This inaugural handbook documents the distinctive research field that utilizes history and philosophy in investigation of theoretical, curricular and pedagogical issues in the teaching of science and mathematics. It is contributed to by 130 researchers from 30 countries; it provides a logically structured, fully referenced guide to the ways in which science and mathematics education is, informed by the history and philosophy of these disciplines, as well as by the philosophy of education more generally. The first handbook to cover the (...) field, it lays down a much-needed marker of progress to date and provides a platform for informed and coherent future analysis and research of the subject. -/- The publication comes at a time of heightened worldwide concern over the standard of science and mathematics education, attended by fierce debate over how best to reform curricula and enliven student engagement in the subjects There is a growing recognition among educators and policy makers that the learning of science must dovetail with learning about science; this handbook is uniquely positioned as a locus for the discussion. -/- The handbook features sections on pedagogical, theoretical, national, and biographical research, setting the literature of each tradition in its historical context. Each chapter engages in an assessment of the strengths and weakness of the research addressed, and suggests potentially fruitful avenues of future research. A key element of the handbook’s broader analytical framework is its identification and examination of unnoticed philosophical assumptions in science and mathematics research. It reminds readers at a crucial juncture that there has been a long and rich tradition of historical and philosophical engagements with science and mathematics teaching, and that lessons can be learnt from these engagements for the resolution of current theoretical, curricular and pedagogical questions that face teachers and administrators. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Adorno's metacritique of freedom in Negative Dialectics and related texts remains fruitful today. I begin with some background on Adorno's conception of ‘metacritique’ and on Kant's conception of freedom, as I understand it. Next, I discuss Adorno's analysis of the experiential content of Kantian freedom, according to which Kant has reified the particular social experience of the early modern bourgeoisie in his conception of unconditioned freedom. Adorno argues against this conception of freedom and suggests (...) that freedom is always conditioned by our embodiment and by our social and historical situation. Finally, I turn to Adorno's criticism of Kant's discussion of freedom and determinism in the Critique of Pure Reason and argue that while his philosophical argument against Kant fails, his metacritical argument remains suggestive. Scepticism about freedom arises when the standpoint of theoretical reason encroaches upon the standpoint of practical reason and assimilates persons to things. (shrink)

Descartes was both metaphysician and natural philosopher. He used his metaphysics to ground portions of his physics. However, as should be a commonplace but is not, he did not think he could spin all of his physics out of his metaphysics a priori, and in fact he both emphasized the need for appeals to experience in his methodological remarks on philosophizing about nature and constantly appealed to experience in describing his own philosophy of nature. During the 1630s, he offered empirical (...) support for the basic principles of his natural philosophy, while also promising to provide a metaphysical justification. He offered the metaphysical justification in the Meditations and Principles. and claimed absolute certainty for it. At the same time, he recognized that the particular postulated mechanisms of his natural philosophy did not reach that standard of certainty. These mechanisms were supported by empirical testing or confirming of causes through observed effects. (shrink)

The Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant's first Critique is notorious for two reasons. First, it appears to contradict itself in saying that the idea of the systematic unity of nature is and is not transcendental. Second, in the passages in which Kant appears to espouse the former alternative, he appears to be making a significant amendment to his account of the conditions of the possibility of experience in the Transcendental Analytic. I propose a solution to both of these (...) difficulties. With regard to the first, I argue that Kant does not contradict himself. With regard to the second, I argue that Kant is not making any change to his view of the conditions of the possibility of experience espoused in the Transcendental Analytic. The underlying cause of these apparent problems is also their solution: the transcendental illusion that nature is necessarily systematic. (shrink)

During the 1630s Descartes recognized that he could not expect all legitimate claims in natural science to meet the standard of absolute certainty. The realization resulted from a change in his physics, which itself arose not through methodological reflections, but through developments in his substantive metaphysical doctrines. Descartes discovered the metaphysical foundations of his physics in 1629-30; as a consequence, the style of explanation employed in his physical writings changed. His early methodological conceptions, as preserved in the Rules and sketched (...) in Part Two of the Discourse, pertained primarily to his early work in optics. By the early 1630s, Descartes was concerned with new methodological problems pertaining to the postulation of micro-mechanisms. Recognition of the need to employ a method of hypothesis led him to lower the standard of certainty required of particular explanations in his mature physics. (shrink)

Neo-positivism is dead. Let that imperfect designation stand for the project that dominated and defined the philosophy of science, especially in its Anglophone form, during the fifty or so years following the end of the Second World War. While its critics were many,1 its death was slow, and some think still to find a pulse.2 But die it did in the cul-de-sac into which it was led by its own faulty compass.

