•  435
    The Wolffian roots of Kant’s teleology
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 44 (4): 724-734. 2013.
    Kant’s teleology as presented in the Critique of Judgment is commonly interpreted in relation to the late eighteenth-century biological research of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach. In the present paper, I show that this interpretative perspective is incomplete. Understanding Kant’s views on teleology and biology requires a consideration of the teleological and biological views of Christian Wolff and his rationalist successors. By reconstructing the Wolffian roots of Kant’s teleology, I identify seve…Read more
  •  382
    Kant and the scope of analogy in the life sciences
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 71 67-76. 2018.
    In the present paper I investigate the role that analogy plays in eighteenth-century biology and in Kant’s philosophy of biology. I will argue that according to Kant, biology, as it was practiced in the eighteenth century, is fundamentally based on analogical reflection. However, precisely because biology is based on analogical reflection, biology cannot be a proper science. I provide two arguments for this interpretation. First, I argue that although analogical reflection is, according to Kant,…Read more
  •  361
    A blooming and buzzing confusion: Buffon, Reimarus, and Kant on animal cognition
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 72 1-9. 2018.
    Kant’s views on animals have received much attention in recent years. According to some, Kant attributed the capacity for objective perceptual awareness to non-human animals, even though he denied that they have concepts. This position is difficult to square with a conceptualist reading of Kant, according to which objective perceptual awareness requires concepts. Others take Kant’s views on animals to imply that the mental life of animals is a blooming, buzzing confusion. In this article I provi…Read more
  •  334
    This paper provides a historical analysis of a shift in the way animal models of mental disorders were conceptualized: the shift from the mid-twentieth-century view, adopted by some, that animal models model syndromes classified in manuals such as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), to the later widespread view that animal models model component parts of psychiatric syndromes. I argue that in the middle of the twentieth century the attempt to maximize the face validi…Read more
  •  284
    Axiomatic Natural Philosophy and the Emergence of Biology as a Science
    Journal of the History of Biology 53 (3): 379-422. 2020.
    Ernst Mayr argued that the emergence of biology as a special science in the early nineteenth century was possible due to the demise of the mathematical model of science and its insistence on demonstrative knowledge. More recently, John Zammito has claimed that the rise of biology as a special science was due to a distinctive experimental, anti-metaphysical, anti-mathematical, and anti-rationalist strand of thought coming from outside of Germany. In this paper we argue that this narrative neglect…Read more
  •  264
    Kant's Theory of Scientific Hypotheses in its Historical Context
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92 12-19. 2022.
    This paper analyzes the historical context and systematic importance of Kant's hypothetical use of reason. It does so by investigating the role of hypotheses in Kant's philosophy of science. We first situate Kant’s account of hypotheses in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy of science, focusing on the works of Wolff, Meier, and Crusius. We contrast different conceptions of hypotheses of these authors and elucidate the different theories of probability informing them. We then ado…Read more
  •  233
    Animal Languages in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy and Science
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93 72-81. 2022.
    This paper analyzes debates on animal language in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science. Adopting a history of ideas approach, I explain how the study of animal language became tied to the investigation into the origin and development of language towards the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that for large parts of the eighteenth century, the question of the existence of animal languages was studied within the context of the philosophical question of whether animals possess reaso…Read more
  •  231
    Theoretical virtues in eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3): 1-35. 2020.
    Within eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition we can distinguish at least three main theoretical positions: (i) Buffon’s mechanism, (ii) Reimarus’ theory of instincts, and (iii) the sensationalism of Condillac and Leroy. In this paper, I adopt a philosophical perspective on this debate and argue that in order to fully understand the justification Buffon, Reimarus, Condillac, and Leroy gave for their respective theories, we must pay special attention to the theoretical virtues these natur…Read more
  •  229
    The Essentialism of Early Modern Psychiatric Nosology
    History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 45 (2): 1-25. 2023.
    Are psychiatric disorders natural kinds? This question has received a lot of attention within present-day philosophy of psychiatry, where many authors debate the ontology and nature of mental disorders. Similarly, historians of psychiatry, dating back to Foucault, have debated whether psychiatric researchers conceived of mental disorders as natural kinds or not. However, historians of psychiatry have paid little to no attention to the influence of (a) theories within logic, and (b) theories with…Read more
  •  217
    Kant’s Ideal of Systematicity in Historical Context
    Kantian Review 26 (2): 261-286. 2021.
