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13Beyond Understanding: The Career of the Concept of Understanding in the Human SciencesIn Stephen P. Turner & Paul Andrew Roth (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Wiley-blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: Real Understanding The Experience Distant — Understanding Hawaiian‐style The Experience Near — Understanding Holocaust Perpetrators Conclusion Notes.
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22Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary TheoryJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49 (2): 180-182. 1991.
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119Hayden White in Philosophical Perspective: Review Essay of Herman Paul’s Hayden White: The Historical Imagination (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (1): 102-111. 2014.For almost half a century, the person most responsible for fomenting brouhahas regarding degrees of plasticity in the writing of histories has been Hayden White. Yet, despite the voluminous responses provoked by White’s work, almost no effort has been made to treat White’s writings in a systematic yet sympathetic way as a philosophy of history. Herman Paul’s book begins to remedy that lack and does so in a carefully considered and extremely scholarly fashion. In his relatively brief six chapters…Read more
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17The philosophical structure of historical explanationNorthwestern University Press. 2020.This book develops a philosophical structure for historical explanation that resolves disputes about the scientific status of history that have persisted since the nineteenth century. It does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative and by making their logic explicit. The books formulates a unique positive account of the logic of narrative explanations. This logic reveals how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. The book also dev…Read more
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54Real True Facts: A Reply to Currie and SwaimJournal of the Philosophy of History 16 (2): 207-225. 2022.
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10Joseph H. Smith and William Kerrigan, eds., Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Phychoanalysis, and CinemaJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47 (2): 184-186. 1989.
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23Jarvie’s RationalitätstreitIn Raphael Sassower & Nathaniel Laor (eds.), The Impact of Critical Rationalism: Expanding the Popperian Legacy Through the Works of Ian C. Jarvie, Springer Verlag. pp. 241-255. 2018.As a Popperian, Ian C. Jarvie takes falsifiability to be a defining characteristic of rationality. This suggests that any disagreement about the truth or falsity of a particular belief that can be settled by further evidence should be rationally resolvable, at least in the following sense. Niceties about probabilities aside, one should be able to specify under what conditions, that is, given what evidence, one would surrender that belief. Put another way, if a belief will not be given up no matt…Read more
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282The End of Histories? Review Essay of Alexander Rosenberg’s How History Gets Things Wrong: the Neuroscience of Our Addiction to StoriesJournal of the Philosophy of History 1-9. forthcoming.Alex Rosenberg’s latest book purports to establish that narrative history cannot have any epistemic value. Rosenberg argues not for the replacement of narrative history by something more science-like, but rather the end of histories understood as an account of human doings under a certain description. This review critiques three of his main arguments: 1) narrative history must root its explanations in folk psychology, 2) there are no beliefs nor desires guiding human action, and 3) historical na…Read more
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15An Audience for History? Review Essay of Kalle Pihlainen’s The Work of HistoryJournal of the Philosophy of History 14 (1): 81-92. 2018.Kalle Pihlainen’s book reworks seven essays published over the last dozen years. Pihlainen’s Preface and Hayden White’s Foreword articulate a cri de cœur. Both fear that something important has been missed. White’s Foreword somewhat cryptically characterizes Pihlainen’s book as “metacritical,” and locates Pihlainen in the role of being a “serious reader” for the community of theorists of history. What does it mean to be a “serious” reader? White never says. But following White’s hint, Pihlainen …Read more
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26Review of Jörn Rüsen, Diane Kerns and Katie Digan: Evidence and Meaning: A Theory of Historical Studies (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 8 (2): 489-492. 2018.
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934Hearts of darkness: 'perpetrator history' and why there is no whyHistory of the Human Sciences 17 (2-3): 211-251. 2004.Three theories contend as explanations of perpetrator behavior in the Holocaust as well as other cases of genocide: structural, intentional, and situational. Structural explanations emphasize the sense in which no single individual or choice accounts for the course of events. In opposition, intentional/cutltural accounts insist upon the genocides as intended outcomes, for how can one explain situations in which people ‘step up’ and repeatedly kill defenseless others in large numbers over sustain…Read more
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12The Philosophy of Social Science in the Twentieth Century: Analytic Traditions: Reflections on the RationalitätstreitIn Ian Jarvie Jesus Zamora Bonilla (ed.), The Sage Handbook of the Philosophy of Social Sciences., Sage Publications. pp. 103. 2011.
