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127The goods of design: Professional ethics for designersBy ArielGuersenzvaig. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2021. Pp. xiii + 294 (review)Metaphilosophy 54 (5): 775-778. 2023.Metaphilosophy, EarlyView.
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153Is Fourier Analysis Conservative over Physical Theory?Logique Et Analyse. forthcoming.Hartry Field argues that conservative rather than true mathematical sentences facilitate deductions in nominalist (i.e., abstracta-free) science without prejudging its empirical outcomes. In this paper, I identify one branch of mathematics as nonconservative, for its indispensable role in enabling nominalist language about a fundamental scientific property, in a fictional scientific community. The fundamental property is electromagnetic reflectance, and the mathematics is Fourier analysis, which…Read more
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188An Extra-Mathematical Program Explanation of Color ExperienceInternational Studies in the Philosophy of Science 33 (3): 153-173. 2020.In the debate over whether mathematical facts, properties, or entities explain physical events (in what philosophers call “extra-mathematical” explanations), Aidan Lyon’s (2012) affirmative answer stands out for its employment of the program explanation (PE) methodology of Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit (1990). Juha Saatsi (2012; 2016) objects, however, that Lyon’s examples from the indispensabilist literature are (i) unsuitable for PE, (ii) nominalizable into non-mathematical terms, and (iii)…Read more
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197Review of Donna Drucker's "Contraception: A Concise History" (review)Metapsychology Online Reviews. 2021.Drucker's contribution succeeds as a handbook of contraceptive history, but I criticize her definition of contraception as too broad, and I argue that a narrower definition undermines her reproductive justice claims.
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63A Counterexample to Deflationary NominalismErkenntnis 88 (4): 1721-1740. 2023.According to Jody Azzouni’s “deflationary nominalism,” the singular terms of mathematical language applied or unapplied to science refer to nothing at all. What does exist, Azzouni claims, must satisfy the quaternary condition he calls “thick epistemic access” (TEA). In this paper I argue that TEA surreptitiously reifies some mathematical entities. The mathematical entity that I take TEA to reify is the Fourier harmonic, an infinite-duration monochromatic sinusoid applied throughout engineering …Read more
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501A dialogue on the ethics of science: Henri Poincaré and Pope FrancisEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3): 1-12. 2021.To teach the ethics of science to science majors, I follow several teachers in the literature who recommend “persona” writing, or the student construction of dialogues between ethical thinkers of interest. To engage science majors in particular, and especially those new to academic philosophy, I recommend constructing persona dialogues from Henri Poincaré’s essay, “Ethics and Science”, and the non-theological third chapter of Pope Francis’s encyclical on the environment, Laudato si. This pairing…Read more
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345Inferential Internalism and the Causal Status EffectLogos and Episteme 11 (4): 429-445. 2020.To justify inductive inference and vanquish classical skepticisms about human memory, external world realism, etc., Richard Fumerton proposes his “inferential internalism,” an epistemology whereby humans ‘see’ by Russellian acquaintance Keynesian probable relations (PRs) between propositions. PRs are a priori necessary relations of logical probability, akin to but not reducible to logical entailments, such that perceiving a PR between one’s evidence E and proposition P of unknown truth value jus…Read more
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141How to make reflectance a surface propertyStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 70 19-27. 2020.Reflectance physicalists define reflectance as the intrinsic disposition of a surface to reflect finite-duration light pulses at a given efficiency per wavelength. I criticize the received view of dispositional reflectance (David R. Hilbert’s) for failing to account for what I call “harmonic dispersion,” the inverse relationship of a light pulse's duration to its bandwidth. I argue that harmonic dispersion renders reflectance defined in terms of light pulses an extrinsic disposition. Reflectance…Read more
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36Ptolemy’s Philosophy: Mathematics as a Way of Life. By Jacqueline Feke. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. xi + 234 (review)Metaphilosophy 51 (1): 151-155. 2020.A fascinating epistemology of science book, to be read alongside contemporary accounts.
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20Pere Grapí, Inspiring Air: A History of Air-Related Science. Wilmington: Vernon Press, 2019. Pp. ix + 352. ISBN 1-62273-738-5. £44.00 (review)British Journal for the History of Science 52 (4): 717-719. 2019.A history of design changes for the eudiometer.
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1317The Ethical Engineer: Contemporary Concepts and Cases. By Robert McGinn. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 340 (review)Metaphilosophy 50 (3): 395-399. 2019.I recommend this book, although it lacks coverage of environmental ethics.
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264Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric: Searching the Negative Spaces in Histories of Rhetoric by Lydia M. McDermott (review)International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics 12 (1): 172-175. 2019.Liminal Bodies, Reproductive Health, and Feminist Rhetoric presents composition professor Lydia McDermott's "sonogram" methodology of rhetorical listening, an exercise that discloses feminine voices muted or unjustly disciplined within texts ostensibly written on women's behalf. The texts examined by McDermott range from eighteenth-century pregnancy manuals to speeches by Favorinus, the ancient sophist, who is described from antiquity as a hermaphrodite. Part of McDermott's purpose in sonogrammi…Read more
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181Review of Joshua Gert, "Primitive Colors" (review)Metapsychology Online Reviews 22 (31). 2018.Good book. See this review's final paragraph for my conspiracy theory defending reflectance physicalism.
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230Review of Wade L. Robison, Ethics Within Engineering (review)Philosophy 93 (3): 455-459. 2018.I criticize Robison's proposal to excise normative ethical paradigms from the engineering ethics curriculum.
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159Review of Angela Potochnik, “Idealization and the Aims of Science.” (review)Meta: Research in Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Practical Philosophy 10 (1): 240-245. 2018.Lacks discussion of mathematics, the ne plus ultra of idealizations. Otherwise interesting.
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302Review of Anya Daly, "Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity". (review)Cosmos and History 13 (3): 438-441. 2017.I recommend this balanced, tripartite examination of phenomenology, psychology, and neuroscience.
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275Autonomy Platonism and the Indispensability Argument. By Russell Marcus. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2015. Pp. xii + 247 (review)Metaphilosophy 48 (4): 591-594. 2017.Comprehensive resource for indispensability research.
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69Robert C. Koons and Timothy H. Pickavance: Metaphysics: The Fundamentals (review)Metaphysica 18 (1): 151-154. 2017.A breathless typhoon of fundamentals and their combinations, covered in minimal depth, that is bound to overwhelm if not discourage beginners. Better books for beginners are Alyssa Nye's, and Markus Schrenk's.