John Dewey's Gifford Lectures, given at Edinburgh in 1929.

John Dewey's Gifford Lectures, given at Edinburgh in 1929.

With this manifesto, John Dupré systematically attacks the ideal of scientific unity by showing how its underlying assumptions are at odds with the central conclusions of science itself.

's argumentation in favour of essential invariability of the fundamental laws of nature is critically examined. It is contended that within the realist framework Poincareé's arguments lose their apodictical force. In this sense the assumption of inconstancy of even the fundamental laws of nature is methodologically legitimate.

Frederick Suppe has come to enjoy a position of undisputed leadership in the post-positivistic philosophy of science.

Parts of the book date back to and some of the concluding remarks on ethics and the will may have been composed still earlier, when Wittgenstein admired ...

This paper explores a new reason for preferring a model-theoretic approach to understanding the nature of scientific theories. Identifying the models in philosophers' model-theoretic accounts of theories with the concepts in cognitive scientists' accounts of categorization suggests a structure to families of models far richer than has commonly been assumed. Using classical mechanics as an example, it is argued that families of models may be "mapped" as an array with "horizontal" graded structures, multiply hierarchical "vertical" structures, and local "radial" structures. (...) These structures promise important implications for how scientific theories are learned and used in actual scientific practice. (shrink)

A succinct introduction to the history of capitalism by the renowned political theorist.

This paper has two interrelated aims. One is a criticism of the recent book by Eric Olin Wright, Andrew Levine and Elliott Sober, "Reconstructing Marxism". It is argued that many of the book's key concepts and premises are obscure; sometimes, when clear enough for logical relations to be established, inconsistent with one another; and nearly always open to objections. The same is true of the arguments (where they can be identified) to the conclusions. The book's basic philosophical stance is, in (...) regard to its combination of essentialism and empiricism, Aristotelian. The second aim is to sketch an alternative view of the general character of historical materialism, based closely on Marx's "mature" practice as theoretician, and on many of his key statements of principle. This view involves a sharp distinction between the context of theory and the context of the real (the understanding and change of the latter being the point of the former), and, in the theoretical domain, a distinction among levels of abstractness or generality. (shrink)