THE problem of universals has been with us at least since the time of Plato and it is no surprise that the first solution was what can be termed a realist one. Not a few have argued that there is something commonsensical about the claim that we call some things by a common term because it seems quite plausible that there are kinds of things and that they are not entirely the creations of our minds. The path of realism has (...) been trodden by many notables, and current literature calls attention to the fact that, in spite of all its problems, the realist view still has its own appeal. This is true now and is even more easily documented for the thirteenth century when the question of the ontological status of universals was fiercely debated in the young universities of Europe. Roger Bacon was beginning his teaching career at the University of Paris in the early 1240s and an inspection of his works reveals that on three occasions he entered the debate ex professo, namely, in his Questiones supra libros prime philosophie Aristotelis, in his Questiones altere supra libros prime philosophie Aristotelis, and in the Liber primus communium naturalium Fratris Rogeri. Hence it is in these that we should look to discover whether he was a nominalist, a moderate realist, or an extreme realist, or indeed whether he developed a position uniquely his own. (shrink)

IT IS CERTAINLY THE CASE that twelfth- and thirteenth-century treatises on logic represent in great part attempts to represent the Organon, Aristotle’s books on logic, by rearranging the material, adding clarifications, and sometimes breaking new ground as in the case of the treatise on the property of terms. Thus when Roger Bacon is writing his Summulae dialectices around 1252, he is confronted by the problem of what to do with the material on the classification of statements into single or multiple, (...) and simple or composed in chapter 5 of Aristotle’s On Interpretation. There, apropos of the two divisions and interspersed among other claims, we read the following. (shrink)

Two persons have been proposed as the author of the Summa Lamberti, a thireenth-century treatise on logic. Franco Alessio takes him to be the Auxerre Dominican Lambert of Ligny-le-Châtel, and he basis his claim on Dominican sources from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Recently, Alain de Libera has presented a counter-proposal: the author was Lambert of Lagny, a secular cleric at the time of the composition, who afterwards became a Dominican. This claim is based on the acta of the (...) counts of Champagne and a document of Pope Urban IV. I conclude that, given the present evidence, de Libera’s case rests on more historically sound data, but that to arrive at this conclusion one must impeach the Dominican sources (not done by de Libera) and take into consideration additional data from the research of Michèle Mulchahey on the introduction of logic into the Dominican curriculum. (shrink)

This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The (...) Presence of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Pragmatism provoked both admiration and fear, as global changes brought into the twentieth century provoked a revisioning of the cultural narratives about who the citizen and child are and should be. In a new book edited by Thomas S. Popkewitz, scholars representing twelve nations provide original chapters to explore the epistemic features and cultural theses figured in Dewey's writings as they assembled in the discourses of public schooling. The significance of Dewey in the book is not about Dewey as (...) the messenger of pragmatism, but in locating different cultural, political, and educational terrains in which debates about modernity, the modern self, and the making of the citizen occurred. (shrink)

The author's concept of incommensurability is explicated by elaborating the claim that some terms essential to the formulation of older theories defy translation into the language of more recent ones. Defense of this claim rests on the distinction between interpreting a theory in a later language and translating the theory into it. The former is both possible and essential, the latter neither. The interpretation/translation distinction is then applied to Kitcher's critique of incommensurability and Quine's conception of a translation manual, both (...) of which take reference-preservation as the sole semantic criterion of translational adequacy. The paper concludes by enquiring about the additional criteria a successful translation must satisfy. (shrink)

The significance of the plurality of the Copernican Revolution is the main thrust of this undergraduate text In this study of the Copernican Revolution, the ...

A highly condensed account of the author's present view of some philosophical problems unresolved in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept of incommensurability, now considerably developed, remains at center stage, but the evolutionary metaphor, introduced in the final pages of the book, now also plays a principal role.

A collection of late 20th-century scholarship devoted to Thomas Jefferson as a politician, writer, philosopher, Christian and economist.

A highly condensed account of the author's present view of some philosophical problems unresolved in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept of incommensurability, now considerably developed, remains at center stage, but the evolutionary metaphor, introduced in the final pages of the book, now also plays a principal role.