Karl Popper is famous for having proposed that science advances by a process of conjecture and refutation. He is also famous for defending the open society against what he saw as its arch enemies – Plato and Marx. Popper’s contributions to thought are of profound importance, but they are not the last word on the subject. They need to be improved. My concern in this book is to spell out what is of greatest importance in Popper’s work, what its failings (...) are, how it needs to be improved to overcome these failings, and what implications emerge as a result. The book consists of a collection of essays which dramatically develop Karl Popper’s views about natural and social science, and how we should go about trying to solve social problems. Criticism of Popper’s falsificationist philosophy of natural science leads to a conception of science that I call aim-oriented empiricism. This makes explicit metaphysical theses concerning the comprehensibility and knowability of the universe that are an implicit part of scientific knowledge – implicit in the way science excludes all theories that are not explanatory, even those that are more successful empirically than accepted theories. Aim-oriented empiricism has major implications, not just for the academic discipline of philosophy of science, but for science itself. Popper generalized his philosophy of science of falsificationism to arrive at a new conception of rationality – critical rationalism – the key methodological idea of Popper’s profound critical exploration of political and social issues in his The Open Society and Its Enemies, and The Poverty of Historicism. This path of Popper, from scientific method to rationality and social and political issues is followed here, but the starting point is aim-oriented empiricism rather than falsificationism. Aim-oriented empiricism is generalized to form a conception of rationality I call aim-oriented rationalism. This has far-reaching implications for political and social issues, for the nature of social inquiry and the humanities, and indeed for academic inquiry as a whole. The strategies for tackling social problems that arise from aim-oriented rationalism improve on Popper’s recommended strategies of piecemeal social engineering and critical rationalism, associated with Popper’s conception of the open society. This book thus sets out to develop Popper’s philosophy in new and fruitful directions. The theme of the book, in short, is to discover what can be learned from scientific progress about how to achieve social progress towards a better world. (shrink)

I argue that Descartes intended the so-called ontological "argument" as a self-validating intuition, rather than as a formal proof. The textual evidence for this view is highly compelling, but the strongest support comes from understanding Descartes's diagnosis for why God's existence is not 'immediately' self-evident to everyone and the method of analysis that he develops for making it self-evident. The larger aim of the paper is to use the ontological argument as a case study of Descartes's nonformalist theory of deduction (...) and his method of analysis, showing how he conceives the latter as a form of philosophical therapy. (shrink)

This essay examines Kant's idea of organic teleology. The first two sections are devoted to Kant's analysis and justification of teleological conceptions in biology. Both the idea of teleology and Kant's anti-reductionism are derived from basic elements of his critical treatment of the human intellect. The third section discusses the limitations Kant places on accounts of origins in the life world. It is argued that the limitations Kant places on accounts of the origins of species do not follow from his (...) idea of teleology. The final section briefly outlines the fate of the Kantian formulation of teleology in the nineteenth century. (shrink)

In the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic, Kant formulates teleological principles, or rather ideas, and explicates them referring to concrete examples of natural science such as chemistry, astronomy, biology, empirical psychology, and physical geography. Despite the increasing interest in the systematic relevance of the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic and its importance for Kant’s conception of natural science, the numerous historical sources for the regulative use of reason have not yet been investigated. One that is very central is Maupertuis’ principle (...) of least action. In 1781, Kant transformed teleology into heuristics and methodology, but in doing so, he partially develops a teleology which was disqualified by Maupertuis because its starting point lies in the construction of animals or plants, the structure of the earth, and the immensity of the celestial bodies. Based on Maupertuis’ principle of action, it can be shown that the Appendix forms a systematic interface between Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens and Critique of Judgement which allows the reconstruction of Kant’s regulative use of reason and its specific status in the context of natural science and his critical appraisal of Maupertuis. (shrink)

