanation of electromagnetic phenomena, and also how, having done so, he ended up with an unlimited number of configurations of matter in motion that could underpin electromagnetic phenomena. The upshot of this paper will be that Poincaré departed from the traditional conceptions on mechanical explanation and defended a purely structural conception, the strong point of which was that it promoted — as the motto of this paper says — the true and only aim of science, namely unity. (shrink)

In this paper I develop five worries concerning Cartwright’s realism about entities and capacities. The first is that while she was right to insist on the ontic commitment that flows from causal explanation, she was wrong to tie these commitments solely to the entities that do the causal explaining. This move obscured the nature of causal explanation and its connection to laws. The second worry is that when she turned her attention to causal inference, by insisting on the motto of (...) ‘the most likely cause’, she underplayed her powerful argument for realism. For she focused her attention on an extrinsic feature of causal inference (or, indeed, of any ampliative inference), that is the demand of high probability, leaving behind the intrinsic qualities that causal explanation should have in order to provide the required understanding. The third worry is that her objections to Inference to the Best Explanation were unnecessarily tied to her objections about the falsity of fundamental laws. The fourth worry is that though her argument for positing capacities and being realist about them was supposed to take strength from its parallel with Sellars’s powerful argument for the indispensable explanatory role of positing unobservable entities, there are important disanalogies between the two arguments which cast doubt on the indispensability of capacities. The final (fifth) worry is that laws—perhaps brute regularities—might well have to come back from the front door, since they are still the most plausible candidates for explaining why objects have the capacities to do what they can do. (shrink)

This article addresses the service of financial companies to society from the perspective of the Catholic Social Teaching (hereinafter CST), specifically regarding conflicts of interest between banks and their customers. The article begins with a case based on interviews with professionals in the financial sector, which provides the context for the CST’s contribution. The analysis of the aforementioned conflicts points to an apparent disconnect between service to society and service to customers. Thus, the bank would set aside the customer’s interests (...) in exchange for a better service to society through good results. This article presents the CST’s normative framework to analyze this matter through some of the CST’s principles: the centrality of the person, the respect for her dignity, and the orientation to the common good. These principles and the CST’s ethical concept of service provide guidance in assessing these conflicts of interest. From an ethical point of view and according to CST, there cannot be a true service to society if the dignity of the client is not respected. It is necessary to review the organization’s incentive policy and level of awareness about the importance of customer service. We end with recommendations related to conflicts of interest with clients. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show, based on Heidegger’s ontology of being and Husserl’s ontological aspects of phenomenology, the ways in which may be highlighted the ontological turned epistemological (and vice versa) enigma of the actual presence of being-in-the-world. In such perspective the content of the philosophical term ‘being there’, in the sense of an original presence in the actuality of the world, is the key issue of discussion both in terms of the ontological implication of the accompanying (...) notion of transcendence and the epistemological relevance it can have by virtue of a phenomenon within the world. Concerning the latter in particular, except for some prompts from formal-mathematical theory, a special attention is drawn to the incompleteness of quantum theory with regard to the treatment of certain ‘ontological’ aspects of the measurement question in a quantum context. The clarification of certain epistemological ‘black box’ cases as this one by virtue of a subjectively based interpretation of the ‘being there’ is a main goal of this article as well as the ontological foundation of the ‘being there’ per se. (shrink)

"Secular criticism" is a term invented by Edward Said to denote, not a theory, but a practice that counters the tendency of much of modern thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures the recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by showing: 1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to society's radical poiesis, its capacity to (...) imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and 2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist. Indeed, the point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between the religious and the secular--hence, the rejection of fashionable languages of post-secularism--in order to engage in a double critique against heteronomous politics of all kinds. For Gourgouris, secular criticism is a form of political being, critical, anti-foundational, disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation's sake, but creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action, which alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be human. Written in free and combative style, as was the demand of the Sydney Library Lectures to "think out loud," and given both to close readings of texts and examinations of the broad horizon, these essays cover a range of issues, historical and philosophical, archaic and contemporary, literary and political that ultimately converge on the significance of contemporary radical politics--the assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in the last couple of years. The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy and a great deal of unlearning established thought patterns. Its most important dimension is not battling religion per se, but dismantling theological politics of sovereignty in favor of creating radical conditions for social autonomy. (shrink)

The theoretical problem Bensaïd tries to confront from the 1990s onwards is the problem of the categories that are necessary to account for the traumatically new experience of history opened up by the defeat of the revolutionary experiments of the twentieth century. Hence the necessity of new answers to these fundamental and inexhaustible questions: How are we to understand history in its relation to human practice and to politics? Can we talk of ‘necessity’ in history, of ‘laws of history’, of (...) ‘determination’, or ‘determinism’, or of modes of causality operating within it? How are we to conceive the notions of ‘historical possibility’, of ‘conflict’ and ‘struggle’? Bensaïd’s contribution will focus on a dialectical notion of temporality that implies a primacy of politics over history and a break with the traditional Marxist notions of a historical subject as an internally homogeneous and fully-sovereign collective force. (shrink)

