Philosophy of Science Commons^™

Abstracting Aristotle’S Philosophy Of Mathematics, John J. Cleary

Research Resources

In the history of science perhaps the most influential Aristotelian division was that

between mathematics and physics. From our modern perspective this seems like an unfortunate deviation from the Platonic unification of the two disciplines, which guided Kepler and Galileo towards the modern scientific revolution. By contrast, Aristotle’s sharp distinction between the disciplines seems to have led to a barren scholasticism in physics, together with an arid instrumentalism in Ptolemaic astronomy. On the positive side, however, astronomy was liberated from commonsense realism for the conceptual experiments of Aristarchus of Samos, whose heliocentric hypothesis was not adopted by later astronomers because …

Heidegger Circle Conference 2001 - Proceedings, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Heidegger on Science and Technology. Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the North American Heidegger Conference at Fordham University: May, 2001. Convenor: Babette Babich

Joachim Castella: Studien Zur Thematik "Kalkül Und Kreativität", Rudolf Kaehr

Rudolf Kaehr

Utopie der Zeichen – Zeichen der Utopie Vilém Flusser und Gotthard Günther als Komplement einer neuen Medienphilosophie Medientheorie als Theoriemedium Prolegomena einer allgemeinenMedientheorie Philosophie des LMR Joachim Castella 2000/2001

Sokal’S Hermeneutic Hoax: Physics And The New Inquisition, Babette Babich

Research Resources

“The Hermeneutics of a Hoax: Physics and the New Inquisition” offers a rhetorical analysis and hermeneutics reading of the parodic character of Sokal's "hoax." From the perspective of a philosopher of science, it is argued that it is important to attend both to the rhetorical level of philosophy and science. In addition it is important to consider the culture of status (Bourdieu) as well as the self-reflective weaknesses of the culture of physics including those of (traditionally) physics-dominated philosophy of science. Echoing some of the criticisms and highlighting the points of social advocacy of the late Paul Feyerabend underscores the …

Heidegger Circle Conference 2001 - Proceedings, Babette Babich

Research Resources

Heidegger on Science and Technology. Proceedings of the 35th annual meeting of the North American Heidegger Conference at Fordham University: May, 2001. Convenor: Babette Babich

Toward A Cohesive Account Of Reid’S Scientific And Moral Self-Evident Principles, Kevin Twain Lowery

Faculty Scholarship - Philosophy

This paper examines the nature of Reid’s self-evident principles by determining the properties that he claims for them in general, alluding to specific references to science and mathematics in the process. Next, it explores the uniqueness of moral self-evident principles, identifying any obstacles that might preclude a cohesive account. Finally, an attempt is made to remove these obstacles by providing a more comprehensive interpretation of moral principles, one that will relate them more closely to scientific principles. This will rely on notions that are implicit, rather than explicit, in Reid’s writings.

Grundlagenreflexionen Zur Thematik Anthropomorpher Schnittstellen, Rudolf Kaehr

Rudolf Kaehr

Report for the EMBASSI Project

The Scope Of Hermeneutics In Natural Science, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

THE SCOPE OF HERMENEUTICS IN NATURAL SCIENCE Hermeneutics or interpretation is concerned with the generation, transmission, and acceptance of meaning within the lifeworld and was the original method of the human sciences stemming from F. Schleiermacher and W. Dilthey. Hermeneutic philosophy refers mostly to M. Heidegger’s. This paper addresses natural science from the perspective of Heidegger’s analysis of meaning and interpretation. Its purpose is to incorporate into the philosophy of science those aspects of historicality, culture, and tradition that are absent from the traditional analysis of theory and explanation, to re-orient the current discussion about scientific realism around the hermeneutics …

Disseminatorik. Zur Dekonstruktion Der Techno-Logik, Rudolf Kaehr

Rudolf Kaehr

POLYKONTEXTURALE LOGIK. Zur Konzeption, Formalisierung und Validierung. PROÖMIK UND DISSEMINATORIK Abbreviaturen transklassischen Denkens. DISKONTEXTURALITATEN: WOZU NEUE FORMEN DES DENKENS? Zur Kritik der logischen Voraussetzungen der Second Order Cybernetics und der Systemtheorie DISSEMINATORIK: ZUR LOGIK DER 'SECOND ORDER CYBERNETICS' Von den 'Laws of Form' zur Logik der Reflexionsform VOM 'SELBST' IN DER SELBSTORGANISATION Reflexionen zu den Problemen der Konzeptionalisierung und Formalisierung selbstbezüglicher Strukturbildungen SUFI´S DRAI: WOZU DISKONTEXTURALITATEN IN DER AI ? KALKÜLE FÜR SELBSTREFERENTIALITAT ODER SELBSTREFERENTIELLE KALKÜLE? SKIZZE EINER GRAPHEMATISCHEN SYSTEMTHEORIE Zur Problematik der Heterarchie verteilter Systeme im Kontext der New „second-order“ Cybernetics EINÜBUNG IN EINE ANDERE LEKTÜRE. Diagramm einer Rekonstruktion …