The role of analogy appears in surprisingly different areas of the first Critique. On the one hand, Kant considered the concept to have a specific enough meaning to entitle the principle concerned with causation an analogy; on the other hand we can find Kant referring to analogy in various parts of the Transcendental Dialectic in a seemingly different manner. Whereas in the Transcendental Analytic, Kant takes some time to provide a detailed (if not clear) account of the meaning of the (...) term ‘analogy’ and his reasons for his employment of it, in the Transcendental Dialectic on the other hand, Kant’s employment of the term seems far less technical. It would seem on the face of it, that Kant has two senses of ‘analogy’: one technical sense reserved for those constitutive principles of the understanding as laid out in the Analytic, and another casual and commonplace use of the term. This picture, although it contains elements of truth, is ultimately misleading. I argue for three claims in this paper. Firstly, I suggest that there can be found in the first Critique a unified conception of analogy. Secondly, I argue that Kant self-consciously differentiated his employment of analogy from the employment that can be found in many early modern philosophers, e.g. Locke. Thirdly, I will tentatively suggest that this interpretation of analogy can aid us in addressing certain contentious areas of transcendental idealism, most notably the account of causation. (shrink)

In this article I dispute the claim, made by several contemporary scholars, that Spinoza was a naturalist. ‘Naturalism’ here refers to two distinct but related positions in contemporary philosophy. The first, ontological naturalism, is the view that everything that exists possesses a certain character permitting it to be defined as natural and prohibiting it from being defined as supernatural. I argue that the only definition of ontological naturalism that could be legitimately applied to Spinoza's philosophy is so unrestrictive as to (...) tell us nothing about the content of his ideas. The second, methodological naturalism, is the view that the natural sciences are the best means of finding out substantial truths about the concrete world. I present some historical research showing that Spinoza's way of positioning himself with respect to other philosophers in the Dutch Republic casts very serious doubt on the claim that he was a methodological naturalist. This adds further weight to arguments that have already been made against the naturalist reading of Spinoza. (shrink)

This article examines the relationship in Kant between transcendental laws and empirical laws (focusing on causal laws), and then brings a particular interpretation of that issue to bear on familiar puzzles concerning the status of the regulative maxims of reason and reflective judgment. It is argued that the 'indeterminate objective validity' possessed by the regulative maxims derives ultimately from strictly constitutive demands of understanding.

Descartes’s most extensive discussion of the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic lens is contained in Rule 8 of "Rules for the Direction of the Mind". Few reconstructions of Descartes’s discovery of the law of refraction take Rule 8 as their basis. In Rule 8, Descartes denies that the law of refraction can be discovered by purely mathematical means, and he requires that the law of refraction be deduced from physical principles about natural power or force, the (...) nature of the action of light, and the behavior of light rays in a variety of transparent media. For over a century, however, there has been broad agreement that Descartes discovered the law of refraction by purely mathematical means, and that he only later provided the relevant physical rationale (via comparisons or analogies) in Dioptrics II. I execute each step in Descartes’s proposed deduction of the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic lens in Rule 8 and concretely show how Descartes could have discovered the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic by its means. Rule 8, I argue, reflects Descartes’s actual path to the discovery of the law of refraction and the shape of the anaclastic lens. (shrink)

