The project behind this and the following1 special issue of Angelaki first assumed concrete form in the shape of a three-day international conference, “Continental Philosophy and the Sciences,” hel...

In this article, we explore the heuristic power of the theoretical distinction between framework and interaction theories applied to the case of General Relativity. According to the distinction, theories and theoretical elements can be classified into two different groups, each with clear ontological, epistemic and functional content. Being so, to identify the group to which a theory belongs would suffice to know a priori its prospects and limitations in these areas without going into a detailed technical analysis. We make the (...) exercise here with General Relativity, anticipate its ontological, epistemic and functional content and show afterwords that such expectations are justified in this case, being consistent with formal issues of General Relativity. With this, we attempt to make a case for the use of the distinction as a powerful tool for scientific and philosophical analysis. (shrink)

As a discipline of its own, the philosophy of science can be traced back to the founding of its academic journals, some of which go back to the first half of the twentieth century. While the discipline has been the object of many historical studies, notably focusing on specific schools or major figures of the field, little work has focused on the journals themselves. Here, we investigate contemporary philosophy of science by means of computational text-mining approaches: we apply topic-modeling algorithms (...) to eight major philosophy of science journals, from the 1930s up until 2017. Based on the full-text content of some 15,897 articles, we identified 25 research themes and 8 thematic clusters that show how the research agenda of the philosophy of science has changed in its content over the course of the last eight decades, up to the philosophy of science we now know. We also show how each one of the journals contributed in its own way to this thematic evolution. (shrink)

The nonmetaphysical interpretation of Hegel's philosophy asserts that the metaphysical reading is not credible and so his philosophy must be rationally reconstructed so as to elide its metaphysical aspects. This article shows that the thesis of the extended mind approaches the metaphysical reading, thereby undermining denials of its credibility and providing the resources to articulate and defend the metaphysical reading of Hegel's philosophy. This fully rehabilitates the metaphysical Hegel. The article does not argue for the truth of the metaphysical Hegel's (...) claims. Rather, it defends the correctness of reading his philosophy as metaphysical. (shrink)

Michael Friedman's Kant and the Exact Sciences (1992) refocused scholarly attention on Kant's status as a philosopher of the sciences, especially (but not exclusively) of the broadly Newtonian science of the eighteenth century. The last few years have seen a plethora of articles and monographs concerned with characterizing that status. This recent scholarship illuminates Kant's views on a diverse group of topics: science and its relation to metaphysics; dynamics and the theory of matter; causation and Hume's critique of it; and, (...) the limits of mechanism and of mechanical intelligibility. I argue that recent interpretations of Kant's views on these topics should influence our understanding of his principal metaphysical and epistemological arguments and positions. (shrink)

The nonmetaphysical interpretation of Hegel's philosophy asserts that the metaphysical reading is not credible and so his philosophy must be rationally reconstructed so as to elide its metaphysical aspects. This article shows that the thesis of the extended mind approaches the metaphysical reading, thereby undermining denials of its credibility and providing the resources to articulate and defend the metaphysical reading of Hegel's philosophy. This fully rehabilitates the metaphysical Hegel. The article does not argue for the truth of the metaphysical Hegel's (...) claims. Rather, it defends the correctness of reading his philosophy as metaphysical. (shrink)

Discovering laws of nature was a way to worship a law-giving God, during the Scientific Revolution. So why should we consider it worthwhile now, in our own more secularized science? For historical perspective, I examine two competing early modern theological traditions that related laws of nature to different divine attributes, and their secular legacy in views ranging from Kant and Nietzsche to Humean and ‘governing’ accounts in recent analytic metaphysics. Tracing these branching offshoots of ethically charged God-concepts sheds light on (...) how our ethical ideals and ideas of natural order can still be valuably integrated. Early modern intellectualists valued the law-governed order of nature as a sign of divine Reason. In turn, Reason traditionally ascribed to God has now been partly reclaimed for humans, reframing the value of natural order anthropocentrically, in terms of the value of our own intelligence. Alternatively, Reason may be reclaimed for nature itself, as in an ‘objective’ idealism or metaphysical rationalism. However, beyond divine Reason, an influential voluntarist tradition in theology stressed a connection between laws of nature and God’s Power or free Will. Tracking how divine Power has been reinvested in human beings provides a broader context for instrumentalism and related lineages of empiricism. But secularization can also transfer Power from God to the impersonal natural world. In this light, current scientific interest in lawlike order may also reflect the inherent value of brute necessity or inhuman causal power in nature: this is a deeper way to reject anthropocentrism and to show our respect for the environment. (shrink)

This thesis is a study of the relationship between 'nature' and 'spirit' in the philosophies of F.W.J. Schelling and G.W.F. Hegel. I aim to show that Schelling and Hegel are involved in a shared task of conceiving spiritual freedom as a necessary outcome of nature's inner, rational development. I argue that by interpreting spirit as 'emergent' from nature, the absolute idealists develop a 'third way' beyond Cartesian dualism and monist naturalism. For on the idealist account, nature and spirit are neither (...) ontologically discontinuous, as if separated by an insurmountable 'gap', nor are they identical, as if spirit were simply a 'second nature'. Rather, according to both Schelling and Hegel, spirit emerges from nature as its ontologically distinct and non-natural telos. What makes Schelling's and Hegel's philosophies of nature so unique, however, is not simply that they present spiritual freedom as dependent upon nature, but that the ontological specificity of spirit is shown to be rationally necessary. In fact, neither the early Schelling nor Hegel is concerned with the historical emergence of spirit. Rather, both philosophers see the 'emergence' of spirit as an atemporal feature of being that must be derived through sheer reason—be it Schelling’s method of 'depotentiation' or Hegel's dialectical logic. I therefore argue that by bracketing the question of historical emergence, Schelling and Hegel each develop a distinctive logic of emergence whereby spiritual freedom is shown to be necessary thanks to the ontological structure of the impersonal, natural world. In my concluding chapter, I consider Schelling's argument in his Berlin lectures of the 1840s that the idealist logic of emergence must be supplemented with a speculative consideration of historical emergence if philosophy is to be a complete science of reality. From this perspective, it looks as though both Hegel's and the early Schelling's 'logics of emergence', despite all their promise, presuppose the idea that nature's necessary stages need not express themselves in temporal succession in order for them to be fully realised. I conclude the thesis by suggesting that Schelling's Ages of the World was meant to overcome this apparent limit of the 'logic of emergence' without abandoning its fundamental aims. For in the Ages, nature's rationally necessary development is presented as unfolding in time, and time is understood as nothing other than the actual development of nature into spirit. (shrink)