    This article explains Kant’s claim that sciences must take, at least as their ideal, the form of a ‘system’. I argue that Kant’s notion of systematicity can be understood against the background of de Jong & Betti’s Classical Model of Science (2010) and the writings of Georg Friedrich Meier and Johann Heinrich Lambert. According to my interpretation, Meier, Lambert, and Kant accepted an axiomatic idea of science, articulated by the Classical Model, which elucidates their conceptions of systematic…Read more
  •  202
    A philosophical perspective on visualization for digital humanities
    with Arianna Betti, Thom Castermans, Rob Koopman, Bettina Speckmann, K. A. B. Verbeek, Titia Van der Werf, Shenghui Wang, and Michel A. Westenberg
    3Rd Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities. 2018.
    In this position paper, we describe a number of methodological and philosophical challenges that arose within our interdisciplinary Digital Humanities project CatVis, which is a collaboration between applied geometric algorithms and visualization researchers, data scientists working at OCLC, and philosophers who have a strong interest in the methodological foundations of visualization research. The challenges we describe concern aspects of one single epistemic need: that of methodologically secu…Read more
  •  178
    Towards a Computational History of Ideas
    Proceedings of the Third Conference on Digital Humanities in Luxembourg with a Special Focus on Reading Historical Sources in the Digital Age: Luxembourg. Ceur Workshop Proceedings, 1681. 2016.
    The History of Ideas is presently enjoying a certain renaissance after a long period of disrepute. Increasing quantities of digitally available historical texts and the availability of computational tools for the exploration of such masses of sources, it is suggested, can be of invaluable help to historians of ideas. The question is: how exactly? In this paper, we argue that a computational history of ideas is possible if the following two conditions are satisfied: (i) Sound Method . A computati…Read more
  •  178
    Kant’s conception of proper science
    Synthese 183 (1): 7-26. 2011.
    Kant is well known for his restrictive conception of proper science. In the present paper I will try to explain why Kant adopted this conception. I will identify three core conditions which Kant thinks a proper science must satisfy: systematicity, objective grounding, and apodictic certainty. These conditions conform to conditions codified in the Classical Model of Science. Kant’s infamous claim that any proper natural science must be mathematical should be understood on the basis of these condi…Read more
  •  172
    Studying the History of Philosophical Ideas: supporting research discovery, navigation, and awareness
    with Gonzalo Parra, Anja Jentzsch, Andreas Drakos, and Erik Duval
    Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge Technologies and Data-Driven Business. 2014.
    The use of computational tools in the humanities for science 2.0 practices is steadily increasing. This paper examines current research practices of a group of philosophers studying the history of philosophical concepts. We explain the methodology and workflow of these philosophers and provide an overview of tools they currently use in their research. The case study highlights a number of fundamental challenges facing these researchers, including: (i) accessing known relevant research content or…Read more
  •  112
    Modelling the History of Ideas
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (4): 812-835. 2014.
    We propose a new method for the history of ideas that has none of the shortcomings so often ascribed to this approach. We call this method the model approach to the history of ideas. We argue that any adequately developed and implementable method to trace continuities in the history of human thought, or concept drift, will require that historians use explicit interpretive conceptual frameworks. We call these frameworks models. We argue that models enhance the comprehensibility of historical text…Read more
  •  57
    Biology in the Critical Philosophy and the Opus postumum Hein van den Berg. Parts of Chap. 2 have been previously published in Hein van den Berg (2011), “ Kant's Conception of Proper Science.” Synthese 183 (1): 7–26. Parts of Chap.
  •  50
    Wolff and Kant on Scientific Demonstration and Mechanical Explanation
    Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 95 (2): 178-205. 2013.
    This paper analyzes Immanuel Kant’s views on mechanical explanation on the basis of Christian Wolff’s idea of scientific demonstration. Kant takes mechanical explanations to explain properties of wholes in terms of their parts. I reconstruct the nature of such explanations by showing how part-whole conceptualizations in Wolff’s logic and metaphysics shape the ideal of a proper and explanatory scientific demonstration. This logico-philosophical background elucidates why Kant construes mechanical …Read more
  •  34
    History of Philosophy in Ones and Zeros
    with Arianna Betti, Yvette Oortwijn, and Caspar Treijtel
    In M. Curtis & Eugen Fischer (eds.), Methodological Advances in Experimental Philosophy, . pp. 295-332. 2019.