Locke’s conception of substance in general or substratum has two relatively widespread interpretations. According to one, substance in general is the bearer of properties, a pure subject, something which sustains properties but itself has no properties. I will call this interpretation traditional, because it has already been formulated by Leibniz. According to the other interpretation, substance is general is something like real essence: an underlying structure which is responsible for the fact that certain observable properties form stable, recurrent clusters. I (...) will argue that both interpretation are partly right, and what is good in them can be reconciled. The traditional interpretation captures the purpose and signficanc of the idea of substance in general, i.e. the reason why Locke says we have this idea. The real essence view is right about the real world counterpart of the idea, i.e. what sort of entity the idea corresponds to. The paper starts with a review of the strengths and weaknesses of the rival interpretations (I, II). Then I examine which part of the traditional interpretation can be sustained in light of the problems it faces (III). Thereafter I will show that the part of the traditional interpretation which can be sustained cannot stand on its own and needs to be supplemented at one point, and the real essence view can provide what is needed. This, as it were, mixed interpretation will be supported by sketching an argument which is plausible within the context of Locke’s teachings and which explains how Locke could have arrived from the view which the traditional interpretation correctly attributes to him to the view which the real essence interpretation takes him to espouse (IV). The two problematic points in this argument will be taken up in the following two sections. (V, VI). Finally, I will provide some evidence from the Drafts for Locke’s identification of substance and essence (VII). (shrink)

On 11thOctober 2007, at the first international conference on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS1) hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh, Ernan McMullin (University of Notre Dame) portrayed a rather gloomy scenario concerning the current relationship between history and philosophy of science (HPS), on the one hand, and mainstream philosophy, on the other hand, as testified by a significant drop in the presence of HPS papers at various meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA).

Causation has always been a philosophically controversial subject matter. While David Hume’s empiricist account of causation has been the dominant influence in analytic philosophy and science during modern times, a minority view has instead connected causation essentially to agency and manipulation. A related approach has for the first time gained widespread popularity in recent years, due to new powerful theories of causal inference in science that are based in a technical notion of intervention, and James Woodward’s closely connected interventionist theory (...) of causation in philosophy. This monograph assesses five manipulationist or interventionist theories of causation, viewed as theories that purport to tell us what causation is by providing us with the meaning of causal claims. It is shown that they cannot do this, as the conditions on causation that they impose are too weak, mainly due to ineliminable circularities in their definitions of causal terms. It is then argued that a subset of Woodward’s theory can nevertheless contribute crucially to an explanation of the unique role that manipulation has in our acquisition of causal knowledge. This explanation differs from the common regularist explanation of the epistemic utility of manipulation and experiment, and it is taken to confirm several important manipulationist intuitions. However, the success of the explanation depends on (this subset of) interventionism not itself being understood as a theory of causation, but as a theory of intervention. (shrink)

Richard Rorty's recent death has unleashed a strikingly mixed judgment of his philosophical legacy, ranging from claims to originality to charges of charlatanry. What is clear, however, is Rorty's role in articulating a distinctive American voice in the history of philosophy. He achieved this not only through his own wide-ranging contributions but also by repositioning the pragmatists, especially William James and John Dewey, in the philosophical mainstream. Rorty did for the United States what Hegel and Heidegger had done for Germany—to (...) portray his nation as philosophy's final resting place. He was helped by postwar German philosophers like Jürgen Habermas who were happy to defer to their American conquerors. Rorty's philosophical method can be understood as a sublimation of America's world-historic self-understanding: a place suspicious of foreigners unless they are willing to blend into the "melting pot." In retrospect, the breadth and confidence of Rorty's writing will come to symbolize the moment when the United States, for better or worse, came to be the world's dominant philosophical power. Key Words: Rorty • pragmatism • logical positivism • analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The subject of this paper is Malebranche’s relation to Descartes on the question of method. Using recent commentary as a springboard, it examines whether Malebranche advances a nonpsychologistic account of method, in contrast to the psychologism typically thought to characterize the Cartesian view. I explore this question with respect to two issues of central importance to method generally: doubt and free will. My argument is that, despite superficial differences of emphasis, Descartes and Malebranche adopt positions on doubt and free will (...) that effectively ensure that their respective accounts of method aresubstantially the same. (shrink)

In 1792 and 1798 Kant noticed two basic problems with hisMetaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MAdN) which opened a crucial gap in the Critical system as a whole. Why is theMAdN so important? I show that the Analogies of Experience form an integrated proof of transeunt causality. This is central to Kant's answer to Hume. This proof requires explicating the empirical concept of matter as the moveable in space, it requires the specifically metaphysical principle that every physical event has an (...) external cause, and it requires a metaphysical principle regarding the individuation of spatio-temporal things. These three doctrines are not defended in the firstCritique, but only in theMAdN. Kant's transcendental analysis of the conditions of experience thus requires the special metaphysics of theMAdN. This marks an important shift in Kant's view of the metaphysical basis of the transcendental philosophy. (shrink)

