Adam Tamas Tuboly

_The once-lost introduction to the philosophy of science by Philipp Frank (1884-1966), a leading member of the Vienna circle of philosophers and biographer of Albert Einstein._ Philipp Frank (1884–1966) was an influential philosopher of science, public intellectual, and Harvard educator whose last book, _The Humanistic Background of Science_, is finally available. Never published in his lifetime, this original manuscript has been edited and introduced to highlight Frank's remarkable but little-known insights about the nature of modern science-insights that rival those of Karl Popper and Frank's colleagues Thomas Kuhn and James Bryant Conant. As a leading exponent of logical empiricism and a member of the famous Vienna Circle, Frank intended his book to provide an accessible, engaging introduction to the philosophy of science and its cultural significance. The book is steadfastly true to science; to aspirations of peace, unity, and human flourishing after World War II; and to the pragmatic philosophies of Charles S. Peirce, William James, and John Dewey that Frank embraced in his new American home. Amidst the many recent surveys and retrospective analyses of midcentury philosophy of science, _The Humanistic Background of Science_ offers an original, first-hand view of Frank's post-European life and of intellectual dramas then unfolding in Chicago, New York City, and Boston.

This book provides new perspectives on the twentieth-century history of philosophy of science through the person of Ernest Nagel. Being one of the philosophical and institutional motors of the new discipline of philosophy of science, Ernest Nagel is still much underappreciated by scholars. By including a major intellectual biography of Nagel’s life and works (written by his daughter Yvonne Nagel and narrated through the personal correspondence of Ernest Nagel), this book provides a unique opportunity for researchers. The Nagel-Hempel correspondence is published here for the very first time, enabling scholars to get a sense of how logical empiricism emigrated to the States, got acclimatized, and took over American philosophy in less than two decades.

In philosophy of science, the pseudosciences (like cryptozoology, homeopathy, Flat-Earth Theory, anti-vaccination activism, etc.) have been treated mainly negatively. They are viewed not simply as false, but even dangerous, since they try to mimic our best scientific theories, thus gaining respect and trust from the public, without the appropriate credentials. As a result, philosophers have traditionally put considerable effort into demarcating genuine sciences and scientific theories from pseudoscience. Since these general attempts at demarcation have repeatedly been shown to break down, the present paper takes a different and somewhat more positive approach to the study of pseudoscience. My main point is not that we should embrace and accept the pseudosciences as they are, but rather that there are indeed valuable and important lessons inherent in the study of pseudoscience and the different sections of the paper list at least six of them. By showing, through numerous examples, how (the study of) pseudoscience can teach us something about science, ourselves, and society, it makes the case that as philosophers, we should devote more time and energy to engaging with such beliefs and theories to help remedy their harmful effects.

This paper reconstructs some conceptual and institutional elements from Philipp Frank’s largely forgotten Research Project about the Sociology of Science. The project was organized by Frank at the Institute for the Unity of Science in the mid-1950s, and it involved scholars such as Robert K. Merton, Bernard Barber, Ernest Nagel, and Thomas Kuhn. Due to various circumstances, the group was unsuccessful in developing and shaping the cognitive and professional identity of sociology of science, and this paper highlights some of the possible reasons.

In recent years, there has been an almost exponentially growing tendency to study and evaluate the life and work of L. Susan Stebbing. She was the first female professor of philosophy in Britain, and thus could serve as a role model for many inquiries of feminist studies within the history of analytic philosophy (for example in Janssen-Lauret 2024). Stebbing was not just a recognized and respected formal logician, but represented an early, socially and politically engaged form of analytic philosophy. Her papers, books, and pamphlets were formed in and shaped by current public events; she was sensitive to debates of the time and never hesitated to take an active role in helping others, be they scholarly refugees, young children, or the (un)educated masses that confronted on a daily basis the latest and fallacious mass-communication and propaganda machineries. Her practical logic (see, for example, Stebbing 1934) was meant to serve a debunking role within public policy and everyday life. Thus, Stebbing was a many-faceted philosopher, logician, and public intellectual, whose ideas are still relevant in debates about the place and future of philosophy in demented times.

In contrast to the history of science and to science and technology studies, the value discourse in the philosophy of science has not provided a thorough analysis of the material culture of science. Instruments in science have a special characteristic, namely that they explicitly and clearly emerge from and remain embedded in social contexts, and are thus imbued with values. We argue that the materials (in most cases they are artifacts) used in science are necessarily influenced by both epistemic and non-epistemic considerations. A consequence of this is that a descriptive term cannot give sufficient information whether an artifact is performing in an acceptable way. Instead of the prevailing descriptive approach, we therefore advocate a normative notion of values in the material culture of science. To this end, we connect the material culture of science to the so-called “new demarcation problem”, in order to lay the foundations for a value-sensitive approach to the analysis of instruments. By assessing the five approaches of demarcation concerning value-influences, it will be shown that they break down at various points if the material aspects of science are taken seriously.

In this paper, we reconsider the highly underrated Carnap–Sellars relationship, arguing that Sellars might be able to provide an interesting resolution to some of Carnap’s finest problems around explication by offering a grand-scale picture of science/common-sense or manifest interactions. The narrative developed here points toward the need for some stratification and re-evaluation of a field of scholarship that all too often still engages in challenging and contradictory dichotomies, undermining the genuine intentions of scholars who were collaborating with, as well as living and researching in parallel with each other. We would like to explore what these figures can offer to each other, and whether, for example, a truly Sellarsian perspective could illuminate any problematic points in Carnap that have not yet been problematized by Carnapians but could still improve the original system.