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1Psychologism: The Sociology of Philosophical KnowledgeRoutledge. 1995.First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company
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2Knowledge by Agreement: The Programme of Communitarian EpistemologyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (1): 235-238. 2006.
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26Psychological Knowledge: A Social History and PhilosophyRoutledge. 1998.Psychologists and philosophers have assumed that psychological knowledge is knowledge about, and held by, the individual mind. _Psychological Knowledge_ challenges these views. It argues that bodies of psychological knowledge are social institutions like money or the monarchy, and that mental states are social artefacts like coins or crowns. Martin Kusch takes on arguments of alternative proposals, shows what is wrong with them, and demonstrates how his own social-philosophical approach constitu…Read more
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72A Sceptical Guide to Meaning and Rules: Defending Kripkes WittgensteinMcgill-Queen's University Press. 2006.No other recent book in Anglophone philosophy has attracted as much criticism and has found so few friends as Saul Kripke's "Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language". Amongst its critics, one finds the very top of the philosophical profession. Yet, it is rightly counted amongst the books that students of philosophy, at least in the Anglo-American world, have to read at some point in their education. Enormously influential, it has given rise to debates that strike at the very heart of contempo…Read more
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Experts and publics in deliberative democracyIn Tim Lewens (ed.), Risk: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. pp. 131. 2007.
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15Folk Psychology and Freedom of the WillIn Daniel D. Hutto & Matthew Ratcliffe (eds.), Folk Psychology Re-Assessed, Springer Press. pp. 175--188. 2007.
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1Towards a political philosophy of risk : experts and publics in deliberative democracyIn Tim Lewens (ed.), Risk: Philosophical Perspectives, Routledge. 2007.
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10Barnes on the Freedom of the WillIn Massimo Mazzotti (ed.), Knowledge as Social Order: Rethinking the Sociology of Barry Barnes, Ashgate Pub Co. pp. 131--146. 2008.
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12Testimony and the Value of KnowledgeIn Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Epistemic Value, Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 60--94. 2009.This chapter gives substance to the idea of a ‘communitarian value-driven epistemology’ by developing and combining ideas from Edward Craig's and Bernard Williams' ‘epistemic genealogy’ and Barry Barnes' and Steven Shapin's ‘sociology of knowledge’. In order to make transparent how this project might slot into more familiar, or more mainstream, projects, the paper maintains throughout a critical dialogue with Jon Kvanvig's position. The chapter is structured around an attempt to defend Craig's p…Read more
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3Social epistemologyIn Sven Bernecker Duncan Pritchard (ed.), The Routledge Companion to Epistemology, Routledge. pp. 873--884. 2010.
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318Hacking’s historical epistemology: a critique of styles of reasoningStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 41 (2): 158-173. 2010.The paper begins with a detailed reconstruction of the development of Ian Hacking’s theory of scientific ‘styles of reasoning’, paying particular attention to Alistair Crombie’s influence, and suggesting that Hacking’s theory deserves to come under the title ‘historical epistemology’. Subsequently, the paper seeks to establish three critical theses. First, Hacking’s reliance on Crombie leads him to adopt an outdated historiographical position; second, Hacking is unsuccessful in his attempt to di…Read more
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39Epistemic Replacement Relativism DefendedIn M. Rédei M. Dorato M. Suàrez (ed.), Epsa Epistemology and Methodology of Science, Springer. pp. 165--175. 2010.
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3Kripke's Wittgenstein, on certainty, and epistemic relativismIn Daniel Whiting (ed.), The later Wittgenstein on language, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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27Disagreement and Picture in Wittgenstein’s ‘Lectures on Religious Belief’In David Wagner, Wolfram Pichler, Elisabeth Nemeth & Richard Heinrich (eds.), Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society - N.S. 17, De Gruyter. pp. 35-58. 2011.