The thought that there is a way to reconcile empiricism with a realist stance towards scientific theories, avoiding instrumentalism and without fearing that this will lead straight to metaphysics, seems very promising. This paper aims to articulate this thought. It consists of two parts. The first (sections 2 and 3) will articulate how empiricism can go for scientific realism without metaphysical anxiety. It will draw on the work of Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach and Herbert Feigl to develop an indispensability argument (...) for the adoption of the realist framework. This argument, unlike current realist arguments, has a pragmatic ring to it: there is no ultimate argument for the adoption of the realist framework. The guiding thought here is that fundamental ontic questions are not dealt with in the same way in which questions about the reality of ordinary entities (be they stones or electrons) are dealt with—the ontic framework must already be in place before questions about the reality of specific entities are raised. The second part (sections 4 and 5) will articulate reasons for avoiding instrumentalism. Most space is given in offering reasons to refrain from adopting P. Kyle Stanford’s (2006) neo-instrumentalism—a very sophisticated version of instrumentalism that seems to work within the realist framework and promises empiricists a way to avoid scientific realism. Scientific realism is alive and well because of Ti(a)na: there is (almost) no alternative. However, in section 6, it will be argued that there is room for rapprochement between contextualist instrumentalism and scientific realism. The paper is accompanied by an appendix in which Reichenbach’s argument for scientific realism is presented and discussed. (shrink)

Volume 97, Issue 3, September 2019, Page 621-624.

This paper addresses a potentially major shift in environmental and landscape aesthetics, which reassesses the traditional view on landscape in light of the idea of global environment. Landscaping is thus rethought as a mode of creatively being on Earth. For this purpose, the paper begins by providing a definition of Earth as a completely semiotized and therefore “plastic” space which is continuously re-shaped by traces, semantic processes and human practices. Earth-shaping practices are then investigated as gestures of poetic overwriting, capable (...) of inhabiting interconnected non-equilibrium landscapes. The paper concludes by examining the case-study of DOM-, an artistic collective that performs ways of dwelling in damaged territories and exploited environments. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to articulate, discuss in detail and criticise Reichenbach’s sophisticated and complex argument for scientific realism. Reichenbach’s argument has two parts. The first part aims to show how there can be reasonable belief in unobservable entities, though the truth of claims about them is not given directly in experience. The second part aims to extent the argument of the first part to the case of realism about the external world, conceived of as a world of (...) independently existing entities distinct from sensations. It is argued that the success of the first part depends on a change of perspective, where unobservable entities are viewed as projective complexes vis-à-vis their observable symptoms, or effects. It is also argued that there is an essential difference between the two parts of the argument, which Reichenbach comes to accept. (shrink)

Over the last twenty years, Bas van Fraassen has developed a “new epistemology”: an attempt to sail between Bayesianism and traditional epistemology. He calls his own alternative “voluntarism”. A constant pillar of his thought is the thought that rationality involves permission rather than obligation. The present paper aims to offer an appraisal of van Fraassen’s conception of rationality. In section 2, I review the Bayesian structural conception of rationality and argue that it has been found wanting. In sections 3 and (...) 4, I analyse van Fraassen’s voluntarism. I raise some objections about van Fraassen’s reliance on prior opinion and argue that the content of a belief matters to its rationality. In section 5, I criticise van Fraassen’s view that inference to the best explanation is incoherent. Finally, in section 6, I take on van Fraassen’s conception of rationality and show that it is too thin to fully capture rational judgement. (shrink)

A thumbnail sketch of the philosophical thinking about the a priori would surely include that it has been dominated by two major approaches: the Kantian absolute conception of it and the Millian-Quinean absolute rejection of it (section 2). Yet, one can find in the literature claims about the existence of a ›functional a priori‹, a ›relative a priori‹, a ›relativised a priori‹ and suchlike. They are all meant to carve a space between the two extremes. An important thought behind the (...) search for a middle ground is that the supposed coincidence between the constitutive and the unrevisable is wrong. The entitlement to accept a principle as being constitutive of experience prior to any empirical justification of it is compatible with an entitlement to revise or abandon such a principle on empirical grounds. If a priori principles are meant to be independent of experience, how should this claim of independence be understood so that room is left for the possibility that a principle is both independent of experience and revisable on empirical grounds (section 3)? A straightforward and natural way to approach this issue is to think of constitutive principles along the lines of Poincaréan conventions, which can be seen as delineating a new sense of the a priori – the conventional a priori principles. These are substantive principles that are constitutive of theoretical frameworks – in the sense that they define (or constitute) the object of knowledge – without being either synthetic a priori or empirical generalisations. Still, their negation is conceivable and they are revisable on empirical grounds (section 4). (shrink)

This article presents the ethical concept of service as a way of specifying higher ethical principles in business practice. We set out from the work of a number of scholars who have found some shared ethical principles for doing business in a context of cultural diversity. Love, benevolence, consideration, and other related concepts are considered to be important guiding concepts for business but it is not clear how they are to be operationalized. We argue that the ethical concept of service (...) can act as a bridge for bringing those higher principles into business practice. The article explains and refines the ethical concept of service, which has received little attention. In particular, we address the ethical ambiguity implicit in the common meaning of service, explain how service shows love in business, and offer an account of how service provides ethical growth through virtue. Finally, this work presents a variety of examples from business which illustrate how the ethical concept of service can be put into practice. To achieve the aim of this study we draw inspiration from Catholic social teaching. This source provides useful insights into service and can be understood and accepted without requiring that particular faith. (shrink)