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66Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind (review)International Philosophical Quarterly 23 (2): 226-227. 1983.
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65Vladimir tasic. Mathematics and the roots of postmodern thoughtPhilosophia Mathematica 11 (2): 244-245. 2003.
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61Money, Method and Medical ResearchEpisteme 1 (1): 49-59. 2004.It's sometimes useful to start with a quiz, even if it seems irrelevant to the issues at hand. Suppose you have to organize a tennis tournament with, say, 1025 players. Match winners will go on to the next round while losers bow out until all have been eliminated except, of course, the final champion. Your problem is this: How many matches must you book for this tournament?
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61Siobhan Roberts. King of infinite space: Donald coxeter, the man who saved geometryPhilosophia Mathematica 15 (3): 386-388. 2007.Donald Coxeter died in 2003, at a ripe old age of 96. Though I had regularly seen him at mathematics talks in Toronto for over twenty years, I never felt rushed to seek him out. It seemed he would go on forever. His death left me regretting my missed opportunity and Siobhan Robert's excellent book makes me regret it even more. Like any good biography of an intellectual, King of Infinite Space contains personal details and mathematical achievements in some detail. Thus, we learn of the traumatic …Read more
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60Katerina Ierodiakonou and Sophie Roux, eds. Thought Experiments in Methodological and Historical Contexts. Leiden: Brill, 2011. Pp. vii+233. €99.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 3 (1): 154-157. 2013.
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60Explaining, Seeing, and Understanding in Thought ExperimentsPerspectives on Science 22 (3): 357-376. 2014.Theories often run into paradoxes. Some of these are outright contradictions, sending the would-be champions of the theory back to the drawing board. Others are paradoxical in the sense of being bizarre and unexpected. The latter are sometimes mistakenly thought to be instances of the former. That is, they are thought to be more than merely weird; they are mistakenly thought to be self-refuting. Showing that they are not self-contradictory but merely a surprise is often a challenge. Notions of e…Read more
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57D avid B ostock . Philosophy of mathematics: An introductionPhilosophia Mathematica 18 (1): 127-129. 2010.(No abstract is available for this citation)
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54Foundations without Foundationalism: A Case for Second-Order LogicStewart Shapiro Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, xx + 277 pp (review)Dialogue 35 (3): 624-626. 1996.Book review
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53Thought Experiments and Inertial Motion: A Golden Thread in the Development of MechanicsRivista di Estetica 42 71-96. 2009.The history of mechanics has been extensively investigated in a number of historical works. The full story from the Greeks and medievals through the Scientific Revolution to the modern era is long and complex. But it is also incomplete. Studies to date have been admirably thorough in putting empirical discoveries into proper perspective and in making clear the great importance of mathematical innovations. But there has been surprisingly little regard for the role of thought experiments in the de…Read more
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53The rational and the socialRoutledge. 1989.THE SOCIOLOGICAL TURN The problem we are concerned with is just this: How should we understand science? Are we to account for scientific knowledge (or ...
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53Review of M. Giaquinto, The Search for Certainty: A Philosophical Account of Foundations of Mathematics (review)Mind 113 (449): 177-179. 2004.
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50The philosophy of mathematical practiceInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 18 (1). 2010.This Article does not have an abstract
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49Kitcher’s Mathematical NaturalismCroatian Journal of Philosophy 3 (1): 1-20. 2003.Recent years have seen a number of naturalist accounts of mathematics. Philip Kitcher’s version is one of the most important and influential. This paper includes a critical exposition of Kitcher’s views and a discussion of several issues including: mathematical epistemology, practice, history, the nature of applied mathematics. It argues that naturalism is an inadequate account and compares it with mathematical Platonism, to the advantage of the latter.
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49Rationality and Relativism Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, editors Oxford: Blackwell, 1982. Pp. 312. $34.25, cloth; $18.25, paper (review)Dialogue 22 (2): 369-371. 1983.
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48Abstract Objects Bob Hale Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Pp. 282. $75.00 (review)Dialogue 27 (4): 729-. 1988.
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48Otavio Bueno and Steven French. Applying Mathematics: Immersion, Inference, Interpretation (review)Philosophy of Science 87 (1): 207-211. 2020.
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45Science in a Free Society by Paul Feyerabend; New Left Books; London, 1978; Pp. 221Dialogue 20 (1): 169-171. 1981.
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45Platonism, Metaphor, and MathematicsDialogue 43 (1): 47-. 2004.RésuméDans leur livre récent, George Lakoff et Rafael Núñez se livrent à une critique naturaliste soutenue du platonisme traditionnel concernant les entités mathématiques. Ils affirment que des résultats récents en sciences cognitives démontrent qu'il est faux. En particulier, ils estiment que la découverte que la cognition mathématique s'appuie pour une large part sur les métaphores conceptuelles est incompatible avec le platonisme. Nous montrons ici que tel n'est pas le cas. Nous examinons et …Read more
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41Realism, Miracles, and the Common CausePSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1982. 1982.The principle of the common cause, which gets its justification from the miracle arguments, probably constitutes the best reason for being a scientific realist. However, results in quantum mechanics steming from the work of Bell raise difficulties which anti-realists have been quick to seize. The author tries to overcome the problem and save scientific realism by reformulating the principle of the common cause so that a distinction is made between a priori and a posteriori correlations.
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37How Do Feynman Diagrams Work?Perspectives on Science 26 (4): 423-442. 2018.Feynman diagrams are now iconic. Like pictures of the Bohr atom, everyone knows they have something important to do with physics. Those who work in quantum field theory, string theory, and other esoteric fields of physics use them extensively. In spite of this, it is far from clear what they are or how they work. Are they mere calculating tools? Are they somehow pictures of physical reality? Are they models in any interesting sense? Or do they play some other kind of role?It is safe to say they …Read more
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37Critical Notice of Roy Sorensen Thought ExperimentsCanadian Journal of Philosophy 25 (1): 135-142. 1995.This book adds to the growing literature on thought experiments. There are numerous examples drawn from the sciences and philosophy. The principle claim is that thought experiments are a limiting case of real experiments. It is a moderate empiricist view, in contrast to, e.g., the Platonism of Brown or the strict empiricism of Norton. Highly recommended
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36Appearance in this list neither guarantees nor precludes a future review of the bookMind 117 (468): 468. 2008.
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36Latour’s Prosaic ScienceCanadian Journal of Philosophy 21 (2): 245-261. 1991.The most embarrassing thing about ‘facts’ is the etymology of the word. The Latin facere means to make or construct. Bruno Latour, like so many other anti-realists who revel in the word’s history, thinks facts are made by us: they are a social construction. The view acquires some plausibility in Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts which Latour co-authored with Steve Woolgar.1 This work, first published a decade ago, has become a classic in the sociology of science litera…Read more
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University of Toronto, St. George CampusDepartment of Philosophy
Institute for the History and Philosophy of ScienceRetired faculty
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |