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4Liberty and the pursuit of knowledge: Charles Renouvier's political philosophy of scienceUniversity of Pittsburgh Press. 2018.Renouvier's place in nineteenth-century French thought -- Renouvier's critique of Comtean positivism -- Renouvier and mathematics -- Renouvier on evolution -- Kant, free will, and the social contract -- Hypothesis and convention in Renouvier's philosophy of science.
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2Review of Stefano Bordoni: When historiography met epistemology: sophisticated histories and philosophies of science in French-speaking countries in the second half of the nineteenth century (review)Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (2): 488-492. 2021.
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171. Preface Preface (pp. i-ii)Philosophy of Science 72 (5): 687-698. 2005.The study of similarity is fundamental to biological inquiry. Many homology concepts have been formulated that function successfully to explain similarity in their native domains, but fail to provide an overarching account applicable to variably interconnected and independent areas of biological research despite the monistic standpoint from which they originate. The use of multiple, explicitly articulated homology concepts, applicable at different levels of the biological hierarchy, allows a mor…Read more
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4Special Issue : nineteenth-century french philosophy of science : positivism and its continuationsHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 11 (2): 421-427. 2021.International audience.
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16Cournot and Renouvier on Scientific RevolutionsJournal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 54 (1): 7-17. 2023.Historians of philosophy have hitherto either given scant attention to Cournot and Renouvier’s views on scientific revolution, tried to read Kuhn’s concept of scientific revolution back into their works, or did not fully appreciate the extent to which these philosophers were reflecting on the works of their predecessors as well as on developments in mathematics and the sciences. Cournot’s views on cumulative development through revolution resemble Comte’s more than Kuhn’s, and his notion of prog…Read more
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13Political Philosophy of Science in Nineteenth-Century France: From Comte’s Positivism to Renouvier’s ConventionalismIn Marcus P. Adams, Zvi Biener, Uljana Feest & Jacqueline Anne Sullivan (eds.), Eppur Si Muove: Doing History and Philosophy of Science with Peter Machamer: A Collection of Essays in Honor of Peter Machamer, Springer. 2017.Recent controversy over whether the Vienna Circle can provide a model for today’s political turn in the philosophy of science indicates the need to clarify just what is meant by the term political philosophy of science. This paper finds fourteen different meanings of the term, including both descriptive and normative usages, having to do with the roles of political values in the sciences, the political consequences and significance of the sciences and scientific modes of thought, and political p…Read more
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3Fraud and Misrepresentation in Research: Whose Rights?IRB: Ethics & Human Research 6 (5): 10. 1984.
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2Book Reviews : Philosophy, Rhetoric, and the End of Knowledge: The Coming of Science and Technology Studies, by Steve Fuller. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993, 421 + xxii pp. $54.00 (cloth); $22.50 (paper (review)Science, Technology and Human Values 19 (4): 526-528. 1994.
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26From positivism to conventionalism: Comte, Renouvier, and PoincaréStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 80 102-109. 2020.Considered in its historical context, conventionalism is quite different from the way in which it has been caricatured in more recent philosophy of science, that is, as a conservative philosophy that allows the preservation of theories through arbitrary ad hoc stratagems. It is instead a liberal outgrowth of Comtean positivism, which broke with the Reidian interpretation of the Newtonian tradition in France and defended a role for hypotheses in the sciences. It also has roots in the social contr…Read more
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35Henri Poincaré and Charles Renouvier on Conventions; or, How Science Is Like PoliticsHopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 7 (2): 182-198. 2017.This article considers Henri Poincaré’s conventionalism in historical context by comparing his use of such terms as “convention” and “conventional” with Charles Renouvier’s. As Renouvier was very influential in late nineteenth-century France, this comparison can provide some insight into how the terms were understood at the time. Renouvier was a political philosopher as well as a philosopher of science. He drew an analogy between the conventions or social contracts that govern society at large a…Read more
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Method, Mind, and Mental Imagery in Auguste ComteDissertation, University of Pittsburgh. 1980.We cannot accept wholly Comte's substantive claim that discovery is a purely non-verbal process. Still, Comte has given us a useful model. The analysis of case studies from the history of scientific method and discovery should serve to illustrate important operations of the human mind. Thus, any philosophy of mind must incorporate and account for such operations. ;Comte was indebted to Kant in his search for the necessary conditions for knowledge. Unlike Kant, Comte starts with an analysis of ou…Read more
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39Is Durkheim the Enemy of Evolutionary Psychology?Philosophy of the Social Sciences 33 (1): 25-52. 2003.an exemplar of an approach that takes the human mind to be largely the product of social and cultural factors with negligible contributions from biology. The author argues that on the contrary, his sociological theory of the categories is compatible with the possibility of innate cognitive capacities, taking causal cognition as his example. Whether and to what extent there are such innate capacities is a question for research in the cognitive neurosciences. The extent to which these innate capac…Read more
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12Review of Lawrence E. Cahoone, Cultural Revolutions: Reason Versus Culture in Philosophy, Politics, and Jihad (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2005 (8). 2005.
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41This Article does not have an abstract
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53Whither social epistemology? A reply to FullerPhilosophy of the Social Sciences 21 (2): 196-202. 1991.
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13The Empirical Character of Methodological RulesPhilosophy of Science 63 (5). 1996.Critics of Laudan's normative naturalism have questioned whether methodological rules can be regarded as empirical hypotheses about relations between means and ends. Drawing on Laudan's defense that rules of method are contingent on assumptions about the world, I argue that even if such rules can be shown to be analytic in principle, in practice the warrant for such rules will be empirical. Laudan's naturalism, however, acquires normative force only by construing both methods and epistemic goals…Read more
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42Evolutionary and Neuroscience Approaches to the Study of CognitionPhilosophy of Science 72 (5): 675-686. 2005.There is a lack of connection between the cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary approaches to the study of the mind, in philosophy as well as the sciences. For instance, although Millikan may display a thorough understanding of evolutionary theory in her arguments for the adaptive value of substance concepts, she gives scant attention to what could be the neural substrates of these concepts. Neuroscience research calls into question her assumption that substance concepts play a role in practic…Read more
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7Book Reviews : Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990. Pp. xii, 262, $35.00 (cloth), $13.95 (paper (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23 (4): 562-566. 1993.
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23Reasons, causes, and the 'strong programme' in the sociology of knowledgePhilosophy of the Social Sciences 15 (2): 189-196. 1985.
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58Book Reviews : Helen E. Longino, Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1990. Pp. xii, 262, $35.00 (cloth), $13.95 (paper (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 23 (4): 562-566. 1993.
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220Functionalism and the meaning of social factsPhilosophy of Science 66 (3): 323. 1999.This paper defends a social functionalist interpretation, modeled on psychological functionalism, of the meanings of social facts. Social functionalism provides a better explanation of the possibility of interpreting other cultures than approaches that identify the meanings of social facts with either mental states or behavior. I support this claim through a functionalist reinterpretation of sociological accounts of the categories that identify them with their collective representations. Taking …Read more
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23Although standpoint theorists tend to characterize a scientist’s social situation in terms of her position in a hierarchy of power within the larger society, her social situation could also be characterized in terms of the degree to which she is integrated into the scientific community. The latter concept of social location may prove helpful in explaining a scientist’s potential for contributing to the growth of knowledge. It may also provide an independent measure of marginalization that makes …Read more
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History of Western Philosophy |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |
Areas of Interest
History of Western Philosophy |
Science, Logic, and Mathematics |