Mathematics is one of the many domains where the adoption of a form of realism has traditionally been challenged. Behaviorism and phenomenalism, opposed to realism about, respectively, mental entities and the existence of material objects, are other well‐known examples. The realism debate, as initiated by Dummett's challenge, appears to have run its course, at least on its original terms, and difficulties have been raised with respect to both antirealist and anti‐antirealist readings of Wittgenstein within that debate. Realism about meaning did (...) not remain unchallenged, however, as successor debates took its place, surrounding Robert Brandom's “inferentialism” or Price's generalized form of quasi‐realism, called “pragmatism”. Brandom also espouses “non‐representationalism” and predictably made use of Wittgenstein, with a reading akin to Kripke's of the rule‐following argument. He was criticized by McDowell largely for failing to account for Wittgenstein's quietism. (shrink)

Hermann Cohen (1842-1918) was among the most accomplished Jewish philosophers of modern times. This newly translated collection of his writings illuminates his achievements for student readers and rectifies lapses in his intellectual reception by prior generations.

Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science, is the second volume of a collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, featuring essays addressing truth, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, with a substantial representation of analytically schooled Nietzsche scholars. This collection offers a dynamic articulation of the differing strengths of Anglo-American analytic and contemporary European approaches to philosophy, with translations from European specialists, notably Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, Paul Valadier, and Walther Ch. Zimmerli. This broad collection also features a preface by Alasdair (...) MacIntyre. Contributions explore Nietzsche's contributions to the philosophy of language and epistemology, and include essays on the social history of truth and the historical and cultural analyses of Serres and Baudrillard, as well as new contributions to the philosophy of science, including theological and hermeneutical approaches, history of science, the philosophy of medicine, cognitive science, and technology. (shrink)

The various cosmological proposals by Einsteinian relativists seek to show the structure of the world as a consequence of the basic notions of relativity. In particular, the irrelevance of the state of motion of an observer to his description of the fundamental laws of nature is to be maintained. Furthermore, gravity is understood as being a description of the fact that particles move along certain minimal paths in non-Euclidean space. In this theory, the effect of one material particle on another (...) particle in the old-fashioned sense of gravitational attraction becomes indirect; that is, a particle moves on a minimal path in a space having a degree of curvature dependent on the material entities which exist in it, rather than having its path bent by the attraction between it and other material bodies, all of them existing in an absolute or receptacle-like space. (shrink)

This volume contains the English translation of Felix Kaufmann's (1895-1945) main work Methodenlehre der Sozialwissenschaften (1936). In this book, Kaufmann develops a general theory of knowledge of the social sciences in his role as a cross-border commuter between Husserl's phenomenology, Kelsen's pure theory of law and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. This multilayered inquiry connects the value-oriented reflections of a general philosophy of science with the specificity of the methods and theories of the social sciences, as opposed to (...) abstract natural science and psychology. The core focus of the study is the attempt to elucidate how and under what conditions scientific knowledge about social facts, empirically justified and theoretically embedded, can be obtained. The empirical basis of knowledge within the social sciences forms a phenomenological concept of experience. According to Kaufmann, this concept of experience exhibits a complex structure. Within the meaning-interpretation of human action as the core of knowledge in the social sciences, this structure reaches out across the isolated act of verification toward the synthesis of external and internal experiences. The book opens with a detailed and useful introduction by Ingeborg K. Helling, which introduces the historical and theoretical background of Kaufmann's study and specifically illuminates his relation to Alfred Schütz and John Dewey. Finally, it contains interviews with and letters to members of his family, colleagues and students. (shrink)

The story of this book of 'materials on Ludwik Fleck' is also the story of the reception of Ludwik Fleck. In this volume, some essential materials which have been produced by that reception have been gathered together.

Philosophical understandings of Nature and Human Nature. Classical Greek and modern West, Christian, Buddhist, Taoist, by 14 authors, including Robert Neville, Stanley Rosen, David Eckel, Livia Kohn, Tienyu Cao, Abner Shimoney, Alfred Tauber, Krzysztof Michalski, Lawrence Cahoone, Stephen Scully, Alan Olson and Alfred Ferrarin. Dedicated to the phenomenological ecology of Erazim Kohák, with 10 of his essays and a full bibliography. Overall theme: on the question of the moral sense of nature.

The Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science began 2S years ago as an interdisciplinary, interuniversity collaboration of friends and colleagues in philosophy, logic, the natural sciences and the social sciences, psychology, religious studies, arts and literature, and often the celebrated man-in-the street. Boston University came to be the home base. Within a few years, pro ceedings were seen to be candidates for publication, first suggested by Gerald Holton for the journal Synthese within the Synthese Library, both from the D. (...) Reidel Publishing Company of Dordrecht, then and now in Boston and Lancaster too. Our colloquium was inheritor of the Institute for the Unity of Science, itself the American transplant of the Vienna Circle, and we were repeatedly honored by encouragement and participation of the Institute's central figure, Philipp Frank. The proceedings were selected, edited, revised in the light of the discussions at our colloquia, and then other volumes were added which were derived from other symposia, in Boston or elsewhere. A friendly autonomy, in dependent of the Synthese Library proper, existed for more than a decade and then the Boston Studies became fully separate. We were grateful to Jaakko Hintikka for his continued encouragement within that Library. The series Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science was conceived in the broadest framework of interdisciplinary and international concerns. Natural scientists, mathematicians, social scientists and philosophers have contributed to the series, as have historians and sociologists of science, linguists, psychologists, physicians, and literary critics. (shrink)