A good book may have the power to change the way we see the world, but a great book actually becomes part of our daily consciousness, pervading our thinking to the point that we take it for granted, and we forget how provocative and challenging its ideas once were—and still are. _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions _is that kind of book. When it was first published in 1962, it was a landmark event in the history and philosophy of science. Fifty (...) years later, it still has many lessons to teach. With _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, _Kuhn challenged long-standing linear notions of scientific progress, arguing that transformative ideas don’t arise from the day-to-day, gradual process of experimentation and data accumulation but that the revolutions in science, those breakthrough moments that disrupt accepted thinking and offer unanticipated ideas, occur outside of “normal science,” as he called it. Though Kuhn was writing when physics ruled the sciences, his ideas on how scientific revolutions bring order to the anomalies that amass over time in research experiments are still instructive in our biotech age. This new edition of Kuhn’s essential work in the history of science includes an insightful introduction by Ian Hacking, which clarifies terms popularized by Kuhn, including paradigm and incommensurability, and applies Kuhn’s ideas to the science of today. Usefully keyed to the separate sections of the book, Hacking’s introduction provides important background information as well as a contemporary context. Newly designed, with an expanded index, this edition will be eagerly welcomed by the next generation of readers seeking to understand the history of our perspectives on science. (shrink)

Divided into three parts, this work is a record of the direction Kuhn was taking during the last two decades of his life. It consists of essays in which he refines the basic concepts set forth in "Structure"--Paradigm shifts, incommensurability, and the nature of scientific progress.

This Alfred Schutz Memorial Lecture discusses the relationship between the phenomenological life-world analysis and the methodology of the social sciences, which was the central motive of Schutz’s work. I have set two major goals in this lecture. The first is to scrutinize the postulate of adequacy, as this postulate is the most crucial of Schutz’s methodological postulates. Max Weber devised the postulate ‘adequacy of meaning’ in analogy to the postulate of ‘causal adequacy’ (a concept used in jurisprudence) and regarded both (...) as complementary and, in the context of sociological analysis, critical. Schutz extracted the two postulates from the Neokantian epistemology, dismissed the concept of causality, and reduced Weber’s two postulates of adequacy into one, namely, the adequacy of meaning. I discuss the benefits and shortcomings of this reduction. A major problem, in my view, is that Schutz’s reformulation lost the empirical concern that was inherent in Weber’s ‘causal adequacy’. As a result, the models of economics (which shaped Schutz’s conception of social science) are considered to be adequate if they are ‘understandable’ to an everyday actor, even when they are based on the most unrealistic assumptions. To recapture Weber’s empirical orientation I recommend a more restrictive interpretation of the postulate of adequacy that links it to qualitative research and unfolds the critical potential of Schutz’s phenomenological life-world analysis. My second goal is to report on some current developments in German sociology in which a number of approaches explicitly refer to Schutz’s analysis of the life-world and attempt to pursue ‘adequate’ empirical research. This lecture focuses on three approaches: ethnophenomenology, life-world analytic ethnography, and social scientific hermeneutics. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn acuno la expresion tension esencial para aludir al conflicto entre las tendencias conservadora y revolucionaria en la ciencia. Estas dan lugar respectivamente a la ciencia normal, que trata de salvar al paradigma dominante de las refutaciones, y a la extraordinaria, que responde a las dificultades sustituyendo las viejas teorias por otras radicalmente novedosas. La actitud adoptada en cada momento no esta dictada por normas de racionalidad, sino por la psicologia y la sociologia de los cientificos y (...) sus comunidades. Al conceder una funcion central a la psicosociologia en la explicacion del desarrollo cientifico, Kuhn creo la alta tension hoy omnipresente entre racionalidad e irracionalidad, objetividad y subjetividad, universalismo y relativismo, realismo e idealismo. Este homenaje a la obra de Kuhn recoge diversas contribuciones a las principales caras de esta tension, desde la perspectiva de la filosofia, la sociologia, la psicologia y la historia de la ciencia. (shrink)