An attempt to revise the special relativity genesis at the expense of comprehending all Einstein’s 1905 papers as a whole is provided. It is argued that light quanta hypothesis and special relativity turn out to be mere stages of implementation of the programme of maxwellian electrodynamics, statistical mechanics and thermodynamics reconciliation. The conception of luminiferous ether was an insurmountable stumbling block for Einstein’s statistical thermodynamics programme in which the leading role was played by the light quanta paper . Einstein’s 1905 (...) unificationist modus operandi was close to Mach’s principle of economy of thought in ingenious conjunction with bashful inclinations of Kantian epistemology. Keywords: intertheoretic context, special relativity, light quanta , Unity of Nature, Mach, Kant. (shrink)

This paper discusses some philosophical and historical connections between, and within, nineteenth century evolutionism and microscopical research. The principal actors are mainly Darwin, Schleiden, Whewell and the “London Doctors,” Arthur Henfrey and Edwin Lankester. I demonstrate that the apparent alliances—particularly Darwin/Schleiden (through evolutionism) and Schleiden/Whewell (through Kantian philosophy of science)—obscure the deep methodological differences between evolutionist and microscopical biology that lingered on until the mid-twentieth century. Through an understanding of the little known significance of Schleiden’s programme of microscopical research and (...) by comparing certain features of his methodology to the activities of the “London Doctors,” we can identify the origin of this state of affairs. In addition, the outcome provides an insight into a critique of Buchdahl’s view on Schleiden’s philosophical conception. (shrink)

Of all contemporary social theorists, Luhmann has best understood the centrality of the concept of meaning to social theory and has most extensively worked out the notion's implications. However, despite the power of his theory, the theory suffers from difficulties impeding its reception. This article attempts to remedy this situation with some critical arguments and proposals for revision. First, the theory Luhmann adopted from biology as the basis of his own theory was a poor choice since that theory has no (...) explanatory power, being purely descriptive; furthermore, that theory is fundamentally flawed since it implies that viruses are impossible. Second, Luhmann's theory of meaning cannot coherently make the social domain autonomous as he desires since Luhmann does not take into account the distinction between syntax and semantics. By introducing this distinction, making clear that social systems consist of rules, not just communications, and raising the rule concept to the same prominence in social theory as those of actor and system, autonomy can be maintained while avoiding the counterintuitive aspects of Luhmann's theory. (shrink)

It is widely held that, in his pre-Critical works, Kant endorsed a necessitation account of laws of nature, where laws are grounded in essences or causal powers. Against this, I argue that the early Kant endorsed the priority of laws in explaining and unifying the natural world, as well as their irreducible role in in grounding natural necessity. Laws are a key constituent of Kant’s explanatory naturalism, rather than undermining it. By laying out neglected distinctions Kant draws among types of (...) natural law, grounding relations, and ontological levels, I show that his early works present a coherent and sophisticated laws-first account of the natural order. (shrink)

Proposes a new way of understanding the nature of metaphysics, focusing on nonreductionist emergence theory, both in ancient and modern philosophy, as well as in contemporary philosophy of science.

The aim of the present paper is to contribute to the discussion on the constitutive a priori in science by linking it with the discussion on scientific laws and theories, in such a way to show how the different senses of the notion of constitutive a priori are not incompatible to each other and that they can be precised in a unified, though differentiated, manner.

