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112The Concept of Truth in Feminist SciencesHypatia 10 (3). 1995.If we view the aim of feminist science as truthlikeness, instead of either absolute or relative truth, then we can explain the sense in which the feminist sciences bring an objective advance in knowledge without implicating One True Theory. I argue that a certain non-linguistic theory of truthlikeness is especially well-suited to this purpose and complements the feminist epistemologies of Harding, Haraway, and Longino.
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108Newton on God's Relation to Space and Time: The Cartesian FrameworkArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 93 (3): 281-320. 2011.Beginning with Berkeley and Leibniz, philosophers have been puzzled by the close yet ambivalent association in Newton's ontology between God and absolute space and time. The 1962 publication of Newton's highly philosophical manuscript De Gravitatione has enriched our understanding of his subtle, sometimes cryptic, remarks on the divine underpinnings of space and time in better-known published works. But it has certainly not produced a scholarly consensus about Newton's exact position. In fact, t…Read more
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47Does Scientific Realism Beg the Question?Informal Logic 18 (2). 1996.In a series of influential articles, the anti-realist Arthur Fine has repeatedly charged that a certain very popular argument for scientific realism, that only realism can explain the instrumental success of science, begs the question. I argue that on no plausible reading ofthe fallacy does the realist argument beg the question. In fact, Fine is himself guilty of what DeMorgan called the "opponent fallacy.".
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23Walter Ott. Causation & Laws in Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii+260. $75.00 (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 1 (2): 371-375. 2011.
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40Similarity as an Intertheory RelationPhilosophy of Science 63 (5). 1996.In line with the semantic conception of scientific theories, I develop an account of the intertheory relation of comparative structural similarity. I argue that this relation is useful in explaining the concept of verisimilitude and I support this contention with a concrete historical example. Finally, I defend this relation against the familiar charge that the concept of similarity is insufficiently objective.
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25Descartes on persistence and temporal partsIn Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Harry Silverstein (eds.), Time and Identity, Mit Press. 2010.This chapter discusses the “real distinction” between the mind and the body and a demonstration of the immortality of the soul as demonstrated in Descartes’s Meditations. Early readers of Descartes’s work like Arnauld and Mersenne rejected the idea on the grounds that “it does not seem to follow from the fact that the mind is distinct from the body that it is incorruptible or immortal.” In light of this, Descartes devised a more detailed proof of immortality based on two assumptions not made exp…Read more
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47Cartesian temporal atomism: A new defence, a new refutationBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (3). 2008.
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64The metaphysical roots of cartesian physics: The law of rectilinear motionPerspectives on Science 13 (4): 431-451. 2005.: This paper presents a detailed account of Descartes' derivation of his second law of nature—the law of rectilinear motion—from a priori metaphysical principles. Unlike the other laws the proof of the second depends essentially on a metaphysical assumption about the temporal immediacy of God's operation. Recent commentators (e.g., Des Chene and Garber) have not adequately explained the precise role of this assumption in the proof and Descartes' reasoning has continued to seem somewhat arbitrary…Read more
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43From form to mechanism: Helen Hattab: Descartes on forms and mechanisms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, x+236 pp, US$ 90.00 HBMetascience 20 (2): 287-290. 2010.From form to mechanism Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9455-7 Authors Geoffrey Gorham, Department of Philosophy, Macalester College, St. Paul, MN 55105, USA Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.
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2David Hausman and Alan Hausman, Descartes's Legacy: Minds and Meaning in Early Modern Philosophy Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 18 (4): 264-266. 1998.
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13‘The Twin-Brother of Space’: Spatial Analogy in the Emergence of Absolute TimeIntellectual History Review 22 (1): 23-39. 2012.
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9Stephen Gaukroger , Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility: Science and the Shaping of Modernity, 1680 -1760 . Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 31 (4): 274-277. 2011.
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70Mixing Bodily Fluids: Hobbes’s Stoic GodSophia 53 (1): 33-49. 2014.The pantheon of seventeenth-century European philosophy includes some remarkably heterodox deities, perhaps most famously Spinoza’s deus-sive-natura. As in ethics and natural philosophy, early modern philosophical theology drew inspiration from classical sources outside the mainstream of Christianized Aristotelianism, such as the highly immanentist, naturalistic theology of Greek and Roman Stoicism. While the Stoic background to Spinoza’s pantheist God has been more thoroughly explored, I mainta…Read more
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99Descartes on the Innateness of All IdeasCanadian Journal of Philosophy 32 (3). 2002.Though Descartes is traditionally associated with the moderately nativist doctrine that our ideas of God, of eternal truths, and of true and immutable natures are innate, on two occasions he explicitly argued that all of our ideas, even sensory ideas, are innate in the mind. One reason it is surprising to find Descartes endorsing universal innateness is that such a view seems to leave no role for bodies in the production of our ideas of them.
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55Descartes’s Dilemma of Eminent ContainmentDialogue 42 (1): 3-. 2003.In his recent survey of the “dialectic of creation” in seventeenth-century philosophy, Thomas Lennon has suggested that Descartes’s assumptions about causality encourage a kind of “pantheistic emanationism”. Lennon notes that Descartes regularly invokes the principle that there is nothing in the effect which was not previously present, either formally or eminently, in the cause. Descartes also believes that God is the continuous, total, and efficient cause of everything. From these assumptions i…Read more
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73The Theological Foundation of Hobbesian Physics: A Defence of Corporeal GodBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2). 2013.(2013). The Theological Foundation of Hobbesian Physics: A Defence of Corporeal God. British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 240-261. doi: 10.1080/09608788.2012.692663
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40Planck's principle and jeans's conversionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 22 (3): 471-497. 1991.
Saint Paul, Minnesota, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
General Philosophy of Science |