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  1. Theoretical virtues in eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition.Hein van den Berg - 2020 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 42 (3):1-35.
    Within eighteenth-century debates on animal cognition we can distinguish at least three main theoretical positions: (i) Buffon’s mechanism, (ii) Reimarus’ theory of instincts, and (iii) the sensationalism of Condillac and Leroy. In this paper, I adopt a philosophical perspective on this debate and argue that in order to fully understand the justification Buffon, Reimarus, Condillac, and Leroy gave for their respective theories, we must pay special attention to the theoretical virtues these naturalists alluded to while justifying their position. These theoretical (...)
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  • The Essentialism of Early Modern Psychiatric Nosology.Hein van den Berg - 2023 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 45 (2):1-25.
    Are psychiatric disorders natural kinds? This question has received a lot of attention within present-day philosophy of psychiatry, where many authors debate the ontology and nature of mental disorders. Similarly, historians of psychiatry, dating back to Foucault, have debated whether psychiatric researchers conceived of mental disorders as natural kinds or not. However, historians of psychiatry have paid little to no attention to the influence of (a) theories within logic, and (b) theories within metaphysics on psychiatric accounts of proper method, and (...)
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  • Kant’s Ideal of Systematicity in Historical Context.Hein van den Berg - 2021 - Kantian Review 26 (2):261-286.
    This article explains Kant’s claim that sciences must take, at least as their ideal, the form of a ‘system’. I argue that Kant’s notion of systematicity can be understood against the background of de Jong & Betti’s Classical Model of Science (2010) and the writings of Georg Friedrich Meier and Johann Heinrich Lambert. According to my interpretation, Meier, Lambert, and Kant accepted an axiomatic idea of science, articulated by the Classical Model, which elucidates their conceptions of systematicity. I show that (...)
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  • Induction and Certainty in the Physics of Wolff and Crusius.Hein van den Berg & Boris Demarest - forthcoming - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-22.
    In this paper, we analyse conceptions of induction and certainty in Wolff and Crusius, highlighting their competing conceptions of physics. We discuss (i) the perspective of Wolff, who assigned induction an important role in physics, but argued that physics should be an axiomatic science containing certain statements, and (ii) the perspective of Crusius, who adopted parts of the ideal of axiomatic physics but criticized the scope of Wolff’s ideal of certain science. Against interpretations that take Wolff’s proofs in physics to (...)
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  • Animal Languages in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy and Science.Hein van den Berg - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 93:72-81.
    This paper analyzes debates on animal language in eighteenth-century German philosophy and science. Adopting a history of ideas approach, I explain how the study of animal language became tied to the investigation into the origin and development of language towards the end of the eighteenth century. I argue that for large parts of the eighteenth century, the question of the existence of animal languages was studied within the context of the philosophical question of whether animals possess reason. In Germany, the (...)
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  • Life, Lawfulness, and Contingency: Kant and Schelling on Organic Nature.Naomi Fisher - 2023 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 105 (1):163-188.
    In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, Kant calls purposiveness the “lawfulness of the contingent”. I argue that this should be interpreted not as lawfulness assumed in order to remove unacceptable mechanical indeterminacy, but rather as an additional kind of lawfulness which, in the case of organisms, inexplicably coincides with mechanical determination. Schelling adapts Kant’s notion of natural purposiveness in his own conception of the relation between mechanism and organism. He states in his 1798 work, On the World Soul, (...)
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  • Kant's Theory of Scientific Hypotheses in its Historical Context.Boris Demarest & Hein van den Berg - 2022 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 92:12-19.
    This paper analyzes the historical context and systematic importance of Kant's hypothetical use of reason. It does so by investigating the role of hypotheses in Kant's philosophy of science. We first situate Kant’s account of hypotheses in the context of eighteenth-century German philosophy of science, focusing on the works of Wolff, Meier, and Crusius. We contrast different conceptions of hypotheses of these authors and elucidate the different theories of probability informing them. We then adopt a more systematic perspective to discuss (...)
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