Columbia University
Department of Philosophy
PhD, 1986
Stanford, California, United States of America
  • QBism : realism about what?
    In Philipp Berghofer & Harald A. Wiltsche (eds.), Phenomenology and Qbism: New Approaches to Quantum Mechanics, Routledge. 2023.
  •  10
    Those enlightened philosophers of physics acknowledging some manner of descent from Kant’s ‘Copernican Revolution’ have long found encouragement and inspiration in the writings of Roberto Torretti. In this tribute, I focus on his “perspective on Kant’s perspective on objectivity” (2008), a short but highly stimulating attempt to extract the essential core of the Kantian doctrine that ‘objects of knowledge’ are constituted, not given, or with Roberto’s inimitable pungency, that “objectivity is an…Read more
  •  116
    Cassirer and Dirac on the Symbolic Method in Quantum Mechanics: A Confluence of Opposites
    Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 6 (3). 2018.
    Determinismus und Indeterminismus in der modernen Physik is one of Cassirer’s least known and studied works, despite his own assessment as “one of his most important achievements”. A prominent theme locates quantum mechanics as a yet further step of the tendency within physical theory towards the purely functional theory of the concept and functional characterization of objectivity. In this respect DI can be considered an “update”, like the earlier monograph Zur Einsteinschen Relativitätstheorie…Read more
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    Designation and Convention: A Chapter of Early Logical Empiricism
    PSA Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1990 (2): 149-157. 1990.
    We have yet to fully understand the mariner or the measure to which logical empiricism emerged as a conventionalist response to both traditional Kantian and empiricist epistemology and to the apparent triumphs of “conventionalist stratagems” (in Popper’s aspersive locution) in the foundations of science. By “conventionalism”, however, is here understood a broader sense than customary, an extrapolation of views on the foundations of geometry and physics (associated in the first instance with Poin…Read more
  •  7
    Otto Neurath (review)
    Philosophical Review 107 (2): 327-329. 1998.
    This collaborative work provides an intellectual portrait of a man known to most students of philosophy today only as a lesser founding member of the Vienna Circle. It makes a strong case for the intrinsic interest and continuing relevance of much of Neurath’s thought to contemporary science studies, considered broadly. Together with several other recent works on Neurath, it forces a substantial revision in any assessment of the Vienna Circle and its legacy. Finally, it describes, in some detail…Read more
  •  147
    Recently discovered correspondence from Oskar Becker to Hermann Weyl sheds new light on Weyl's engagement with Husserlian transcendental phenomenology in 1918-1927. Here the last two of these letters, dated July and August, 1926, dealing with issues in the philosophy of mathematics are presented, together with background and a detailed commentary. The letters provide an instructive context for re-assessing the connection between intuitionism and phenomenology in Weyl's foundational thought, and …Read more
  •  17
    Philosophy of Science and its Discontents
    Noûs 27 (2): 261-264. 1993.
  •  2
    Hilbert on General Covariance and Causality
    In David E. Rowe, Tilman Sauer & Scott A. Walter (eds.), Beyond Einstein: Perspectives on Geometry, Gravitation, and Cosmology in the Twentieth Century, Springer New York. pp. 67-77. 2018.
    Einstein and Hilbert both struggled to reconcile general covariance and causality in their early work on general relativity. In Einstein’s case, this first led to his infamous “hole argument”, a stumbling block that persuaded him early on that generally covariant field equations for gravitation could never be found. After his breakthrough to general covariance in the fall of 1915, the resolution came in form of the “point-coincidence argument.” Hilbert from the beginning took a different view of…Read more
  •  7
    Book Reviews (review)
    with Doohwan Ahn, Nataša Bakić-Mirić, Giorgio Baruchello, Cristina M. Bettin, Martine Benjamin, Michael Bonura, Peter Burke, Camelia Mihaela Cmeciu, John M. Cox, Janina K. Darling, Donald J. Dietrich, Liviu Drugus, Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Steven L. Goldman, Boris Gubman, Grant Havers, Stefan Höjelid, Javier A. Ibáñez-Noé, Horst Jesse, Rachael Lorna Johnstone, Steven Joyce, Yves Laberge, David W. Lovell, Joseph Mali, Glenn W. Olsen, Bruce F. Pauley, Duncan Richter, Sheldon Rothblatt, Arthur B. Shostak, Stanley Shostak, Barnard Turner, Timothy Unwin, Frederick G. Whelan, and Warren C. Wood
    The European Legacy 13 (7): 877-916. 2008.
