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353Einstein on Locality and SeparabilityStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 16 (3): 171. 1985.
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303Who invented the “copenhagen interpretation”? A study in mythologyPhilosophy of Science 71 (5): 669-682. 2004.What is commonly known as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, regarded as representing a unitary Copenhagen point of view, differs significantly from Bohr's complementarity interpretation, which does not employ wave packet collapse in its account of measurement and does not accord the subjective observer any privileged role in measurement. It is argued that the Copenhagen interpretation is an invention of the mid‐1950s, for which Heisenberg is chiefly responsible, various other p…Read more
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266The physics and metaphysics of identity and individuality Content Type Journal Article DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9463-7 Authors Don Howard, Department of Philosophy and Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA Bas C. van Fraassen, Philosophy Department, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA Otávio Bueno, Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA Elena Caste…Read more
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191What makes a classical concept classical? Toward a reconstruction of Niels Bohr's philosophy of physicsIn Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 201--230. 1994.— Niels Bohr, 19231 “There must be quite definite and clear grounds, why you repeatedly declare that one must interpret observations classically, which lie absolute ly in thei r essenc e. . . . It must belong to your deepest conviction—and I cannot understand on what you base it.”.
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155(STARS Conference, Cancún, January 2007).
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148Revisiting the Einstein-Bohr DialogueIyyun 57. forthcoming.as the chief novelty in the quantum description of nature, Einstein for having found vindication in 3 relativity theory for either positivism or realism, depending upon whom one asks. Famous as is each in his own domain, they are famous also, together, for their decades-long disagreement over the future of fundamental physics, their respective embrace and rejection of quantum indeterminacy being only the most widely-known point of contention.
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129more on the history of the Vienna Circle and its allies, see Coffa 1991; Friedman 1983; Hailer 1982, 1985; Kraft 1950; and Proust 1986, 1989). Without question, however, the crucial, formative, early intellectual experience of at least Schlick, Reichenbach, and Carnap, the experience that did most to give form and content to their emergent philosophies of science, was their engagement with relativity theory. Thus, after a few early writings on more general philosophical themes, Schlick first cau…Read more
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129Steven French and Décio Krause have written what bids fair to be, for years to come, the definitive philosophical treatment of the problem of the individuality of elementary particles in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. The book begins with a long and dense argument for the view that elementary particles are most helpfully regarded as non-individuals, and it concludes with an earnest attempt to develop a formal apparatus for describing such non-individual entities better suited to the…Read more
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129Einstein and DuhemSynthese 83 (3): 363-384. 1990.Pierre Duhem's often unrecognized influence on twentieth-century philosophy of science is illustrated by an analysis of his significant if also largely unrecognized influence on Albert Einstein. Einstein's first acquaintance with Duhem's La Théorie physique, son objet et sa structure around 1909 is strongly suggested by his close personal and professional relationship with Duhem's German translator, Friedrich Adler. The central role of a Duhemian holistic, underdeterminationist variety of conven…Read more
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126Reduction and emergence in the physical sciences: some lessons from the particle physics and condensed matter debateIn Nancey C. Murphy & William R. Stoeger (eds.), Evolution and emergence: systems, organisms, persons, Oxford University Press. pp. 141--157. 2007.
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117
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112Lost wanderers in the forest of knowledge: Some thoughts on the discovery-justification distinctionIn Jutta Schickore & Friedrich Steinle (eds.), Revisiting Discovery and Justification: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on the Context Distinction, Springer. pp. 3--22. 2006.Neo-positivism is dead. Let that imperfect designation stand for the project that dominated and defined the philosophy of science, especially in its Anglophone form, during the fifty or so years following the end of the Second World War. While its critics were many,1 its death was slow, and some think still to find a pulse.2 But die it did in the cul-de-sac into which it was led by its own faulty compass.