Scientific Discipline And The Origins Of Race: A Foucaultian Reading Of The History Of Biology, Ladelle Mcwhorter

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Foucault's "power-knowledge" is a controversial concept. Brought into English-speaking theoretical circles less than two decades ago, its meaning and range of applicability are still in dispute. While no one denies that some fields of social scientific knowledge (such as criminology) intersect institutionally with mechanisms of power, these intersections do not seem, to many, to constitute any essential relation of "mutual reinforcement" between knowledge and power. If, in rare cases, politics and scientific research are admitted to be mutually constitutive, the results of their mingling are typically dismissed as propaganda or pseudo-science. A few thinkers are willing to allow the entirety …

The Question Of Hermeneutics, Timothy Stapleton

Research Resources

No abstract provided.

Philosophies Of Science: Mach Duhem Bachelard, Babette Babich

Research Resources

approaches reflect the philosophical reflections on science expressed from the tradition of continental thought. In this context, the philosophical reflections on science to be found in Mach, Duhem and Bachelard may be mined for what should prove to be a productive

historical foundation between these two traditions addressed to a common focus.

Mach, Duhem and Bachelard among other thinkers have argued that science itself is more critical, indeed more inherently ‘hermeneutic’, than philosophy. But this point is problematic, and not only because of its counter-intuitive content -- whereby science ends up with the virtue of being more hermeneutic than hermeneutics …

Rethinking Reverence For Life, Mike W. Martin

Philosophy Faculty Articles and Research

Albert Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life is more complex and interesting than first appears. It contains themes relevant to contemporary environmental ethics, including a virtue-ethics approach that emphasizes personal responsibility and tolerance, empathy for living organisms, and the fundamental unity of life. Not surprising, then, Schweitzer has recently been acknowledged for pioneering a biocentric (life-centered) ethical theory.

At the same time, Schweitzer’s ethic has four unpalatable features: pantheism, anthropomorphism, excessive subjectivity, and guilt mongering. I trace these features to the metaphysical framework in which Schweitzer develops his ideal of reverence for life. I also show how the framework can …

The Palmer Philosophy Of Chiropractic – An Historical Perspective., Dennis M. Richards

Dennis M Richards

This paper presents the Palmer philosophy of chiropractic from an historical viewpoint. It examines how influences in the life of DD Palmer, such as spiritualism, theosophy and magnetic healing helped to shape the chiropractic philosophy expressed by him. It also oulines the philosophy of BJ Palmer, explaining how it may have been influenced by legal challenges to the early pioneers of chiropractic. Contemporary expression of the Palmer philosophy, as articulated by Strang, is also noted.

Hermeneutical Phenomenology And The Philosophy Of Science, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

Continental philosophy from the start sees science as an institution in a cultural, historical, and hermeneutical setting. The domain of its discourse is values, subjectivity, Life Worlds, history, and society, as these affect the constitution of scientific knowledge. Its notion of truth is that which pertains to history, political power, and culture. Its concern with science is to interpret its historical conditions within human society -- usually in Western culture. Science, from this perspective, is a human, social -- and fallible -- enterprise. A concern of continental philosophy of science will include social failure as a possible indictment of scientific …

Hermeneutics Of Experimental Science In The Context Of The Life-World, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

Science is distinguished as an element of our total contemporary culture, or “historical science,” from science as the professional business of natural scientists, or “experimental science.” Phenomenology has always taken a very critical stance against certain defects or biases -- objectivism, scientism, technicism -- it has found in historical science. It is my purpose to show that these defects and biases, associated historically with physical science, are not necessary parts of physical science, and consequently, that physics, especially experimental physics, has all of those hermeneutical, ontological, historical and dialectical dimensions negated by historical science. The notion of dialectic is given …

Hermeneutics Of Experimental Science In The Context Of The Life-World, Patrick A. Heelan

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Science is distinguished as an element of our total contemporary culture, or “historical science,” from science as the professional business of natural scientists, or “experimental science.” Phenomenology has always taken a very critical stance against certain defects or biases -- objectivism, scientism, technicism -- it has found in historical science. It is my purpose to show that these defects and biases, associated historically with physical science, are not necessary parts of physical science, and consequently, that physics, especially experimental physics, has all of those hermeneutical, ontological, historical and dialectical dimensions negated by historical science. The notion of dialectic is given …

Hermeneutics Of Experimental Science In The Context Of The Life-World, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

As an element of our total contemporary culture, "historical science" may be distinguished from "experimental" science as the professional business of natural scientists. Phenomenology has always taken a very critical stance against certain defects or biasses -- objectivism, scientism, techicism -- it has found in historical science. I show that these defects and biasses, associated historically with physical science, are not necessary parts of physical science, and consequently, that physics, especially experimental physics, has all of those hermeneutical, ontological, historical and dialectical dimensions negated by historical science.

