-
45I summarise certain aspects of Paul Feyerabend’s account of the development of Western rationalism, show the ways in which that account is supposed to run up against an alternative, that of Karl Popper, and then try to give a preliminary comparison of the two. My interest is primarily in whether what Feyerabend called his ‘story’ constitutes a possible history of our epistemic concepts and their trajectory. I express some grave reservations about that story, and about Feyerabend’s framework, fin…Read more
-
28
-
87The idea of a pseudo-problem in Mach, Hertz, and BoltzmannJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (1): 55-77. 2023.Identifications, diagnoses, and treatments of pseudo-problems form a family of classic methodologies in later nineteenth century philosophy and at least partly, as I shall argue, in the philosophy of science. They were devised, not by academic philosophers, but by three of the greatest of the philosopher-scientists. (Later, the idea was taken up by academic philosophers, of course. But I will not discuss that development). Here I show how Ernst Mach, Heinrich Hertz and Ludwig Boltzmann each depl…Read more
-
23The Instrument of Science: Scientific Anti-realism Revitalised, by Darrell P. RowbottomMind 130 (519): 1028-1032. 2021.The Instrument of Science: Scientific Anti-realism Revitalised, by RowbottomDarrell P.. Abingdon: Routledge, 2019. Pp. 216.
-
24The Fate of Wonder: Wittgenstein’s Critique of Metaphysics and Modernity (review)The European Legacy 19 (6): 807-809. 2014.
-
5The Engine of Reason, The Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the BrainPhilosophical Books 37 (3): 198-200. 1996.
-
15Thomas Kuhn's Revolution: An Historical Philosophy of Science – By James A. Marcum (review)Ratio 20 (3): 352-354. 2007.
-
11PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of SciencePhilosophical Books 35 (2): 136-137. 1994.
-
16Mach, Wittgenstein, Science and LogicIn Friedrich Stadler (ed.), Ernst Mach – Life, Work, Influence, Springer Verlag. 2019.The received view is that Ernst Mach should not be counted as among the important influences on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought. Recently, though, some affinities between their works have been brought to light, and two scholars, Henk Visser and Jaakko Hintikka, have gone beyond this to claim that Wittgenstein took specific and important philosophical ideas about science and logic from Mach. These claims have not been addressed by Wittgenstein scholars, but they do deserve attention. …Read more
-
64Janik on Hertz and the early WittgensteinGrazer Philosophische Studien 73 (1): 83-95. 2006.Various claims have been made about the influence of Heinrich Hertz's Principles of Mechanics on Wittgenstein's work. I consider some such recent claims, made by Allan Janik, to the effect that Hertz exercised a very strong influence on Wittgenstein, early and late. I suggest they are ill-founded, in virtue of misinterpretations either of Hertz, or of Wittgenstein, or of both. I try to set the record straight on issues such as the three criteria Hertz suggests for evaluating scientific 'represen…Read more
-
15Introduction: Thought as LanguageRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 42 1-. 1997.Western philosophy has a long-standing interest in the relationship between thought and language. This is not least because language use and our mental capacities are so central to our human self-conception, as well as to the ways in which we have tried to think about other beings. Retrospectively, it is possible to identify certain broad traditions in the philosophical study of thought and language, traditions which also have their representatives in psychology and linguistics. In this introduc…Read more
-
62Hertz, Wittgenstein and philosophical methodPhilosophical Investigations 31 (1). 2007.There have recently appeared claims that the influence Heinrich Hertz exerted over Wittgenstein's later work was far more abiding than previously recognised. I critically evaluate such claims by Gordon Baker and Allan Janik. I first show that Hertz was indeed concerned with the same feature, clarity, which often exercised Wittgenstein. But I then argue that Wittgenstein should not be seen as having adopted the conception of philosophical method, which Hertz deployed in The Principles of Mechanic…Read more
-
12Gestalt Epistemology: From Gestalt Psychology to Phenomenology in the Work of Michael PolanyiPhilosophia Scientiae 26 233-254. 2022.Gestalt psychology of perception was one of the main inspirations behind the philosophical work of the Hungarian polymath Michael Polanyi. Seeing scientists and philosophers backing away from its implications, he proposed instead to take those implications seriously. I detail four ways in which he did so, the result of which was his theory of “tacit knowing”. This can be thought of as a Gestalt epistemology, because it takes the figure/ground relation as the model for all knowing. Polanyi took h…Read more
-
42Frictionless philosophy: Paul Feyerabend and relativismHistory of European Ideas 20 (4-6): 963-968. 1995.The version of moral relativism that Paul Feyerabend discusses in his 1991 book "Three Dialogues on Knowledge" is evaluated. It is shown to be in conflict with an essential feature of appraisal vocabulary known as supervenience. This is enough to render this version of relativism untenable. But the way in which Feyerabend defends his relativist principle against the Platonic objection that relativist is self-refuting also involves that might be called semantic nihilism', the idea that nothing ca…Read more
-
75Folk psychology as theory or practice? The case for eliminative materialismInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 32 (September): 277-303. 1989.One foundation of Eliminative Materialism is the claim that the totality of our ordinary resources for explaining and predicting behaviour, ?Folk Psychology?, constitutes a theoretical scheme, potentially in conflict with other theories of behaviour. Recent attacks upon this claim, as well as the defence by Paul Churchland, are examined and found to be lacking in a suitably realistic conception of theory. By finding such a conception, and by correctly identifying the level of conceptual structur…Read more
-
44
-
32Elucidating the tractatus: Wittgenstein's early philosophy of logic and language – by Marie McGinnPhilosophical Investigations 31 (3). 2008.No Abstract
-
65Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind * By ROBERT D. RUPERT (review)Analysis 70 (4): 798-800. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
-
20Cheryl Misak, Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein . xviii + 321, price £30.00 hb (review)Philosophical Investigations 40 (4): 443-448. 2017.
-
3Review of Arthur Donovan, Larry Laudan and Rachel Laudan: Scrutinizing Science: Empirical Studies of Scientific Change (review)British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (4): 1063-1065. 1994.
-
89
-
9Coming to Our Senses By Devitt Michael Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 338Philosophy 72 (281): 464-. 1997.
-
18Externalism and First-Person AuthorityThe Monist 78 (4): 515-533. 1995.If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Philosophy of Physical Science |