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11The political theory of French science studies in contextPerspectives on Science 15 (2): 202-221. 2007.: Science Studies, as developed initially in France attempt to overcome the distinctions between science and society, and correspondingly between the philosophy of science and political and social theory. Science Studies considers the theories and beliefs of scientists political rather than direct reflections of an objective natural world. I consider here Science Studies as a political theory that emerged and has developed in reaction to a particular social and political context, a crisis of tec…Read more
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5The Philosophy of Natural History and Historiography Making Prehistory: Historical Science and the Scientific Realism Debate (review)Journal of the Philosophy of History 3 (4): 385-394. 2009.
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18Unique events: The underdetermination of explanationErkenntnis 48 (1): 61-83. 1998.The paper explicates unique events and investigates their epistemology. Explications of unique events as individuated, different, and emergent are philosophically uninteresting. Unique events are topics of why-questions that radically underdetermine all their potential explanations. Uniqueness that is relative to a level of scientific development is differentiated from absolute uniqueness. Science eliminates relative uniqueness by discovery of recurrence of events and properties, falsification o…Read more
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The Philosophy of Charter 77 SignatoriesDissertation, University of Maryland, College Park. 1992.This is a critical study of the philosophies of Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel, as leading to, and flowing from, Charter 77. In part one, Patocka's philosophy is presented as between Platonic-humanistic and Heideggerian poles. In his Heideggerian moments, Patocka looked for a way to transcend productionist metaphysics and return to unspecified authenticity. In his Platonic-humanistic moments, Patocka found authenticity in "care for the soul" and "life in truth," the practice of the Socratic method…Read more
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34The illness of psychoanalysis (review)Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 26 (4): 657-665. 1995.Experimental and theoretical studios are reported of the current-voltage characteristics and Josephson radiations from granular Y1Ba2Cu3Oy bridges. We show that the granular structure of bridges can be understood as a series connected independent and inhomogeneous resistively shunted junction army. When we take typical values of junction critical parameters, the experimental results are well understood quantitatively
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3The Homes of PhilosophersProceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 67 (6). 1994.
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7Shipwrecked: Patočka's philosophy of Czech historyHistory and Theory 35 (2): 196-216. 1996.Czech history defies dominant Western progressive historical narratives and moral evolutionism. Czech free-market democracy was defeated and betrayed three times in 1938, 1948, and 1968. The Czech Protestants were defeated in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Consequently, Czechs have a different perspective on the traditional questions of speculative philosophy of history: Where are we coming from? Where are we going? What does it mean? They ask further: where and why did history go wron…Read more
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55The Generation of Knowledge from Multiple TestimoniesSocial Epistemology 30 (3): 251-272. 2016.The article presents, develops, and defends a non-reductionist model of the generation of knowledge from multiple testimonies. It distinguishes the generation of knowledge from multiple testimonies from the transmission of knowledge by a single testimony. The reiteration of the generation of knowledge from multiple testimonies generates social knowledge.Critical examination of the literature about the coherence of multiple testimonies, their reliability, and independence argues in particular aga…Read more
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10The epistemic significance of consensusInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 46 (4). 2003.Philosophers have often noted that science displays an uncommon degree of consensus on beliefs among its practitioners. Yet consensus in the sciences is not a goal in itself. I consider cases of consensus on beliefs as concrete events. Consensus on beliefs is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for presuming that these beliefs constitute knowledge. A concrete consensus on a set of beliefs by a group of people at a given historical period may be explained by different factors according…Read more
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8Scientific Historiography Revisited: An Essay on the Metaphysics and Epistemology of HistoryDialogue 37 (2): 235-. 1998.RÉSUMÉ: La pragmatique et la sémantique de l’historiographie révèlent une fragmentation croissante qui s’étend par-delà les écoles jusqu’aux historiens individuels. Alors que les scientifiques normalisent les données pour qu’elles s’ajustent aux théories, les historiens interprètent leurs théories, de manières incompatibles entre elles, pour qu’elles s’ajustent aux différents cas historiques. Les difficultés qui en découlent dans la communication historiographique remettent en cause les philosop…Read more
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1Reflections on a Fairy Godfather (review)Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 1996 (106): 195-202. 1996.In traditional Jewish funerals, beggars usually join family and friends of the deceased in the kaddish prayer. When the funeral service ends, the beggars start chanting their own prayer: Charity will Save from Death! Charity will Save from Death! (sdaka tasil mimavet!). As the dead body of communism is interred in the ground of history, East European intellectuals accompany the funeral march chanting their own version of “Charity will Save from Death” (and political instability, rabid ideologies…Read more
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3Review of Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Out of the Cave: A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Dead Sea Scrolls Research (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2006 (9). 2006.