Recent research has defended the surprising thesis that in many cases the search for truth is better off if the information exchanged between the members of an epistemic community is limited. This is what one may call the limited information thesis. There is, however, the possibility of an even more radical position than this: the thesis that any communication between peers has zero epistemic value and that the search for truth is better off if the truth-inquirer does not take into (...) consideration the truth-claims of her peers. This can be called the solitude thesis. The paper defends the claim that Descartes is a supporter of the solitude thesis with respect to metaphysical inquiry. The defense is facilitated by means of interpreting textual evidence found in Descartes’ essays Discourse on the Method, The Search for Truth and the Meditations on First Philosophy. (shrink)

According to Kant, being purely rational or purely reasonable and being autonomously free are one and the same thing. But how can this be so? How can my innate capacity for pure reason ever motivate me to do anything, whether the right thing or the wrong thing? What I will suggest is that the fundamental connection between reason and freedom, both for Kant and in reality, is precisely our human biological life and spontaneity of the will, a conjunctive intrinsic structural (...) property of our animal bodies, which essentially constitutes human personhood and rational agency. I say ‘suggest’ because, obviously, no proper argument for such a conclusion could ever be worked out in a short essay. I would nevertheless like to motivate my suggestion by way of a commentary on the second part of Adrian Moore's extremely rich and interesting recent book, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty. (shrink)

This paper concerns the role of the transcendental distinction between agents qua phenomena and qua noumena in Kant's theory of free will. It argues (1) that Kant's incompatibilism can be accommodated if one accepts the "ontological" interpretation of this distinction (i.e. the view that agents qua noumena are ontologically prior to agents qua phenomena), and (2) that Kant's incompatibilism cannot be accommodated by the "two-aspect" interpretation, whose defining feature is the rejection of the ontological priority of agents qua noumena. The (...) ontological interpretation allows Kant to be an incompatibilist because the ontological priority of agents qua noumena "ontologically undermines" the significance of phenomenal determinism for agents' free will. That is, since agents qua noumena are ontologically prior to agents qua phenomena, the fact that agents qua noumena are not subject to determinism is more fundamental than the fact that agents qua phenomena are subject to determinism, and it is the more fundamental fact that we should be concerned with in the metaphysical foundations of moral responsibility. Recent (independent) work by myself, Eric Watkins, and Robert Hanna is drawn on to demonstrate that the ontological interpretation can mount a better defense against some traditional objections than has often been thought. -/- According to the two-aspect interpretation, the transcendental distinction between agents qua noumena and qua phenomena is a semantic and epistemological distinction. Since it rejects the ontological priority of noumena, it has no way to assert that the non-determinism of agents qua noumena is more metaphysically fundamental than the determinism of agents qua phenomena. For the two-aspect interpretation, the truth of determinism must remain just as fundamental as the truth of any other characterization of agents. This means that, on the two-aspect interpretation, there is no better reason to call Kant an incompatibilist than there is to call him a compatibilist. Since Henry Allison has presented the most detailed two-aspect interpretation of the agential transcendental distinction, the arguments against the two-aspect distinction address his interpretation. Part of Allison's strategy is to argue that phenomenal determinism poses less of a problem for free will if we accept his accounts of the Second Analogy and empirical psychology. I point our problems in these accounts and argue that this strategy cannot be accepted. -/- . (shrink)

I argue that Kant's refutation of Mendelssohn's proof of the immortality of the soul also refutes his own proof of the permanence of material substance. To evade this result, Kant would have had to rely on premises that can only be established empirically. This difficulty brings up deep and disturbing difficulties with Kant's theory of matter and body in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science and suggests that his early Physical Monadology offered a better account, one he was constrained by (...) later commitments to abandon to the detriment of the coherence of his matter theory. (shrink)

