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11Gestalt 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
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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
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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
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32Elucidating the tractatus: Wittgenstein's early philosophy of logic and language – by Marie McGinnPhilosophical Investigations 31 (3). 2008.No Abstract
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65Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind * By ROBERT D. RUPERT (review)Analysis 70 (4): 798-800. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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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.
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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.
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9Coming to Our Senses By Devitt Michael Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 338Philosophy 72 (281): 464-. 1997.
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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.
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149Externalism and first-person authorityThe Monist 78 (4): 515-33. 1995.If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.
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19Feyerabend: philosophy, science, and societyPolity Press. 1997.This book is the first comprehensive critical study of the work of Paul Feyerabend, one of the foremost twentieth-century philosophers of science. The book traces the evolution of Feyerabend's thought, beginning with his early attempt to graft insights from Wittgenstein's conception of meaning onto Popper's falsificationist philosophy. The key elements of Feyerabend's model of the acquisition of knowledge are identified and critically evaluated. Feyerabend's early work emerges as a continuation …Read more
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58Bird, Kuhn and positivismStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 35 (2): 327-335. 2004.I challenge Alexander Bird’s contention that the divergence between Kuhn’s views and recent philosophy of science is a matter of Kuhn having taken a wrong turn. Bird is right to remind us of Kuhn’s naturalistic tendencies, but these are not clearly an asset, rather than a liability. Kuhn was right to steer clear of extreme referential conceptions of meaning, since these court an unacceptable semantic scepticism. Although he eschewed the concepts of truth and knowledge as philosophers of science …Read more
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8Associative Engines: Connectionism, Concepts, and Representational Change (review)Philosophical Books 37 (2): 125-127. 1996.
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8Christian Erbacher, Wittgenstein’s Heirs and Editors (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). 0 + 71 pp., price £15.00 pb, £8.69 Kindle edition (review)Philosophical Investigations 44 (3): 339-342. 2021.Philosophical Investigations, EarlyView.
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41Great Books, Bad Arguments: Republic, Leviathan, and The Communist Manifesto. By W. G. RuncimanThe European Legacy 17 (7): 957-958. 2012.No abstract
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67Interactions between archaeology and philosophy are traced, from the ‘New Archaeology’s’ use of ideas from logical empiricism, the subsequent loss of confidence in such ideas, the falsificationist alternative, the rise of ‘scientific realism’, and the influence of the ‘new’ philosophies of science of the 1960s on post-processual archaeology. Some recent ideas from philosophy of science are introduced, and that discipline’s recent trajectory, featuring debate between realists and anti-realists, a…Read more
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12Review: Christine Sypnowich (ed.), The egalitarian conscience: essays in honour of G. A. Cohen (review)The European Legacy 12 (5): 644-5. 2007.
Areas of Interest
Epistemology |
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Social Science |
Philosophy of Physical Science |