Marco Buzzoni

Kant hat weder zwischen Gedankenexperimenten und Realexperimenten unterschieden, noch hat er den deutschen Begriff „Gedankenexperiment“ verwendet. Aber viele Aspekte von Kants Denken, insbesondere die „Experimente der Vernunft“, sind mit dem Begriff des Gedankenexperiments verbunden. Die Experimente der Vernunft, die der erste Teil dieses Beitrags rekonstruiert, sind das Unterscheidungsmerkmal der Transzendentalphilosophie gegenüber der Mathematik und der empirischen Erkenntnis. Im zweiten Teil wird eine ohnehin funktionale Sichtweise von Kants Apriori verteidigt und mit Ørsteds erster kantischer Interpretation des Gedankenexperiments kontrastiert. Die funktionale Sicht des Apriori führt zu einer Darstellung des Gedankenexperiments in der Philosophie, das durch die folgenden vier Merkmale gekennzeichnet ist: 1) Philosophische Gedankenexperimente sind Beispiele kontrafaktischen Denkens, die Ausdruck der die Philosophie kennzeichnenden unbegrenzten Kritik sind; 2) was ihren Inhalt betrifft, so hängen sie vollständig von Informationen ab, die von „außen“ kommen, d. h. von der allgemeinen Lebenserfahrung und den empirischen Wissenschaften, und dieser Inhalt begründet, wenn auch hinsichtlich der Bedingungen seiner Möglichkeit, das Kriterium ihrer inneren Konsistenz; 3) abgesehen von der Umkehrung der Untersuchungsrichtung gibt es keinen prinzipiellen Unterschied zwischen den speziellen Argumentationsmethoden, die in wissenschaftlichen und philosophischen Gedankenexperimenten angewandt werden (ein solcher Unterschied könnte nur auf einer materialen Konzeption des Apriori beruhen); 4) sowohl die Philosophie als auch die philosophischen Gedankenexperimente haben letztlich nur eine kritische oder negative Aufgabe, nämlich alle Versuche zu widerlegen, welche die menschliche Person auf Kategorien oder Begriffe reduzieren, die aus der empirischen Realität (sei sie natürlich oder kulturell) implizit oder explizit abgeleitet sind.

With reference to an already existing and relatively widespread use of the expression in question, mathematical “thought experiments” (“TEs”) involve mathematical reasoning in which visualisation plays a relatively more important role. But to ensure an unambiguous and consistent use of the term, certain conditions have to be met: (1) Contrary to what has happened so far in the literature, the distinction between logical-formal thinking and experimental-operational thinking must not be ignored; (2) The separation between the context of discovery and the context of justification is to be rejected, at least in one of the main senses in which it was defended by the logical empiricists and Popper (this excludes any position which, ascribing to mathematical TEs only a heuristic role, regards them an intermediate step to attain more traditional forms of rigour); (3) The distinction between mathematical TEs and formal proofs must be regarded as one of degree, and not as a qualitative one, although this distinction may be used in a de facto way for particular or local purposes.

Elsewhere I have tried to provide the justification of both the irreducible (transcendental) distinction of science and philosophy and their inevitable (naturalistic) complementarity. Unlike empirical science, philosophy has no limit whatever as far as its possible objects are concerned. To say that there is no limit whatever to the possible objects of philosophy is to say that, strictly speaking, it has no object at all and must find its object outside itself, that is, in common sense knowledge and the natural and human sciences. Against the background of this conception, the paper argues that philosophy of science, as a critical reflection on common sense knowledge and the natural or human sciences, inherits from philosophy in general this two-faced Janus nature, which in the philosophy of science shapes the epistemological status of the discipline in an even more prominent way. To show this in detail, the paper enunciates eleven theses that derive from the intimate connection of unity and distinction that exists between philosophy of science on the one hand and the particular and specialized scientific knowledge on the other.