It has become a mantra, that doping is immorally and therefore should be punished with exclusion, fines and stigmatization. In most parts of the world, the doping debate is characterised by an extreme tunnel vision since all athletes, politicians and sports managers who have public airtime express that doping is bad or the invention of the devil. -/- The purpose of 'Doping in Sport: A Defence' is to identify, clarify and challenge some of the central arguments that are used in (...) the often extremely emotional debate that primarily focuses on rejecting the use of doping. I hope that my effort to clarify and challenge the arguments will help cultivate a productive dialogue where all arguments are given a fair trial instead of the prevailing one-sided condemnation of doping. An open dialogue about doping is important since the question of where the line should be drawn when it comes to doping in sports is highly relevant in terms of the scope within which athletes, sports physicians, sports managers, coaches and pharmaceutical companies can operate in the world of sports. (shrink)

“This important collection of essays will help all Americans to consider anew the relationship between the ‘spirit of liberty’ and the ‘spirit of religion’ at work in the American Founding. Michael Zuckert’s masterful response establishes him as one of the leading scholars of the period.” —Jean Yarbrough, author of _American Virtues: Thomas Jefferson on the Character of a Free People_ "_Protestantism and the American Founding_ is an extraordinarily rich and thought provoking dialogue on the religious dimension of the nation's (...) foundations." —Thomas L. Pangle, University of Texas at Austin “This collection of essays by some of the most eminent scholars in the field will have a wide-ranging influence on both academic and political debate on the vital interaction of religion and politics in historical and contemporary America.” —Garrett Ward Sheldon, University of Virginia’s College at Wise This welcome new textbook explores the relationship between Protestant theology and American political thought of the founding era. It gathers together both new and well-known essays by scholars and outstanding thinkers in political philosophy and is enriched by classic selections from Alexis de Tocqueville's _Democracy in America_. _Protestantism and the American Founding_ will serve as a valuable classroom guide for discussion and debate about issues in American and modern political philosophy. (shrink)

This paper discusses ethnomethodology's program in relation to the phenomenological life-world analysis of Alfred Schutz. A recent publication of Garfinkel's early writings sheds new light on how he made use of phenomenological reflections in order to create a new sociological approach. Garfinkel used Schutz's life-world analysis as a source of inspiration, called for 'misreading' in the sense of an alternate reading and developed a new, empirical approach to the analysis of social order which he called 'ethnomethodology'. Ethnomethodologists usually acknowledge the (...) historical importance of Schutz but emphasize that Garfinkel succeeded to overcome the limitations of phenomenological analyses and moved beyond. This view has spread above all in the Anglosaxon countries. In German sociology, Schutz's life-world analysis still has a much stronger standing than ethnomethodology and is interpreted as a systematic whole. Following Luckmann, it is discussed as a protosociological foundation of the methodology of social sciences or, following Srubar, as a philosophical anthropology with two poles: a subjective and a social, pragmatic pole. Both versions claim to analyze the meaningful constitution of the social world, to serve as a foundation of sociological methodology and to provide guidelines for an `adequate' sociology. While Garfinkel used phenomenological concepts for sociological analysis, Luckmann clearly distinguishes the two: you either do phenomenology (protosociology) or you do sociology (a theoretically guided, empirical sociology of knowledge). This paper describes the present-day debate in German sociology and compares ethnomethodology's program with these interpretations of Schutz's life-world analysis. (shrink)

To what extent is the scientist's endeavor qua scientist influenced by his philosophic image of himself? A preliminary and partial answer to this question is suggested by a study of eight physiological thinkers of the second half of the eighteenth century, a period during which biology was much influenced by the scientific and philosophical ideas of Isaac Newton. At this time, physiologists invoked certain "principles," "properties," and "powers" which were deemed useful as explanatory devices, even though they could not themselves (...) be explained. The use of these devices in physiology was often defended in terms of their supposed similarity to devices used in mathematics and Newtonian physics. The results of this practice are considered critically, partly in the light of current studies of scientific explanation. (shrink)