  •  52
    Chaos, Clio, and Scientistic Illusions of Understanding
    History and Theory 34 (1): 30-44. 1995.
    A number of authors have recently argued that the mathematical insights of "chaos theory" offer a promising formal model or significant analogy for understanding at least some historical events. We examine a representative claim of each kind regarding the application of chaos theory to problems of historical explanation. We identify two lines of argument. One we term the Causal Thesis, which states that chaos theory may be used to plausibly model, and so explain, historical events. The other we …Read more
  •  46
    Metaphysics Avoidance: Mark Wilson and Ernst Cassirer
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (2): 466-472. 2021.
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 103, Issue 2, Page 466-472, September 2021.
  •  26
    Proof and Knowledge in Mathematics
    Philosophical Quarterly 46 (182): 125-127. 1996.
  •  33
    Burge and the Hierarchy
    with Herbert Heidelberger
    Critica 13 (39): 83-85. 1981.
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    Contingency, a Prioricity and Acquaintance
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (2): 323-343. 1993.
  •  34
    Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (review)
    with Nancy Cartwright, Jordi Cat, Lola Fleck, and Thomas E. Uebel
    Philosophical Review 107 (2): 327. 1998.
    Four distinguished authors have been brought together to produce this elegant study of a much-neglected figure. The book is divided into three sections: Neurath's biographical background and the economic and social context of his ideas; his theory of science; and the development of his role in debates on Marxist concepts of history and his own conception of science. Coinciding with the emerging serious interest in logical positivism, this timely publication will redress a current imbalance in th…Read more
  •  17
    Proper Names, Beliefs, and Definite Descriptions
    Dissertation, University of Massachusetts Amherst. 1984.
    This dissertation investigates issues raised by these two questions: what kinds of propositions are ordinarily expressed by uses of sentences that contain proper names; and what kinds of beliefs are ordinarily on the minds of speakers when they use sentences that contain proper names? It develops a new view about the connections between beliefs, linguistic behavior, and propositional content, one that explicitly denies that the kinds of propositions typically expressed by uses of such sentences …Read more
  •  31
    Einstein, Cassirer, and General Covariance — Then and Now
    Science in Context 12 (4): 585-619. 1999.
    The ArgumentRecent archival research has brought about a new understanding of the import of Einstein's puzzling remarks (1916) attributing a physical meaning to general covariance. Debates over the scope and meaning of general covariance still persist, even within physics. But already in 1921 Cassirer identified the significance of general covariance as a novel stage in the development of the criterion of objectivity within physics; an account of this development, and its implications, is the pr…Read more
  •  21
    Russell and Analytic Philosophy
    with A. D. Irving and G. A. Wedeking
    Philosophical Quarterly 46 (184): 425. 1996.
  •  70
    Revised Factualism
    The Monist 77 (2): 207-216. 1994.
    I shall argue that those who hold that there are factual complexes, or facts, and who subscribe to a correspondence theory of truth, according to which truth is analyzed in terms of correspondence to facts, need not hold that, in addition to facts, there are propositions.
  •  181
    Hilbert's 'foundations of physics': Gravitation and electromagnetism within the axiomatic method
    Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 39 (1): 102-153. 2008.
  •  81
    Review. Carnap's construction of the world: The aufbau and the emergence of logical empiricism (review)
    British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (3): 497-500. 1999.
  •  88
    In early major works, Cassirer and Schlick differently recast traditional doctrines of the concept and of the relation of concept to intuitive content along the lines of recent epistemological discussions within the exact sciences. In this, they attempted to refashion epistemology by incorporating as its basic principle the notion of functional coordination, the theoretical sciences' own methodological tool for dispensing with the imprecise and unreliable guide of intuitive evidence. Examining t…Read more
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    Recovering First Philosophy in Philosophy of Physics
    Philosophy Today 49 (Supplement): 13-22. 2005.