Scientific Objectivity And Framework Transpositions, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

Truth-invariance relative to synchronous communities of knowers in all countries of the world seems to be one of the striking facts about science that distinguishes it from common sense or even from philosophy. Science is international, cosmopolitan and has, it is claimed, but one language. So pervasive is this belief about the one language of science that it might seem to be almost part of what we mean by the scientific enterprise, and it was indeed a part of the classical philosophy of Newton, Descartes and Kant which supported the scientific enterprise in the first three hundred years of its …

Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (Typoscript 1969), Rudolf Kaehr

Rudolf Kaehr

Facsimile of Paul Feyerabend's AGAINST METHOD Original typoscript of Against Methods from 1968 with handwritten corrections. Last sentence, p. 116: "We must take care that it does not lose its ability to make such a choice."

Paul Feyerabend's Telegram, Rudolf Kaehr

Rudolf Kaehr

6-page telegram from Paul Feyerabend (London) to Rolf Kaehr (Westberlin) Telegram 1 I am ill. Please let the seminar continue in my absence. Inform Prof Landmann and Prof Huebner, cancel the hotel reservation and read the following final message to my class on tuesday 1pm: I am sorry that I cannot give what Telegram 2 would have been my last lecture to you. In this lecture I would have elaborated on Verons argument and would have tried to show that it also excludes consience, self expression, identification. Turning back to the empiricist methodology and demand for theoretical unification I would …

Horizon, Objectivity And Reality In The Physical Sciences, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

An exploration of the utility of a phenomenological style of philosophizing about nature called the analysis of horizons. The name refers to a banner of philosophical reflection practiced by many philosophers mostly of European origin who have been influenced by the Husserlian tradition, like Heidegger, de Waelhens, Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, Luijpen, to mention but a few. To philosophize about science in a phenomenological vein, one must begin with a phenomenological description of the form of life of scientific research, because it is only within a form of life, that is, within a way of experiencing objects, that objects present themselves as …

The Discovery Of Quantum Mechanics, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

In this chapter Heelan discusses how Heisenberg's insight of 1925, that physics should concern itself henceforth only with relations between observables, changed the intentionality-structure of physics. This insight led Heisenberg to the construction of a quantum mechanics of observables. Heelan briefly discusses the significance of his insighand of his rejection of Schrödinger's wave mechanics; the novelty of quantum mechanics as a physical theory, and the meaning he attributed to its most surprising result, viz., the Indeterminacy Relations. The crisis was a crisis of the rationalism inherent in the outlook of classical physics, and Heisenberg's insistence on "observable quantities" was a …

Quantum Mechanics And Objectivity - Table Of Contents And Preface And Acknowledgments, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

This book deals with the 'crisis of objectivity' and the 'crisis of realism' which overtook physics when Heisenberg and Bohr consciously rejecting the intentionality-structure of classical physics, gave physics a new form and a new philosophy. The new physics was called quantum mechanics and the new philosophy was called complimentarity. Using the method 'analysis of horizons,' the author attempts to disentangle the epistemological and ontological pesuppositions of Heisenberg's view of complementarity. A similar analysis of Bohr's view of complimentarity reveals a remarkable contrast in basic philosophy between the two founders of quantum physics. The author distinguishes various kinds of objectivity …

Complementarity And The Scientific Method: A Criticism, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

In this chapter "Conplementarity and the Scientific Method" of his Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity, Heelan argues that the philosophy of complementarity, although successful in providing physicists with a common language with which to describe quantum phenomena, also contains a theory about scientific method and about human knowing which is open to criticism. Heelan here criticises the following points arising out of the philosophy of complementarity: psycho-physical parallelism; the view that quantum mechanical properties are to be defined classically; and the perturbation theory of measurement. In the course of the criticism, he elaborates the distinction between two types of concepts …

Reality In Heisenberg's Philosophy - Chapter Eight Of Heelan's Quantum Mechanics And Objectivity, Patrick Heelan

Research Resources

This chapter contains a study of Heisenberg's views of the ontological content of quantum mechanics from I925 until the present day. During the quantum revolution of I925, he began by accepting a Berkeley-type empiricism in which the reality of a quantum mechanical system was reduced to that of a set of observation events, which were, however, acausally connected and in consequence did not constitute a stable phenomenal object of experimental knowledge. After 1955, he professed a modified form of Kantian philosophy whose starting point was the existence of universal and necessary scientific laws. Those universal and necessary scientific laws from …

The Intentionality Structure Of Complementarity, Patrick A. Heelan

Research Resources

In this article Heelan argues that the return to the concrete and empirical implied in Heisenberg's insight on the importance of observables in physics was not, however, in Heisenberg's case, accompanied by a thorough re-thinking of the rationalist presuppositions of classical physics. The effect on Bohr, however, was to lead him to a complete rejection of rationalism and to the adoption of the contrary extreme, empiricism. The profound – though largely implicit – cause of the disagreement between Bohr and Heisenberg as to the correct interpretation of quantum mechanics, was resolved in the sumnler of 1927, by the common acceptance …