The problem of ‘collective unity’ in the transcendental philosophies of Kant and Husserl is investigated on the basis of number’s exemplary ‘collective unity’. To this end, the investigation reconstructs the historical context of the conceptuality of the mathematics that informs Kant’s and Husserl’s accounts of manifold, intuition, and synthesis. On the basis of this reconstruction, the argument is advanced that the unity of number – not the unity of the ‘concept’ of number – is presupposed by each transcendental philosopher in (...) their accounts of the transcendental foundation of manifold, intuition, and synthesis. This presupposition is ultimately traced to Kant’s and Husserl’s responses to Hume’s philosophy of human understanding and the critical limits of what Kant calls the ‘qualitative’ unity of transcendental consciousness. These critical limits are exposed in both philosophers’ attempts to account for that ‘qualitative’ unity on the basis of the ‘quantitative’ unity of number. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Theodor W. Adorno 's philosophy of freedom needs an ontological picture of the world. Adorno does not make his view of natural order explicit, but I suggest it could be neither the chaotic nor the strictly determined ontological images common to idealism and positivism, and that it would have to make intelligible the possibility both of human freedom and of critical social science. I consider two possible candidates, Nancy Cartwright 's ‘patchwork of laws’, and (...) Roy Bhaskar 's critical realism. Arguing that Cartwright 's position conflicts with the spirit of Adorno 's philosophy, I suggest that Bhaskar 's realism is compatible with and to a significant extent implicit in Adorno 's position. Whilst Adorno is clearly not a critical realist, Bhaskar 's position does provide the best overall account of the ontological commitments of Adorno 's critical theory. It becomes possible in turn to locate Bhaskar 's arguments in a broader critical tradition and give fuller expression to the concerns that structure his work, in particular by locating the epistemic fallacy in the narrative account of the natural history of subjective reason and its tendency towards ‘identity thinking ’. The discussion goes on to consider the interdependence of reason, nature and freedom in the idea of emancipatory critique, confirming the deeper affinities between critical realism and critical theory. (shrink)

Many commentators have argued that Locke understood laws of nature as causally efficacious. On this view the laws are causally responsible for the production of natural phenomena. This paper argues that this interpretation faces serious difficulties. First, I argue that it will be very difficult to specify the ontological status of these laws. Proponents of the view suggest that these laws are divine volitions. But I argue that this will be difficult or impossible to square with Locke’s nominalism. Second, I (...) argue that it will be difficult to specify the manner in which these laws operate. The view runs the risk of collapsing into occasionalism and Locke has measured critiques of the occasionalist position. The only way to maintain that laws are causally efficacious divine volitions while avoiding occasionalism is to have God engage in what I call ‘brute fact-making’. But brute fact-making is difficult to square with Locke’s remarks on God’s action in the world and with his standards for explanation in natural philosophy. (shrink)

In the Critique of Fure Reason Kant distinguishes two sorts of conditions of knowledge. First, there are the space and time of pure intuition, introduced in the Transcendental Aesthetic. They are grounded in our dependence on a special sort of perceptual field for the location of objects. Second, there are pure concepts of the understanding, or categories, introduced in the Analytic. In one respect these are grounded in the logical function of the understanding in judgements, introduced in the first chapter (...) of the analytic of concepts: Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding; in another respect, they are grounded in transcendental unity of apperception, which is introduced in the second chapter: Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, or Transcendental Deduction. I shall be concerned with the latter and its contribution to the overall strategy of argument in the analytic. Within the Analytic, Kant distinguishes between an Analytic of Concepts and an Analytic of Principles. This corresponds to a traditional distinction between a doctrine of concepts and judgement. It is arguable that Kant's theory of concepts undermines this distinction. However, I shall not deal with that general issue, but with a more specific issue related to the first two chapters of the Analytic of Principles: the Schematism and the System of Principles. (shrink)

(2001). Changing conceptions of the philosophy of science. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 127-131. doi: 10.1080/02698590120058997.

(1986). The method of analysis‐synthesis and the structure of causal explanation in Newton. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 60-84.

Some philosophers of science suggest that philosophical assumptions must influence historical scholarship, because history (like science) has no neutral data and because the treatment of any particular historical episode is going to be influenced to some degree by one's prior philosophical conceptions of what is important in science. However, if the history of science must be laden with philosophical assumptions, then how can the history of science be evidence for the philosophy of science? Would not an inductivist history of science (...) confirm an inductivist philosophy of science and a conventionalist history of science confirm a conventionalist philosophy of science? I attempt to resolve this problem; essentially, I deny the claim that the history of science must be influenced by one's conception of what is important in science — one's general philosophy of science. To accomplish the task I look at a specific historical episode, together with its history, and draw some metamethodological conclusions from it. The specific historical episode I examine is Descartes' critique of Galileo's scientific methodology. (shrink)

The interpretation of Kant's Critical philosophy as a version of traditional idealism has a long history. In spite of Kant's and his commentators’ various attempts to distinguish between traditional and transcendental idealism, his philosophy continues to be construed as committed (whether explicitly or implicitly and whether consistently or inconsistently) to various features usually associated with the traditional idealist project. As a result, most often, the accusation is that his Critical philosophy makes too strong metaphysical and epistemological claims.