    How can we best reconstruct the origin of a notion, its development, and possible spread to multiple fields? We present a pilot study on the spread of the notion of conceptual scheme. Though the notion is philosophically important, its origin, development, and spread are unclear. Several purely qualitative and competing historical hypotheses have been offered, which rely on disconnected disciplinary traditions, and have never been tested all at once in a single comprehensive investigation fittin…Read more
  •  32
    Kant's Organicism: Epigenesis and the Development of Critical Philosophy (review)
    International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 28 (1): 99-101. 2014.
    No abstract
  •  27
    Induction and Certainty in the Physics of Wolff and Crusius
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1-22. forthcoming.
    In this paper, we analyse conceptions of induction and certainty in Wolff and Crusius, highlighting their competing conceptions of physics. We discuss (i) the perspective of Wolff, who assigned induction an important role in physics, but argued that physics should be an axiomatic science containing certain statements, and (ii) the perspective of Crusius, who adopted parts of the ideal of axiomatic physics but criticized the scope of Wolff’s ideal of certain science. Against interpretations that …Read more
  •  8
    SolarView: Low Distortion Radial Embeddings with a Focus
    with Thom Castermans, Kevin Verbeek, Bettina Speckmann, Michel Westenberg, Rob Koopman, Shenghui Wang, and Arianna Betti
    IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 25 (10): 2969-2982. 2019.
    We propose a novel type of low distortion radial embedding which focuses on one specific entity and its closest neighbors. Our embedding preserves near-exact distances to the focus entity and aims to minimize distortion between the other entities. We present an interactive exploration tool SolarView which places the focus entity at the center of a "solar system" and embeds its neighbors guided by concentric circles. SolarView provides an implementation of our novel embedding and several state-of…Read more
  •  7
    GlamMap: geovisualization for e-humanities
    with Thom Castermans, Bettina Speckmann, Kevin Verbeek, Michel A. Westenberg, and Arianna Betti
    2016 Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities. 2016.
    This paper presents GlamMap, a visualization tool for large, multi-variate georeferenced humanities data sets. Our approach visualizes the data as glyphs on a zoomable geographic map, and performs clustering and data aggregation at each zoom level to avoid clutter and to prevent overlap of symbols. GlamMap was developed for the Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums (GLAM) domain in cooperation with researchers in philosophy. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach by a case study on …Read more
  •  6
    GlamMapping Trove.
    with Arianna Betti, Thom Castermans, Bettina Speckmann, and Kevin Verbeek
    Proceedings of VALA 2016. 2016.
    This paper presents the current state of development of GlamMap, a visualisation tool that displays library metadata on an interactive, computer-generated geographic map. The focus in the paper is on the most crucial improvement achieved in the development of the tool: GlamMapping Trove. The visualisation of Trove’s sixtymillion book records is possible thanks to an improved database structure, more efficient data retrieval, and more scalable visualisation algorithms. The paper analyses problems…Read more
  •  2
    @PhilosTEI: Building Corpora for Philosophers
    with Arianna Betti and Martin Reynaert
    In J. Odijk & A. Van Hessen (eds.), Clarin in the Low Countries, . pp. 379-392. 2017.
    The step to e-research in philosophy depends on the availability of high quality, easily and freely accessible corpora in a sustainable format composed from multi-language, multi-script books from different historical periods. Corpora matching these needs are at the moment virtually non-existing. Within @PhilosTei, we have addressed this corpus building problem by developing an open source, web-based, user-friendly workflow from textual images to TEI, based on state-of-the-art open source OCR so…Read more
  • In this paper I provide some critical comments on Schulting’s Kant’s Radical Subjectivism (2017). I will focus on two aspects of Schulting’s reading of Kant: his reading of Kant as a coherentist and his reading of Kant as a conceptualist. I will argue that it is not clear whether Kant accepts a form of coherentism and I will discuss reflections of Kant on animals that may be difficult to square with a conceptualist reading of Kant.
  • GlamMap: visualizing library metadata.
    with Arianna Betti, D. H. P. Gerrits, and Bettina Speckmann
    Proceedings of VALA 2014. 2014.
    Libraries provide access to large amounts of library metadata. Unfortunately, many libraries only offer textual interfaces for searching and browsing their holdings. Visualizations provide simpler, faster, and more efficient ways to navigate, search and study large quantities of metadata. This paper presents GlamMap, a visualization tool that displays library metadata on an interactive, computer-generated geographic map. We provide detailed discussion of how GlamMap benefits the work of libraria…Read more