Despite the many turns that philosophy of technology has undergone in recent decades, the question of the nature and limits of technological determinism (TD) has been neglected, because it was considered as solved and overcome, and therefore not worth further discussion. This paper once again raises the problem of TD, by trying to save the opposing, but complementary elements of truth of the two main forms of TD that I shall call “nomological” and “normative”: (a) technology is all-pervasive and has an inexorable capacity for extending itself into every field of human life, and (b) we have a capacity to counteract and orient technology, at least in some measure. In order to reconcile these seemingly inconsistent claims, the key move for my argument is a brief analysis of the notion of scientific experiment from the perspective of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. As a result, two senses of technology are distinguished, which I shall call respectively “reflective” and “methodological.” From the point of view of this distinction, the all-pervasiveness and inexorability of technology and the in principle irreducibility of human persons to technology—which nomological and normative TD assert dialectically one against the other—can be reconciled. Among other things, this requires the rejection (in one fundamental sense) of the widely held assumption, made both by nomological and normative TD, that technology is a cultural field whose contents can be neatly separated from the rest of human culture. This thesis should be replaced by the more qualified claim of the reflective unity and the methodological multiplicity of technology.

The terms “perspectivism” and “perspectivalism” have been the focus of an intense philosophical discussion with important repercussions for the debate about the role of mechanisms in scientific explanations. However, leading exponents of the new mechanistic philosophy have conceded more than was necessary to the radically subjectivistic perspectivalism, and fell into the opposite error, by retaining not negligible residues of objectivistic views about mechanisms. In order to remove this vacillation between the subjective-cultural and the objective-natural sides of mechanisms, we shall raise the question about theory-ladenness over again and interpret it in its connection with the technical–experimental nature of scientific knowledge, as affirming the perspectival character of scientific knowledge: It is because of the character at once theory-laden and practice-laden, i.e. technique-laden, of our putting questions to nature that empirical reality must be investigated from particular perspectives: nature can be known scientifically only from a potentially infinite (not determinable a priori) number of perspectives or theoretical points of view, concretely exemplified by mechanisms or experimental ‘machines’ that allow specific access to specific aspects of sensible reality.

Lorenzo Magnani has pointed out the danger of considering scientific models not only as useful tools for explaining facts or discovering new entities, laws and theories, but also as fictions, surrogates, parables, etc. It is true that underlying many current positions is the inability to clearly distinguish between the epistemic and non-epistemic use of idealizations and/or fictions in the scientific enterprise. However, an account that primarily interprets idealization not at the level of theoretical modelling and thought experiment, but at the level of real experimentation and, more generally, human agency, can acknowledge the fictional character of empirical-scientific models and thought experiments while maintaining a firm distinction between empirical-scientific and fictional work.

Method and creativity seem to be, at least at first sight, opposing concepts. The problem has recently been taken up again in the discussion around serendipity, i.e. the phenomenon in which a fortuitous and unexpected experience turns out to be an essential ingredient of a discovery or invention. How can chance be essential to research conducted methodically? The two essential ingredients of chance and method give rise to what, in the discussion on serendipity, has been called the paradox of control: the concept in question invokes chance and luck and at the same time proposes itself as a kind of method, capable of leading to ever new discoveries or inventions. To solve this paradox, it is necessary to critically rethink both the acceptance of the logical empiricist distinction between discovery and justification and its more recent rejection within the epistemological tradition. I propose a distinction between two senses – reflexive-transcendental and genetic-methodological – of the discovery/justification dichotomy that may dissolve the paradoxical nature of serendipity. From this point of view, an empirical discovery always moves from accidental and contingent conditions (which as such are not only unplanned but also independent of us) to the formulation of a new question to which those same conditions, now transformed into essential constituents of a thought experiment, provide an intersubjectively reproducible and testable answer.