In this paper, I argue that Berkeley was a theological voluntarist in the Siris. I define theological voluntarism as the view that the divine will has conceptual priority over the intellect, implying serious ramifications for the modal status of the laws of nature. I identify four theses that are required to call Berkeley a full-blown voluntarist and show that we find all of them in the Siris: (i) God’s indifferent, arbitrary and free will enjoys conceptual priority over his intellectual functions; (...) (ii) nature is directly guided by, and its laws are grounded in, God’s will, meaning not only that physical things have no causal powers or essences which could ground the laws of nature; but also that (iii) God creates and maintains the physical world in accordance with law-like patterns of the phenomena arbitrarily established by particular divine volitions. As a consequence, (iv) whatever we can know about the metaphysically contingent laws of nature we know through induction from our limited experience. The Siris is particularly interesting from the perspective of voluntarism underlying these views, as, due to the alleged discontinuities with the early works and its Platonic tendencies in general, it seems to be the worst candidate for such an interpretation. In what follows, my principal aim is to show how wrong this appearance is, and that the voluntarist views Berkeley put forward in the Siris concerning the divine nature, the God-world relation, the laws of nature and the proper scientific methodology link it very naturally to his earlier considerations. (shrink)

The second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason contains several major and myriad minor emendations. The revision of the mode of presentation is apparent in four sections of the Critique: the Aesthetic; the Doctrine of the Concepts of the Understanding; the Principles of Pure Understanding; and ‘the paralogisms advanced against rational psychology’ . A new refutation of psychological idealism begins at B274. Perhaps most importantly, a new Preface frames the Critique.

This paper addresses problems associated with the role of the empirical concept of matter in Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, offering an interpretation emphasizing two points consistently neglected in the secondary literature: the distinction between logical and real essence, and Kant's claim that motion must be represented in pure intuition by static geometrical figures. I conclude that special metaphysics cannot achieve its stated and systematically justified goal of discovering the real essence of matter, but that Kant requires this failure (...) for his larger philosophical presentation of the dialectic that (A298/B354). (shrink)

Neste trabalho, nos propomos percorrer algumas etapas do debate sobre a relevância das causas finais nas investigações físicas, que levou Leibniz a confrontar sua filosofia, de modo particular, com o cartesianismo e, mais em geral, com uma concepção estritamente mecanicista da natureza. Serão seguidos aqueles indícios que se encontram na obra de Leibniz, ao procurar pelas referências a Molyneux, um dos primeiros a receber e divulgar a perspectiva leibniziana, e, além disso, um dos poucos interlocutores com os quais se instaurou (...) um diálogo de tons cordiais. Tentaremos mostrar que, todavia, tal troca não polêmica é fruto de um desentendimento de fundo entre os dois intelectuais. (shrink)

Essay review of Daniel Garber, 1992, Descartes' Metaphysical Physics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, xiv + 389 pp., and Michael Friedman,: 1992, Kant and the Exact Sciences, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., and London, xvii + 357 pp. These two books display the historical connection between science and philosophy in the writings of Descartes and Kant. They show the place of science in, or the scientific context of, these authors' central metaphysical doctrines, pertaining to substance and its properties, (...) the metaphysics of force and causal agency, the relation of geometry to matter and to space, and the structure of cognition. In so doing, they provide an image of philosophy as an intellectually and culturally engaged enterprise, an image according to which it makes little sense to make pronouncements about the foundations of knowledge or the possibilities for science without direct engagement with the living practice of scientific and other cognitive enterprises. However, in some areas they did not engage the context as fully as needed; their interpretations of particular arguments and indeed of whole philosophical programs suffered thereby. (shrink)