Science entails history writing: scientists are continuously engaged in creating “imagined pasts” for their own specialisms, both on the small scale of the ubiquitous literature review and on a much broader scale. This aspect of science has been considered in very different ways in decades-old, yet largely neglected, contributions by Thomas S. Kuhn, Augustine Brannigan, and Simon Schaffer. Inspired by these pieces and by the missing dialogue between them, this essay argues that their concealment is itself an instance, on the (...) broadest possible scale, of the power of “imagined pasts”—in this case the imagined continuity, inscribed in the very name of our discipline, between Isaac Newton and ourselves. (shrink)

hilosophy of history and history of philosophy of science make for an interesting case of “mutual containment”: the former is an object of inquiry for the latter, and the latter is subject to the demands of the former. This article discusses a seminal turn in past philosophy of history with an eye to the practice of historians of philosophy of science. The narrative turn by Danto and Mink represents both a liberation for historians and a new challenge to the objectivity (...) of their findings. I will claim that good sense can be made of “working historical veins of possibility” (contrary to how the phrase was originally intended) and that already Danto and Mink provided materials (although they did not quite advertise them as such) to assuage fears of a constructivist free-for-all. (shrink)

Several scholars have criticized the histories of early modern philosophy based on the dichotomy of empiricism and rationalism. They view them as overestimating the importance of epistemological issues for early modern philosophers (epistemological bias), portraying Kant's Critical philosophy as a superior alternative to empiricism and rationalism (Kantian bias), and forcing most or all early modern thinkers prior to Kant into the empiricist or rationalist camps (classificatory bias). Kant is often said to be the source of the three biases. Against this (...) criticism, this paper argues that Kant did not have the three biases. However, he promoted a way of writing histories of philosophy from which those biases would naturally flow. (shrink)

The identity theory’s rise to prominence in analytic philosophy of mind during the late 1950s and early 1960s is widely seen as a watershed in the development of physicalism, in the sense that whereas logical behaviourism proposed analytic and a priori ascertainable identities between the meanings of mental and physical-behavioural concepts, the identity theory proposed synthetic and a posteriori knowable identities between mental and physical properties. While this watershed does exist, the standard account of it is misleading, as it is (...) founded in erroneous intensional misreadings of the logical positivists’—especially Carnap’s—extensional notions of translation and meaning, as well as misinterpretations of the positivists’ shift from the strong thesis of translation-physicalism to the weaker and more liberal notion of reduction-physicalism that occurred in the Unity of Science programme. After setting the historical record straight, the essay traces the first truly modern identity theory to Schlick’s pre-positivist views circa 1920 and goes on to explore its further development in Feigl, arguing that the fundamental difference between the Schlick-Feigl identity theory and the more familiar and influential Place-Smart-Armstrong identity theory has resurfaced in the deep and seemingly unbridgeable gulf in contemporary philosophy of consciousness between inflationary mentalism and deflationary physicalism. (shrink)

The thesis identifies two strands in Rorty’s philosophy. One is an orientation towards practice in opposition to the traditional philosophical emphasis on theoretical knowledge. The other is Rorty’s anti-representationalist conception of knowledge. Rorty argues that these strands are mutually supporting, while the author argues they are incompatible. The nominal aim of Rorty’s anti-representationalism is to overcome many traditional dualisms of theoretical philosophy, such as subject and object, mind and world, and theory and practice. The thesis argues that anti-representationalism does not (...) and cannot achieve this aim, since what is required to overcome these dualisms is the recognition of the practical basis of knowledge, with which anti-representationalism is incompatible. The author agrees with much of Rorty’s critique of foundationalist epistemology, but argues in opposition to Rorty that anti-representationalism does not follow necessarily from this critique. Where Rorty locates the error of traditional epistemology in the very notion that knowledge and language can represent the world, the author argues that this idea is benign. The fundamental problem is the desire to anchor our conceptual scheme to an external structure independently of human practice — but this idea can be rejected without abandoning the notion of representation. The thesis also looks to explain why Rorty takes anti-representationalism to follow naturally from a rejection of foundationalism. The motivation is located in Rorty’s fundamental metaphysical orientation, which is naturalistic. Anti-representationalism is the product of the wish to promote a naturalistic worldview without succumbing to scientism. In this way Rorty hopes to unite the manifest and scientific images of man. The author argues that this cannot be done from within a naturalistic metaphysics. (shrink)