Great scholars in philosophy possess a keen analytical mind, excel in logical reasoning, and exhibit meticulous attention to detail. They rigorously define terms, avoiding ambiguities and errors. Originality and the willingness to challenge conventions are their hallmarks. They make significant contributions across various philosophical fields. They transparently address the exact aim of their research, and what it is not. Finally, they anticipate the impact of their theories on the current literature, and how such an impact should blossom across the future generations. In this respect, great philosophers address open problems and propose big questions for the foreseeable research efforts of those who will follow. Mario Alai embodies the qualities of a great scholar in philosophy, and the various essays in this volume are an evidence to that. It is challenging to condense a lifetime of research in one book. However, the Editors of the present volume’s aim was to face this challenge, to make a collection dedicated to Mario Alai’s work not only possible but, as metaphysicians would say, actual. The book attempts to bring together the reflections of three different generations of scholars - i.e., mentors, colleagues, and students - on Alai’s thought. Viewed from this perspective, the extensive and valuable contributions that follow, crafted in honor of Mario Alai and his scholarly endeavors, come as no surprise. All the chapters focus on a theme that was very dear to the philosophical curiosity of Mario Alai. Moreover, in engaging with these different topics, the plethora of contributions gives us a sense of the work by Alai. To make sense of the different contributions as a unified enterprise, this volume is organized into three sections, which seek to gather writings that revolve around Mario’s most substantial contributions, while elucidating their contemporary significance in the global discourse. Moreover, it endeavors to offer precious insights into the origins and development of these contributions, as observed through Mario’s writings and responses. This represents a sort of closure of the theoretical circle, clearly showing how the work by Mario Alai has been appreciated through different generations, originating from his relation to his mentors, on the one hand, while also shedding new light on his students’ research interests, on the other. Editing such a wealth of material was, again, no small feat. Still, the taxonomy we have chosen for this book will assist readers in navigating the profound depths of Alai’s philosophical research. Consequently, the book is structured into the following three parts: 1. Realism in History of Philosophy, History of Science, and Metaphysics. 2. Scientific Realism. 3. Realism in Philosophy of Language, Epistemology, and Experimental Philosophy. Each contribution actively participates in a substantial conversation with Alai’s body of work, as a deep theoretical dialogue between the author and Mario. Consequently, it appeared fitting to let Alai conclude this conversation, with direct responses to these philosophy-provoking pieces in his honor. We shall refrain from further commentary on the works within this book and allow them to express their significance independently to appreciate the river of ideas flowing through Mario’s work1. Beyond their philosophical substance, they are a vivid testament to Alai’s enduring dedication and ongoing contributions, in different moments of his research life.

In the first part of this paper, I argue that what we consider to be a “mechanism,” “level,” or “component” depends on the perspectives that scientists have explicitly or implicitly adopted. If this is right, interlevel explanations and intertheoretic reductions become intimately connected. That is, I show that we cannot make sense of competing interlevel explanations of the same phenomena without reference to how those different levels of analysis relate or reduce to one another. And likewise, we cannot make sense of intertheoretic reductions (e.g., Newtonian to Relativistic equations of motion) without reference to how explanations of the same phenomena produced by those different perspectives compare. To better understand this connection between interlevel explanations and intertheoretic reductions a distinction is drawn in the second half of this paper, though only provisionally, between strong and weak relations. In the end, this distinction is removed as it only suggests ideals which are never reached in practice. Nevertheless the distinction helps us to understand how scientists can relate multiple perspectives to one another and also why they should always ultimately try to seek out newer, wider and deeper perspectives. In the end, I argue that how to relate interlevel explanations and complete theoretical reductions in science cannot be answered in the abstract by purely philosophical considerations, but only with reference to, and in accordance with, the actual history and practice of science. This is true not only for physical, but also for all empirical theories, something I show with a brief example from current cancer research.

The paper addresses the question of the nature and limits of philosophical thought experiments. On the one hand, experimental philosophers are right to claim that we need much more laboratory work in order to have more reliable thought experiments, but on the other hand a naturalism that is too radical is incapable of clarifying the peculiarity of thought experiments in philosophy. Starting from a historico-critical reconstruction of Kant’s concept of the “experiments of pure reason”, this paper outlines an account of thought experiments in philosophy that tries to reconcile the thesis of a principled difference between scientific and philosophical TEs with the position of a methodological naturalism that does not admit any difference in kind between the methods of science and of philosophy.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate some important aspects of the relationship between thought experiment (hereafter TE) and computer simulation (hereafter CS), from the point of view of real experiment (RE). In the first part of this paper, I shall pass in critical review four important approaches concerning the relationship between TE and CS. None of these approaches, though containing some important insights, has succeeded in distinguishing between CS and TE, on the one hand, and REs, on the other. Neither have they succeeded in distinguishing TEs and REs (Sect. 1–4). In Sect. 5, the paper briefly outlines an account of CSs as compared with TEs that takes REs as a central reference point. From the perspective of the analysis of the empirico-experimental intensions of the concepts of TE, CS, and RE—considering their empirical content and actual performance within a discipline—the attempts to find a distinction in logical kind between TEs, CSs and REs breaks down: for every particular characteristic of one of these notions there is a corresponding characteristic in the two others. From an epistemological-transcendental point of view, the only difference in kind between TEs and CSs consists in the fact that any simulation, even a computer one, involves a kind of real execution, one that is not merely psychological or conceptual. In TEs the subject operates concretely by using mental concepts in the first person; in contrast, real experiments and simulations involve an ‘external’ realisation. As shown in Sect. 6, this manifests itself in the higher degree of complexity often found in CSs as compared with TEs.

