Giancarlo Marchetti

This volume provides a broad and comprehensive overview of the many ways in which pragmatism has influenced contemporary debates in the philosophy of science. Pragmatism has been undergoing a considerable revival in philosophical debates for the last two decades. Philosophers of science are now turning to pragmatism as a source of general insights and technical tools to address some of the thorniest problems of the discipline from a new and fresh perspective. This volume traces how pragmatism—in its classical and contemporary versions—serves as a useful toolbox for philosophers of science. It is divided into three thematic sections. The first section contains essays addressing topics belonging to the general philosophy of science. The second section features chapters that deal with themes and concepts from special sciences, ranging from natural sciences to sociology and from mathematics to religious studies. Finally, the third section analyzes the societal role of science and scientific activity. Pragmatism and Philosophy of Science will appeal to scholars and advanced students working on philosophy of science, pragmatism, and history of philosophy.

The work of the philosopher Donald Davidson (1917--2003) is not only wide ranging in its influence and vision, but also in the breadth of issues that it encompasses. Davidson's work includes seminal contributions to philosophy of language and mind, to philosophy of action, and to epistemology and metaphysics. In _Dialogues with Davidson_, leading scholars engage with Davidson's work as it connects not only with aspects of current analytic thinking but also with a wider set of perspectives, including those of hermeneutics, phenomenology, the history of philosophy, feminist epistemology, and contemporary social theory. They link Davidson's work to other thinkers, including Collingwood, Kant, Derrida, Heidegger, and Gadamer. The essays demonstrate the continuing significance of Davidson's philosophy, not only in terms of the philosophical relevance of the ideas he advanced, but also in the further connections and insights those ideas engender.

This collection offers a synoptic view of the philosophical discussion over the relationship between facts and values, bringing together contributors committed to exposing the weaknesses of the fact-value dichotomy and exploring alternatives and their implications. The assumption that facts and values occupy distinct, unbridgeable fields of discourse and experience long dominated scientific and philosophical discourse and practice, but this separation has been called into question by critics of the empiricist tradition. This volume brings together a diversity of philosophical responses to the fact-value dichotomy and includes contributors such as Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam who helped to revitalize the contemporary debate over this alleged opposition. Contributors claim that the relationship between epistemic activities and evaluative attitudes cannot be understood in terms of a conflict between the descriptive and the normative. Their chapters demonstrate how and why the contrapositions between science and ethics, between facts and values, and between objective and subjective are false dichotomies: values simply cannot be separated from reason. _Facts and Values _will be essential reading for analytic philosophers working in ethics, meta-ethics, the philosophy of law, and the epistemology and metaphysics of normativity.