Assume for the sake of argument that doing philosophy is intrinsically valuable, where “doing philosophy” refers to the practice of forging arguments for and against the truth of theses in the domains of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and so on. The practice of the history of philosophy is devoted instead to discovering arguments for and against the truth of “authorial” propositions, that is, propositions that state the belief of some historical figure about a philosophical proposition. I explore arguments for thinking that (...) doing history of philosophy is valuable—specifically, valuable in such a way that its value does not reduce to the value of doing philosophy. Most such arguments proffered by historians of philosophy fail, as I show. I then offer a proposal about what makes doing history of philosophy uniquely valuable, but it is one that many historians will not find agreeable. (shrink)

ITA: L’elaborato ha come obiettivo una ricostruzione storica del dibattito tra Immanuel Kant e Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi nel contesto del cosiddetto _Pantheismusstreit_ degli anni Ottanta del Settecento. In particolare, si andranno ad evidenziare le fonti dei due autori, i quali propongono due interpretazioni uguali e contrarie rispetto alle possibilità della fede, nonché del rapporto che questa intercorre con la ragione. Nello specifico, si andrà esponendo la posizione kantiana oltre al mito del Kant «alles Zermalmender», rimarcando le radici profonde della sua (...) riflessione tanto nelle letture di autori quali Christian Wolff, Christian August Crusius o Georg Friedrich Meier, quanto nella sua stessa produzione, come testimoniato già dalla _Principiorum primorum cognitionis methapysicae nova dilucidatio_ all’inizio del suo percorso intellettuale, culminando quindi nel breve saggio _Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientiren?_ e nella seconda edizione della _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_ del 1787. Inoltre, si fornirà anche una ricostruzione della posizione jacobiana, delle sue fonti, quali, ad esempio, Johann Georg Hamann o Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, e della sua originale riflessione all’interno del contesto tedesco dell’epoca evocando soprattutto due opere, ovvero _Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn_, vero e proprio _casus belli_ del _Pantheismusstreit_, e _David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus_. Dunque, obiettivi dello scritto sono tanto il dissolvere il mito di uno spietato Kant come «la lama che in Germania ha tagliato la testa al deismo», quanto quello dello Jacobi irrazionalista ed indegno del titolo di filosofo. ENG: The subject of this work is an historical reconstruction of the debate between Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi in the context of the so-called _Pantheismusstreit_ that happened in the '80s of the Eighteenth Century. Specifically, the sources of the two authors are going to be stressed to highlight the equal and opposite interpretations given about the possibilities of the faith, as well as its relationship with reason. In particular, the kantian position is going to be displayed over the myth of Kant as «alles Zermalmender», drawing attention to his thought’s roots as much as in his lectures of Christian Wolff, Christian August Crusius or Georg Friedrich Meier, as in his own works, as the _Principiorum primorum cognitionis methapysicae nova dilucidatio_ already testimonies at the beginning of his career, climaxing in the short essay _Was heißt: Sich im Denken orientiren?_ as well in the second edition of the _Kritik der reinen Vernunft_ in 1787. Also, it is going to be proposed a reconstruction of the jacobian standpoint, careful to remark his sources, like Johann Georg Hamann or Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and his original thought in the German context of the era, summoning two works of his, _Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn_, the very _casus belli_ of the _Pantheismusstreit_, and the _David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus_. Therefore, goals of this works are the dispel of the myth of a ruthless Kant as «the sword that cut deism’s head in Germany», as well as the one on Jacobi as an irrationalist unworthy of being granted the title of philosopher. ​. (shrink)

The past can be a stubborn subject: it is complex, heterogeneous and opaque. To understand it, one must decide which aspects of the past to emphasise and which to minimise. Enter frameworks. Frameworks foreground certain aspects of the historical record while backgrounding others. As such, they are both necessary for, and conducive to, good history as well as good philosophy. We examine the role of frameworks in the history and philosophy of science and argue that they are necessary for both (...) forms of enquiry. We then suggest that the right attitude towards frameworks is pluralism rather than monism: there is no single correct framework to be applied to a given scientific episode. Rather, a multitude of different frameworks are more or less appropriate given various contexts and aims. From this perspective, good frameworks generate and further, rather than frustrate, historical and philosophical enquiry. Our view sheds light on historical disagreement, and on the relationship between philosophy and history of science. (shrink)