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44The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences (edited book)Wiley-Blackwell. 2003._The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences _collects newly commissioned essays that examine fundamental issues in the social sciences
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26Introduction. Ghosts and the Machine: Issues of Agency, Rationality, and Scientific Methodology in Contemporary Philosophy of Social ScienceIn Stephen P. Turner & Paul Andrew Roth (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Wiley-blackwell. 2003.This chapter contains sections titled: The Origins of the Philosophy of Social Science Winch's Triad The Legitimation of “Continental” Philosophy Enter Davidson Rational Choice: The Scientization of the Intentional Philosophy of Social Science Today Notes.
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Special Issue: Selected Papers from the ENPOSS Meeting, Venice 3-4 September 2013Philosophy of the Social Sciences 44 (1). 2014.
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218Ghosts and the Machine: Philosophy of Social Science in Contemporary PerspectiveIn Stephen P. Turner & Paul Andrew Roth (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 1--17. 2003.
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33Will the real scientists please stand up? dead ends and live issues in the explanation of scientific knowledgeStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 27 (1): 43-68. 1996.
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156Personhood, property rights, and the permissibility of abortionLaw and Philosophy 2 (2). 1983.The purpose of this paper is to argue that the tactic of granting a fetus the legal status of a person will not, contrary to the expectations of opponents of abortion, provide grounds for a general prohibition on abortions. I begin by examining two arguments, one moral (J. J. Thomson's A Defense of Abortion) and the other legal (D. Regan's Rewriting Roe v. Wade), which grant the assumption that a fetus is a person and yet argue to the conclusion that abortion is permissible. However, both Thomso…Read more
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Can Post-Newtonian Psychologists Find Happiness in a Pre-Paradigm Science?Journal of Mind and Behavior 16 (1): 87-98. 1995.This paper is a commentary on the essays by Faulconer , Leahey , Rawling , Slife , Vandenberg , and Williams . Whatever the differences among these essays, they nonetheless share a common concern with the image of science which Newton promulgated. What might be termed the Newtonian meta-paradigm is positivistic, in the contemporary sense. This meta-paradigm has survived the demise of the Newtonian paradigm in physics. Each of the authors in this volume, in turn, is concerned with how to expose, …Read more
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77Testing normative naturalism: The problem of scientific medicineBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 45 (2): 571-584. 1994.Laudan's normative naturalism' claims to account for the success of science by construing theories and other claims as methodological rules interpreted as defeasible hypothetical imperatives for securing cognitive ends. We ask two questions regarding the adequacy for medicine of Laudan's meta- methodology. First, although Laudan denies that general aims can be assigned to a science, we show that this is not the case for medicine. Second, we argue that Laudan's account yields mixed results as a t…Read more
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67Essentially narrative explanationsStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 62 (C): 42-50. 2017.
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53Symposium: Does Cross-Cultural Philosophy Stand in Need of a Hermeneutic Expansion?Journal of World Philosophies 2 (1): 121-143. 2017.Does cross-cultural philosophy stand in need of a hermeneutical expansion? In engaging with this question, the symposium focuses upon methodological issues salient to cross-cultural inquiry. Douglas L. Berger lays out the ground for the debate by arguing for a methodological approach, which is able to rectify the discipline’s colonial legacies and bridge the hermeneutical distance with its objects of study. From their own perspectives, Hans-Georg Moeller, Paul Roth and A. Raghuramaraju analyze w…Read more
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848The Epistemology of “Epistemology Naturalized”Dialectica 53 (2): 87-110. 1999.Quine's “Epistemology Naturalized” has become part of the canon in epistemology and excited a widespread revival of interest in naturalism. Yet the status accorded the essay is ironic, since both friends and foes of philosophical naturalism deny that Quine makes a plausible case that the methods of naturalism can accommodate the problems of epistemology.
Santa Cruz, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Philosophy of Social Science |
20th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Metaphilosophy |
Philosophy of Language |
Philosophy of Physical Science |