Peter West

Northeastern University London
  • The Philosopher Versus the Physicist: Eddington's Rejoinder to Stebbing
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    A number of recent papers or monographs have examined Susan Stebbing’s criticisms of Arthur Eddington’s scientific-philosophical writing. These papers focus on Stebbing’s critique of Eddington’s attempt to infer philosophical conclusions from developments in modern physics, his view that there is a discrepancy between the world of science and the world of common sense (best encapsulated by his famous ‘two tables’ metaphor), and his use of “inexact language” to try and convey modern scientific in…Read more
  • Philosophy is not a science: Margaret Macdonald on the nature of philosophical theories
    Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science. forthcoming.
    Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. Yet, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this paper, I focus on her 1953 article ‘Linguistic Philosophy and Perception’, a provocative paper in which Macdonald argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. …Read more
  • The philosopher versus the physicist: Susan Stebbing on Eddington and the passage of time
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (1): 130-151. 2021.
    In this paper, I provide the first in-depth discussion of Susan Stebbing’s views concerning our experience of the passage of time – a key issue for many metaphysicians writing in the first half of the twentieth century. I focus on Stebbing’s claims about the passage of time in Philosophy and the Physicists and her disagreement with Arthur Eddington over how best to account for that experience. I show that Stebbing’s concern is that any attempt to provide a scientific account of the passage of ti…Read more