The paper attempts to clarify a fundamental similarity and some relevant differences between empirical-scientific and fictional thought experiments. For this purpose, the second section of the paper provides a brief outline of a quasi-Kantian account of thought experiments (TE) in the empirical sciences from the viewpoint of a radically functional, strictly not material, a priori. On the basis of this account, a fundamental similarity and two main differences between empirical-scientific and narrative thought experiments are brought to the fore: the counterfactual construction of idealised scenarios is a fundamental characteristic that is shared by scientific and fictional thought experiments (and, more generally, by science and art). The differences depend on the different intentionalities to which this construction is subordinated. Fictional TEs, instead of resolving the dimension of counterfactuality in real empirical facts or processes, use it to transpose certain cultural contents (thoughts, feelings, possible courses of action, etc.) into a dimension outside any particular space and time, which are able to produce a symbolic shelter that protects us from the particular adverse events of concrete life. This, on the one hand, generates in us the feeling of pleasure or enjoyment that tradition has so often linked to artistic enjoyment and, on the other, urges us, implicitly or explicitly, to re-enact those contents in the first person and to take an evaluative stance towards them.

Bridgmans Operationalismus stieß auf ernsthafte Schwierigkeiten, und diese Tatsache veranlasste viele Autoren, den Operationalismus per se abzulehnen. Agazzis Operationalismus, der in den späten 1960er Jahren entwickelt wurde, entging diesen Schwierigkeiten von Anfang an, aber das Festhalten an einem traditionellen Primat der Theorie gegenüber dem Experiment führte dazu, dass er einen Gegensatz zwischen Wissenschaft und Technik aufstellte, der mit dem allgemeinen operationalistischen Rahmen seiner Wissenschaftsphilosophie nicht vereinbar war. Später versuchte Agazzi, seinen Operationalismus kohärenter zu gestalten, indem er eine engere Beziehung zwischen Wissenschaft und Technik anstrebte, d. h. eine vermittelnde Lösung, die sie als miteinander interagierend betrachtet. Um eine intermediäre Lösung kohärent zu verteidigen, reicht es jedoch nicht aus, eine bestimmte Gruppe von Eigenschaften zu finden, die der Wissenschaft, nicht aber der Technik zuzuordnen sind, oder umgekehrt. Vielmehr ist es notwendig, zwei unterschiedliche (aber auch komplementäre) Standpunkte zu spezifizieren, von denen aus Wissenschaft und Technik gleichzeitig, aber ohne Widerspruch, sowohl als begrifflich verschiedene als auch als ununterscheidbare historisch-empirische Realitäten erscheinen können: In einem Sinne ist die Wissenschaft von der Technik zu unterscheiden, aber im anderen Sinne fallen sie völlig zusammen.

This book offers the most complete and up-to-date overview of the philosophical work of Evandro Agazzi, presently the most important Italian philosopher of science, and one of the most influential in the world. Scholars from seven countries explore his contributions in areas ranging from philosophy of physics and general philosophy of science to bioethics, philosophy of mathematics and logic, epistemology of the social sciences and history of science, philosophy of language and artificial intelligence, education and anthropology, metaphysics, and philosophy of religion. Agazzi developed a complete and coherent philosophical system, anticipating some of the turns in the philosophy of science after the crisis of logical empiricism and exerting an equal influence on continental hermeneutic philosophy. His work is characterized by an original synthesis of contemporary analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and classical philosophy, including the scholastic tradition, and these threads are reflected in the different backgrounds of the contributors to this book. While upholding the epistemological value of science against scepticism and relativism, Agazzi eschews scientism by stressing the equal importance of non-scientific forms of thought, such as metaphysics and religion. While defending the freedom of research as a cognitive enterprise, he argues that as a human and social practice it must nonetheless respect ethical constraints.