Fundamental problems of the uses of formal techniques and of natural and instrumental practices have been raised again and again these past two decades, in many quarters and from varying viewpoints. We have brought a number of quite basic studies of these issues together in this volume, not linked con ceptually nor by any rigorously defined problematic, but rather simply some of the most interesting and even provocative of recent research accomplish ments. Most of these papers are derived from the (...) Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during 1973-80, the two exceptions being those of Karel Berka (on scales of measurement) and A. A. Zinov'ev (on a non-tradi tional theory of quantifiers). Just how intriguing these results (or conjectures?) seem to us may be seen from some brief quotations: (1) Judson Webb: ".... the abstract machine concept has many of the appropriate kinds of properties for modelling living, reproducing, rule following, self-reflecting, accident-prone, and lucky creatures... the a priori logical results relevant to the abstract machine concept, above all Godel's, could not conceivably have turned out any better for the mechanist. " (2) M. L. Dalla Chiara: "... modal interpretation (of quantum logic) shows clearly that it possesses a logical meaning which is quite independent of quantum mechanics. " (3) Isaac Levi: (as against Peirce and Popper) "... infallibilism is con sistent with corrigibilism, and a view which respects avoidance of error is an important desideratum for science. (shrink)

Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science 1969/1972.

In this short paper we analyse some paradoxical aspects of France’s Foucauldian heritage: while several French scholars claim the COVID-19 pandemic is a perfect example of what Foucault called biopolitics, popular reaction instead suggests a biopolitical failure on the part of the government; One of these failures concerns the government’s inability to produce reliable biostatistical data, especially regarding health inequalities in relation to COVID-19. We interrogate whether Foucaldianism contributed, in the past as well today, towards a certain myopia in France (...) regarding biostatistics and its relation to social inequalities in health. One might ask whether this very data could provide an appropriate response to the Foucauldian question: What kind of governance of life is the pandemic revealing to us? (shrink)

GEOMETRY AND SEMANTICS: AN EXAMINATION OF PUTNAM'S PHILOSOPHY OF GEOMETRY There are many ways to shed light on how and why our conception of geometry changed during the last two centuries. One fruitful strategy is to relate those ...

Among the extraordinary Polish philosophers of the past one hundred years, Zygmunt Zawirski deserves to be given particular attention for his fusion of analytic and historical scholarship. Strikingly versatile, and con tributing original work in all his fields of competence, Zawirski thought through issues in the philosophical aspects of relativity theory, on the claims of intuitionalistic foundations of mathematics, on the nature and usefulness of many-value Logics, and on the calculus of probability, on the axiomatic method in science and in (...) the philosophy of science, on the genesis and development of scientific and philosophical concepts, and in his crowning achievement, the conceptual history of notions of time. His work has been too little known in English despite the respect which has been so clearly shown by his Polish COlleagues and students. In this generous selection from his papers and from his great critical study L' Evolution de la Notion du Temps, Dr. Irena Szumilewicz-Lachman has provided a clear account of Zawirski's achievement; and she has written a fine comprehensive introductory essay which provides both the personal and historical context of his work and a systematic survey of his principal publications. (shrink)

Marxism makes its analysis on many levels: it has its epistemology and its ontology, its ethics and its esthetics, and each is intimately related to its philosophy of history and its conception of science. It is a systematic philosophy of culture which claims the empirical sanctions of scientific method and the skeptical toughness of naturalistic rationalism. And finally it draws its philosophic inheritance from the major streams of western philosophic, scientific and religious thought.

Ca. 40 published papers from a summer institute in the German Democratic Republic in 1988.

In September 2007, more than 100 philosophers came to Prague with the determination to approach Karl Popper's philosophy as a source of inspiration in many areas of our intellectual endeavor. This volume is a result of that effort.

The elaboration of these principles has rested on the efforts of many thinkers. In presenting the scientific aspect, few have been as lucid and as aware of fundamental issues as the British physicist, J. D. Bernal. Aside from the Soviet tradition, which derives so largely from Lenin's work of critical re-statement, Materialism and Empirio-criticism, little has been done to carry out what has been mainly a program, a series of brilliant aperçus, and a guide. In Bernal's recent writings, the attempt (...) is finally being made to apply these principles and practice their program. His political activities, his philosophical commentary, and his research have blended in his Marxist vision of a scientific way of life. (shrink)

This selection of papers that were presented (or nearly so!) to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during the seventies fairly re presents some of the most disturbing issues of scientific knowledge in these years. To the distant observer, it may seem that the defense of rational standards, objective reference, methodical self-correction, even the distin guishing of the foolish from the sensible and the truth-seeking from the ideological, has nearly collapsed. In fact, the defense may be seen to (...) have shifted; the knowledge business came under scrutiny decades ago and, indeed, from the time of Francis Bacon and even far earlier, the practicality of the discovery of knowledge was either hailed or lamented. So the defense may be founded on the premise that science may yet be liberating. In that case, the analysis of philosophical issues expands to embrace issues of social interest and social function, of instrumentality and arbitrary perspective, of biological constraints (upon knowledge as well as upon the species-wide behavior of human beings in other relationships too), of distortions due to explanatory metaphors and imposed categories, and of radical comparisons among the perspectives of different civilizations. Some of our contributors are frankly programmatic, showing how problems must be formulated afresh, how evasions must be identified and omissions rectified, but they do not reach their own completion. (shrink)