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106This paper proposes a model for an artificial autonomous moral agent (AAMA), which is parsimonious in its ontology and minimal in its ethical assumptions. Starting from a set of moral data, this AAMA is able to learn and develop a form of moral competency. It resembles an “optimizing predictive mind,” which uses moral data (describing typical behavior of humans) and a set of dispositional traits to learn how to classify different actions (given a given background knowledge) as morally right, wro…Read more
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102The Challenge of the Social and the Pressure of Practice: Science and Values Revisited (edited book)University of Pittsburgh Press. 2008.ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-4317-4 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8229-4317-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Science — Philosophy. 2. Science — Social aspects. 3. Values. 4. Science and civilization. I. Carrier, Martin. II. Howard, Don, professor. III. Kourany ...
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99What is Albert Einstein’s place in the history of twentieth-century philosophy of science? Were one to consult the histories produced at mid-century from within the Vienna Circle and allied movements (e.g., von Mises 1938, 1939, Kraft 1950, Reichenbach 1951), then one would find, for the most part, two points of emphasis. First, Einstein was rightly remembered as the developer of the special and general theories of relativity, theories which, through their challenge to both scientific and philos…Read more
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98Was Einstein Really a Realist?Perspectives on Science 1 (2): 204-251. 1993.It is widely believed that the development of the general theory of relativity coincided with a shift in Einstein’s philosophy of science from a kind of Machian positivism to a form of scientific realism. This article criticizes that view, arguing that a kind of realism was present from the start but that Einstein was skeptical all along about some of the bolder metaphysical and epistemological claims made on behalf of what we now would call scientific realism. If we read Einstein’s philosophy o…Read more
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70Introduction: Integrated history and philosophy of science in practiceStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 50 1-3. 2015.
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56Artificial moral agents: creative, autonomous, social. An approach based on evolutionary computationIn Johanna Seibt, Raul Hakli & Marco Nørskov (eds.), Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, . 2014.
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55On Saturday, August 26, 1893, thirteen-year-old Edith Low Babson was swimming in her favorite swimming hole on the Annisquam river in her home town of Gloucester, Massachusetts. Though she was a strong swimmer, something went wrong, and she drowned. A tragedy like all such. But this drowning had unusual consequences. Edith’s older brother was Roger W. Babson, who grew up to become one of America’s most prominent businessmen of the early twentieth century. A statistician, prolific author, philant…Read more
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44Astride the Divided Line: Platonism, Empiricism, and Einstein's Epistemological OpportunismPoznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 63 143-164. 1998.
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41What makes a classical concept classical?In Jan Faye & Henry J. Folse (eds.), Niels Bohr and Contemporary Philosophy, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 201--229. 1994.
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38Such are those thick & gloomie shadows dampe Oft seene in charnel vaults, & sepulchers, Lingering, & sitting by a new made grave, As loath to leave the bodie that it lov'd, & link’t it selfe by carnall sensualtie To a degenerate, & degraded state.
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36Passion at a DistanceIn Wayne C. Myrvold & Joy Christian (eds.), Quantum Reality, Relativistic Causality, and Closing the Epistemic Circle, Springer. pp. 3--11. 2009.
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33Let me briefly indicate why I do not find this standpoint natural" : Einstein, general relativity, and the contingent a prioriIn Michael Friedman, Mary Domski & Michael Dickson (eds.), Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science, Open Court. pp. 333--355. 2010.
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27Technomoral Civic Virtues: a Critical Appreciation of Shannon Vallor’s Technology and the VirtuesPhilosophy and Technology 31 (2): 293-304. 2018.This paper begins by summarizing the chief, original contributions to technology ethics in Shannon Vallor’s recent book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting, highlighting especially the book’s distinctive inclusion of not only the western virtue ethics tradition but also the analogous traditions in Buddhist and Confucian ethics. But the main point of the paper is to suggest that the theoretical framework developed in the book be extended to include an anal…Read more
Areas of Specialization
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
History of Western Philosophy |
Philosophy, Misc |
Areas of Interest
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
History of Western Philosophy |
Philosophy, Misc |