Hempel’s account of thought experiments has been discussed only by a very few authors and, for the most part, with rather cursory remarks. Its importance, however, is not only historical, but also systematic theoretical, because it involves the distinction between discovery and justification, a main pillar of neopositivistic philosophy of science. Hempel raised the question whether thought experiments constitute a methodological component of scientific research or, on the contrary, are merely a heuristic-psychological device for obtaining and/or transmitting new ideas. While conceding a few exceptions in the natural sciences, he argued that thought experiments always have a heuristic character in the social sciences. There is however a fundamental tension in Hempel’s conception of thought experiments, between the thesis of methodological monism and the neopositivistic dichotomy discovery/justification. On the one hand, on the basis of the unity of scientific method, Hempel admits a difference only in degree between the natural and the human sciences, but on the other hand, he draws a principled distinction between thought experiments of the human sciences (which have only a greater or lesser heuristic value) and those of the natural sciences (which may have also a cognitive-justificatory value). If one assumes the unity of method in the minimal sense in which no scientific knowledge can renounce intersubjective controllability, this tension can be removed either by rejecting the discovery/justification dichotomy or by interpreting it differently. Here, following the second path, two senses of the dichotomy are distinguished, one of which must be accepted, while the other rejected. This removes the internal tension in Hempel’s conception of thought experiments and suggests the thesis that any plausible thought experiment, both in the natural and the human sciences, must already contain some justification, implicit or explicit, of the theoretical hypotheses that they formulate.

Der Neue Experimentalismus musste sich angesichts seines Gegensatzes zwischen experimentellen Praktiken und grundlegenden Theorien mit dem Problem der Beziehung zwischen der Einmaligkeit der ersteren und der Allgemeinheit der letzteren auseinandersetzen. Andere Autoren (von Charles A. Baylis und Nelson Goodman bis Catherine Elgin) haben das Konzept der Exemplifikation verwendet, um die Beziehung zwischen partikulären und universellen/allgemeinen Begriffen oder Gesetzen zu klären. Es stellt sich jedoch die Frage, ob sie zwar einen Gesichtspunkt andeuten, der neue Aspekte des Problems beleuchten kann, das Problem selbst aber nicht lösen. In diesem Artikel wird auf der Grundlage von Überlegungen, die an anderer Stelle entwickelt wurden, sowie in Anlehnung an eine Anregung von Aristoteles vorgeschlagen, den Begriff der Exemplifikation mit dem Problem der Induktion und der Abduktion zu verknüpfen, die hier als Bezeichnung für eine Vielzahl methodischer Verfahren verstanden werden, die darauf abzielen, eine kognitive Beziehung zwischen der Reproduzierbarkeit wissenschaftlicher Begriffe oder Gesetze und der Konkretheit, der Lokalität und dem situierten Charakter experimenteller Praktiken herzustellen. Eine notwendige Voraussetzung für die Lösung des durch diese Beziehung aufgeworfenen Problems ist die Unterscheidung zwischen zwei Bedeutungen − einer reflexiv-transzendentalen und einer genetisch-methodologischen − des Begriffspaares Entdeckung/Rechtfertigung. Dies wirft gleichzeitig Licht auf das Problem der Induktion sowie auf das Problem des Verhältnisses zwischen der Universalität wissenschaftlicher Gesetze und dem stets lokalen und situierten Charakter experimenteller Praktiken. Der letzte Teil des Artikels zeigt, wie diese Schlussfolgerungen auch für Gedankenexperimente gelten, indem auf John Nortons Auffassung eingegangen wird.

