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109Pierre Duhem’s virtue epistemologyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 38 (1): 149-159. 2007.Duhem’s concept of “good sense” is central to his philosophy of science, given that it is what allows scientist to decide between competing theories. Scientists must use good sense and have intellectual and moral virtues in order to be neutral arbiters of scientific theories, especially when choosing between empirically adequate theories. I discuss the parallels in Duhem’s views to those of virtue epistemologists, who understand justified belief as that arrived at by a cognitive agent with int…Read more
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47Fallibilism, naturalism and the traditional requirements for knowledgeStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 22 (3): 451-469. 1991.In april 1872, with the caisson at a depth of seventy-odd feet and still no bedrock, two men died. The strain for Roebling was nearly unbearable, as his wife later said. On May 18, a third man died, and that same day Roebling made the most difficult and courageous decision of the project. Staking everything — the success of the bridge, his reputation, his career - he ordered a halt. The New York tower, he had concluded, could stand where it was, at a depth of 78 feet 6 inches, not on bedrock, bu…Read more
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46The Independence of the Parallel Postulate and Development of Rigorous Consistency ProofsHistory and Philosophy of Logic 28 (1): 19-30. 2007.I trace the development of arguments for the consistency of non-Euclidean geometries and for the independence of the parallel postulate, showing how the arguments become more rigorous as a formal conception of geometry is introduced. I analyze the kinds of arguments offered by Jules Hoüel in 1860-1870 for the unprovability of the parallel postulate and for the existence of non-Euclidean geometries, especially his reaction to the publication of Beltrami’s seminal papers, showing that Beltrami wa…Read more
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70Henri Poincaré's philosophy of scienceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 20 (3): 335-363. 1989.Poincare’s arguments for his thesis of the conventionality of metric depend on a relationalist program for dynamics, not on any general philosophical interpretation of science. I will sketch Poincare’s development of the relationalist program and show that his arguments for the conventionality of metric do not depend on any global strategies such as a general empiricism or Duhemian underdetermination arguments. Poincare’s theory of space, while empirically false, is more philosophically sophisti…Read more
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1Bertrand Russell, An Essay on the Foundations of Geometry (review)Philosophy in Review 17 (5): 364-366. 1997.
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165Poincaré's thesis of the translatability of euclidean and non-euclidean geometriesNoûs 25 (5): 639-657. 1991.Poincaré's claim that Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries are translatable has generally been thought to be based on his introduction of a model to prove the consistency of Lobachevskian geometry and to be equivalent to a claim that Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries are logically isomorphic axiomatic systems. In contrast to the standard view, I argue that Poincaré's translation thesis has a mathematical, rather than a meta-mathematical basis. The mathematical basis of Poincaré's transl…Read more
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24From the Values of Scientific Philosophy to the Value Neutrality of the Philosophy of ScienceIn Michael Heidelberger & Friedrich Stadler (eds.), History of Philosophy of Science: New Trends and Perspectives, . pp. 147-158. 2002.Members of the Vienna Circle played a pivotal role in defining the work that came to be known as the philosophy of science, yet the Vienna Circle itself is now known to have had much broader concerns and to have been more rooted in philosophical tradition than was once thought. Like current and past philosophers of science, members of the Vienna Circle took science as the object of philosophical reflection but they also endeavored to render philosophy in general compatible with contemporary scie…Read more
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40A Life in Science, Philosophy, and the Public Domain: Three Biographies of PoincaréJeremy J. Gray. Henri Poincaré: A Scientific Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Pp. xii+592. $35.00/£24.95 .Ferdinand Verhulst. Henri Poincaré: Impatient Genius. New York: Springer, 2012. Pp. xi+260. $49.95 ; $39.95 .Jean-Marc Ginoux and Christian Gerini. 2012. Henri Poincaré: Une biographie au quotidien. Paris: Ellipses, 2012. Pp. iv+298. €24.00 . [Henri Poincaré: A Biography through the Daily Papers. Singapore: World Scientific, 2013. Pp. 260. $29.00 ; $22.00 .] (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 6 (2): 309-318. 2016.
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