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History of ‘temperature’: maturation of a measurement conceptAnnals of Science 77 (4): 399-444. 2020.Accounts of how the concept of temperature has evolved typically cast the story as ancillary to the history of the thermometer or the history of the concept of heat. But then, because the history of temperature is not treated as a subject in its own right, modern associations inadvertently get read back into the historical record. This essay attempts to lay down an authoritative record not of what people in the past thought about what we call ‘temperature’ but of what they thought about what the…Read more
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Induction, Philosophical Conceptions ofEncyclopedia of Renaissance Philosophy. 2020.How induction was understood took a substantial turn during the Renaissance. At the beginning, induction was understood as it had been throughout the medieval period, as a kind of propositional inference that is stronger the more it approximates deduction. During the Renaissance, an older understanding, one prevalent in antiquity, was rediscovered and adopted. By this understanding, induction identifies defining characteristics using a process of comparing and contrasting. Important participant…Read more
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Induction in the Socratic TraditionIn Paolo C. Biondi & Louis F. Groarke (eds.), Shifting the Paradigm: Alternative Perspectives on Induction, De Gruyter. pp. 161-192. 2014.Aristotle said that induction (epagōgē) is a proceeding from particulars to a universal, and the definition has been conventional ever since. But there is an ambiguity here. Induction in the Scholastic and the (so-called) Humean tradition has presumed that Aristotle meant going from particular statements to universal statements. But the alternate view, namely that Aristotle meant going from particular things to universal ideas, prevailed all through antiquity and then again from the time of Franc…Read more
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Freeing Aristotelian Epagōgē from “Prior Analytics” II 23Apeiron 40 (4): 345-374. 2007.
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Reviving material theories of inductionStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 83. 2020.John Norton says that philosophers have been led astray for thousands of years by their attempt to treat induction formally. He is correct that such an attempt has caused no end of trouble, but he is wrong about the history. There is a rich tradition of non-formal induction. In fact, material theories of induction prevailed all through antiquity and from the Renaissance to the mid-1800s. Recovering these past systems would not only fill lacunae in Norton’s own theory but would highlight areas wh…Read more
Stanford University
PhD, 2006
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Induction |
Aristotle: Induction |
Francis Bacon |