Nella sua straordinaria opera scientifica, Franco Selleri si è sempre opposto alla rinuncia alla comprensione della struttura della realtà e della natura degli oggetti fisici, che egli considera come l’elemento caratterizzante delle principali teorie della fisica del Novecento e che è stata stigmatizzata da Karl Popper come tesi della “fine della strada in fisica”. Sin dalla fine degli anni ’60, egli ha sviluppato quella riflessione critica nei confronti delle teorie fondamentali della fisica moderna, in particolar modo della teoria delle particelle elementari e della meccanica quantistica, e in un secondo tempo delle teorie relativistiche, che contraddistingue il suo programma di ricerca. Nel corso della sua intensa e infaticabile attività scientifica, Selleri è entrato in proficuo contatto con molti grandi fisici e filosofi della scienza, instaurando un intenso dialogo critico con Louis de Broglie, John Bell e Karl Popper. Le sue originali e non convenzionali ricerche lo hanno portato a risultati significativi non solo nell’ambito dei fondamenti della fisica, ma anche della storia e della filosofia della fisica. Per questo abbiamo voluto dedicare un numero speciale di Isonomia al nostro impareggiabile amico e collega, sia per la sua passione instancabile e la sua profonda conoscenza dei fondamenti formali, concettuali e filosofici delle teorie della fisica contemporanea, sia e forse ancor più come maestro di una prospettiva perennemente critica che egli ha sempre seguito e proposto con particolare rigore ed estrema determinazione.

With reference to an already existing and relatively widespread use of the expression in question, mathematical “thought experiments” (“TEs”) involve mathematical reasoning in which visualisation plays a relatively more important role. But to ensure an unambiguous and consistent use of the term, certain conditions have to be met: (1) Contrary to what has happened so far in the literature, the distinction between logical-formal thinking and experimental-operational thinking must not be ignored; (2) The separation between the context of discovery and the context of justification is to be rejected, at least in one of the main senses in which it was defended by the logical empiricists and Popper (this excludes any position which, ascribing to mathematical TEs only a heuristic role, regards them an intermediate step to attain more traditional forms of rigour); (3) The distinction between mathematical TEs and formal proofs must be regarded as one of degree, and not as a qualitative one, although this distinction may be used in a de facto way for particular or local purposes.

In the last decades it has become clear that medicine must find some way to combine its scientific and humanistic sides. In other words, an adequate notion of medicine requires an integrative position that mediates between the analytic-reductionist and the normative-holistic tendencies we find therein. This is especially important as these different styles of reasoning separate “illness” (something perceived and managed by the whole individual in concert with their environment) and “disease” (a “mechanical failure” of a biological element within the body). While the demand for an integrative view has typically been motivated by ethical concerns, we claim that it is also motivated, perhaps even more fundamentally, by epistemological and methodological reasons. Evidence-based bio-medicine employs experimental and statistical techniques which eliminate important differences in the ways that conscious humans evaluate, live with, and react to disease and illness. However, it is precisely these experiences that underpin the concepts and norms of bio-medicine. Humanistic disciplines, on the other hand, have the resources to investigate these experiences in an intersubjectively testable way. Medicine, therefore, cannot afford to ignore its nature as a human science; it must be concerned not only with disease and illness, but also with the ways in which patients as persons respond to malady. Insofar as attitudes and expectations influence the criteria of illness and disease, they must be studied as part of the genuine subject matter of medicine as a human science. In general, we urge that this is a necessary step to overcome today's trend to split evidence-based and clinical medicine.

Elsewhere I have tried to provide the justification of both the irreducible distinction of science and philosophy and their inevitable complementarity. Unlike empirical science, philosophy has no limit whatever as far as its possible objects are concerned. To say that there is no limit whatever to the possible objects of philosophy is to say that, strictly speaking, it has no object at all and must find its object outside itself, that is, in common sense knowledge and the natural and human sciences. Against the background of this conception, the paper argues that philosophy of science, as a critical reflection on common sense knowledge and the natural or human sciences, inherits from philosophy in general this two-faced Janus nature, which in the philosophy of science shapes the epistemological status of the discipline in an even more prominent way. To show this in detail, the paper enunciates eleven theses that derive from the intimate connection of unity and distinction that exists between philosophy of science on the one hand and the particular and specialized scientific knowledge on the other.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, prominent authors including Jean Piaget have drawn attention to Edmond Goblot’s account of mathematical thought experiments. But his contribution to today’s debate has been neglected so far. The main goal of this article is to reconstruct and discuss Goblot’s account of logical operations (the term he used for thought experiments in mathematics) and its interpretation by Piaget against the theoretical background of two open questions in today’s debate: (1) the relationship between empirical and mathematical thought experiments and (2) the question of whether mathematical thought experiments can play a justificatory function in proofs. The main corollary of this analysis is that Piaget’s interpretation is seriously flawed and insufficiently appreciative of important theses of Goblot’s account. First, Goblot can be easily defended against Piaget’s main criticism, and second, Goblot developed ideas about mathematical thought experiments that still deserve attention.