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3Patocka vs. Heidegger: The Humanistic DifferenceTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 1992 (92): 85-98. 1992.
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76Review: Historiographical Counterfactuals and Historical Contingency (review)History and Theory 38 (2): 264-276. 1999.
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2Review essay: Historiographic self-consciousness (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 37 (2): 210-228. 2007.Historians tend to present what they do in terms of prevailing epistemic values that have little to do with their actual practices. Practical knowledge of how does not generate necessarily abstract theoretical knowledge of what . Mark Bevir's The Logic of the History of Ideas attempts to integrate his normative philosophy of historiography with contemporary philosophy of language and epistemology, intentionalist theory of meaning, and coherentist epistemology, on a sophisticated and well-informe…Read more
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8Plato and Vico: A Platonic Reinterpretation of VicoIdealistic Studies 23 (2-3): 139-150. 1993.Giambattista Vico referred throughout his writings to Plato as the most important single influence on his own philosophy [SN 1109]. Nevertheless, Plato’s influence on Vico has not received sufficient attention by contemporary commentators. The purpose of this paper is to suggest what aspects of Plato’s philosophy influenced which parts of Vico’s Scienza Nuova and in what fashion; to reinterpret Vico’s philosophy in light of the Platonic influence on it; to reject some interpretations of Vico tha…Read more
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9Philosophical Foundations of the Social Sciences (review)Dialogue 38 (2): 435-437. 1999.The philosophic distinction between the human and natural sciences was introduced by the romantics, but no sooner had the distinction been made than experimental psychology sprang into life and demolished it. Though scientific accounts of human events have been present for over a century, philosophers keep trying to exclude human affairs from the purview of science on a priori grounds. This tradition started with Hegel, who, for the duration of his professorship in Berlin, prevented the appointm…Read more
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3Patocka vs. Heidegger: The Humanistic DifferenceTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 1992 (92): 85-98. 1992.
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81Our Knowledge of the Past: A Philosophy of HistoriographyCambridge University Press. 2004.How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science the book covers such topics as evidence, theory, methodology, explanation, determination and underdetermination, coincidence, contingency and counterfac…Read more
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O historiograficznej teorii „strudla i jabłek”. Odpowiedź Chrisowi LorenzowiRuch Filozoficzny 70 (3). 2013.
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61Memory: Irreducible, Basic, and Primary Source of KnowledgeReview of Philosophy and Psychology 9 (1): 1-16. 2018.I argue against preservationism, the epistemic claim that memories can at most preserve knowledge generated by other basic types of sources. I show how memories can and do generate knowledge that is irreducible to other basic sources of knowledge. In some epistemic contexts, memories are primary basic sources of knowledge; they can generate knowledge by themselves or with trivial assistance from other types of basic sources of knowledge. I outline an ontology of information transmission from eve…Read more
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No Czechs or Dogs Allowed: The Former "Praxis International" in PragueTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 98 (n/a): 255. 1993.
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18Miracles, historical testimonies, and probabilitiesHistory and Theory 44 (3). 2005.The topic and methods of David Hume’s "Of Miracles" resemble his historiographical more than his philosophical works. Unfortunately, Hume and his critics and apologists have shared the prescientific, indeed ahistorical, limitations of Hume’s original historical investigations. I demonstrate the advantages of the critical methodological approach to testimonies, developed initially by German biblical critics in the late eighteenth century, to a priori discussions of miracles. Any future discussion…Read more
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Knowing the Past: Philosophical Issues of History and Archeology (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34 (2): 309. 2004.
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27Intellectual Responsibility: The Specter of Benda and the Phantom of Bakunin (review)Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 1998 (110): 181-191. 1998.
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University of OstravaDepartment of Philosophy
Director, Center for the Philosophy of HistoriographyProfessor
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Interest
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