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133Knowledge and Certainties in the Epistemic State of NatureEpisteme 8 (1): 6-23. 2011.This paper seeks to defend, develop, and revise Edward Craig's “genealogy of knowledge”. The paper first develops the suggestion that Craig's project is naturally thought of as an important instance of “social cognitive ecology”. It then introduces the genealogy of knowledge and some of its main problems and weaknesses, suggesting that these are best taken as challenges for further work rather than as refutations. The central sections of the paper conduct a critical dialogue between Craig's theo…Read more
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114Reflexivity, Relativism, Microhistory: Three Desiderata for Historical Epistemologies (review)Erkenntnis 75 (3): 483-494. 2011.This paper tries to motivate three desiderata for historical epistemologies: (a) that they should be reflective about the pedigree of their conceptual apparatus; (b) that they must face up to the potentially relativistic consequences of their historicism; and (c) that they must not forget the hard-won lessons of microhistory (i.e. historical events must be explained causally; historical events must not be artificially divided into internal/intellectual and external/social “factors” or “levels”; …Read more
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1Sociology of science: Bloor, Collins, LatourIn James Robert Brown (ed.), Philosophy of Science: The Key Thinkers, Continuum Books. pp. 168. 2012.
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419Wittgenstein as a Commentator on the Psychology and Anthropology of ColourIn Frederik Gierlinger & Štefan Joško Riegelnik (eds.), Wittgenstein on Colour, De Gruyter. pp. 93-108. 2014.
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74The Metaphysics and Politics of Corporate PersonhoodErkenntnis 79 (S9): 1587-1600. 2014.This paper consists of brief critical comments on Chapter 8, “Personifying Group Agents”, of Christian List’s and Philip Pettit’s book Group Agency (2011). A first set of objections concerns the chapter’s history of ideas. List and Pettit present the history of the idea of corporate personhood as divided between “intrinsicist” and “performative” conceptions. I argue that this distinction does not fit with the historical record and that it makes important political and legal divides and battles i…Read more
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115Microscopes and the Theory-Ladenness of Experience in Bas van Fraassen’s Recent WorkJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 46 (1): 167-182. 2015.Bas van Fraassen’s recent book Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective modifies and refines the “constructive empiricism” of The Scientific Image in a number of ways. This paper investigates the changes concerning one of the most controversial aspects of the overall position, that is, van Fraassen’s agnosticism concerning the veridicality of microscopic observation. The paper tries to make plausible that the new formulation of this agnosticism is an advance over the older rendering. …Read more
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752Scientific pluralism and the Chemical RevolutionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 49 69-79. 2015.In a number of papers and in his recent book, Is Water H₂O? Evidence, Realism, Pluralism (2012), Hasok Chang has argued that the correct interpretation of the Chemical Revolution provides a strong case for the view that progress in science is served by maintaining several incommensurable “systems of practice” in the same discipline, and concerning the same region of nature. This paper is a critical discussion of Chang's reading of the Chemical Revolution. It seeks to establish, first, that Chang…Read more
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1238Wittgenstein’s On Certainty and RelativismIn Harald A. Wiltsche & Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl (eds.), Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Methods and Perspectives. Proceedings of the 37th International Wittgenstein Symposium, De Gruyter. pp. 29-46. 2016.
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689Epistemic relativism, scepticism, pluralismSynthese 194 (12): 4687-4703. 2017.There are a number of debates that are relevant to questions concerning objectivity in science. One of the eldest, and still one of the most intensely fought, is the debate over epistemic relativism. —All forms of epistemic relativism commit themselves to the view that it is impossible to show in a neutral, non-question-begging, way that one “epistemic system”, that is, one interconnected set of epistemic standards, is epistemically superior to others. I shall call this view “No-metajustificatio…Read more
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185Two kinds of actions: A phenomenological studyPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (4): 799-819. 1995.In this paper, we will explain and analyse a phenomenological distinction between two kinds of actions. The distinction we have in mind is the difference between those actions that actors try, or are satisfied, to carry out, in like situations, ‘in the same way’, and all other actions. We call the first kind ‘mimeomorphic actions’ and the second kind ‘polimorphic actions’. We will define these two kinds of actions, and their species, on the basis of their characteristic intentions and experience…Read more
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182Knowledge by agreement: the programme of communitarian epistemologyOxford University Press. 2002.Martin Kusch puts forth two controversial ideas: that knowledge is a social status and that knowledge is primarily the possession of groups rather than individuals. He defends the radical implications of his views: that knowledge is political, and that it varies with communities. This bold approach to epistemology is a challenge to philosophy and the wider academic world
Heiligenstadt, Vienna, Austria
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
History of Western Philosophy |