Despite the many turns that philosophy of technology has undergone in recent decades, the question of the nature and limits of technological determinism (TD) has been neglected, because it was considered as solved and overcome, and therefore not worth further discussion. This paper once again raises the problem of TD, by trying to save the opposing, but complementary elements of truth of the two main forms of TD that I shall call “nomological” and “normative”: (a) technology is all-pervasive and has an inexorable capacity for extending itself into every field of human life, and (b) we have a capacity to counteract and orient technology, at least in some measure. In order to reconcile these seemingly inconsistent claims, the key move for my argument is a brief analysis of the notion of scientific experiment from the perspective of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. As a result, two senses of technology are distinguished, which I shall call respectively “reflective” and “methodological.” From the point of view of this distinction, the all-pervasiveness and inexorability of technology and the in principle irreducibility of human persons to technology—which nomological and normative TD assert dialectically one against the other—can be reconciled. Among other things, this requires the rejection (in one fundamental sense) of the widely held assumption, made both by nomological and normative TD, that technology is a cultural field whose contents can be neatly separated from the rest of human culture. This thesis should be replaced by the more qualified claim of the reflective unity and the methodological multiplicity of technology.

The main purpose of this paper is to investigate some important aspects of the relationship between thought experiment and computer simulation, from the point of view of real experiment. In the first part of this paper, I shall pass in critical review four important approaches concerning the relationship between TE and CS. None of these approaches, though containing some important insights, has succeeded in distinguishing between CS and TE, on the one hand, and REs, on the other. Neither have they succeeded in distinguishing TEs and REs. In Sect. 5, the paper briefly outlines an account of CSs as compared with TEs that takes REs as a central reference point. From the perspective of the analysis of the empirico-experimental intensions of the concepts of TE, CS, and RE—considering their empirical content and actual performance within a discipline—the attempts to find a distinction in logical kind between TEs, CSs and REs breaks down: for every particular characteristic of one of these notions there is a corresponding characteristic in the two others. From an epistemological-transcendental point of view, the only difference in kind between TEs and CSs consists in the fact that any simulation, even a computer one, involves a kind of real execution, one that is not merely psychological or conceptual. In TEs the subject operates concretely by using mental concepts in the first person; in contrast, real experiments and simulations involve an ‘external’ realisation. As shown in Sect. 6, this manifests itself in the higher degree of complexity often found in CSs as compared with TEs.

The first part of this paper discusses two important meanings of robustness and shows their essential connection with the notion of intersubjective reproducibility. As I shall maintain, robustness in both senses of the term is intimately connected with the notion of scientific experiment. This is the important element of truth of the mechanistic systems approach, which explains events as products of robust and regular systems and processes. In the second part of this paper I shall show that the concept of robustness of a mechanism, if applied to biological systems, is one-sided and incomplete without a heuristic˗methodical reference to final causes, even though the assumption of the teleological point of view is justified in biology only to the extent that we use it as a counterfactual artifice, capable of bringing to light causal relations which have a robustly reproducible content. In this way, the reflexive, typically human concept of purposefulness may be employed to investigate living beings scientifically, that is, in an intersubjectively testable and reproducible way, to discover mechanisms in living systems which are robust in both senses of the word.

The paper addresses the question of the nature and limits of philosophical thought experiments. On the one hand, experimental philosophers are right to claim that we need much more laboratory work in order to have more reliable thought experiments, but on the other hand a naturalism that is too radical is incapable of clarifying the peculiarity of thought experiments in philosophy. Starting from a historico-critical reconstruction of Kant’s concept of the “experiments of pure reason”, this paper outlines an account of thought experiments in philosophy that tries to reconcile the thesis of a principled difference between scientific and philosophical TEs with the position of a methodological naturalism that does not admit any difference in kind between the methods of science and of philosophy.