Structural realism as developed by John Worrall and others can claim philosophical roots as far back as the late 19th century, though the discussion at that time does not unambiguously favor the contemporary form, or even its realism. After a critical examination of some aspects of the historical background some severe critical challenges to both Worrall's and Ladyman's versions are highlighted, and an alternative empiricist structuralism proposed. Support for this empiricist version is provided in part by the different way in (...) which we can do justice to Worrall's original demands and in part by the viewpoint it provides (in contrast to e.g. Michael Friedman's) on the stability maintained through scientific theory change. Planck against the heretics 1.1 Poincaré on the meaning of Maxwell's equations 1.2 Two responses: reification and structuralism On the road to structuralism 2.1 The microscope 2.2 Mathematization of the world picture 2.3 The 18th–20th century The new structural realism 3.1 From scientific realism to structuralism 3.2 The Ladyman variant: objectivity and invariance 3.3 How is structural realism supported? An empiricist structuralism 4.1 Royal succession in science 4.2 Defence of the empiricist version 4.3 Structure: an empiricist view. (shrink)

This paper examines Karl Alfred von Zittel’s practice in order to uncover the roots of so-called idiographic paleontology. The great American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) defined the discipline of idiographic paleontology as illustration and description of the morphological features of extinct species. However, this approach does not investigate macroevolutionary patterns and processes. On the contrary, the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s implemented an epistemic methodology that illustrates macrovelutionary patterns and laws by combining idiographic data with a nomothetic form of (...) explanation. This article elucidates the features of the idiographic data as well as the acquired knowledge coupled with this approach. First of all, Heinrich G. Bronn’s (1800–1862) statistical method is analyzed. Zittel’s practice arose as a reaction against the approximate conclusions reached by Bronn’s quantitative approach. Second, the details of Zittel’s methodology are described in order to bring out its peculiarities. The microscope played a pivotal role in creating and forming Zittel’s morphological data. This analysis sheds new light on the reasons behind the so-called ideographic paleontology, thus revising Gould’s historical reconstruction, as well as on the notion of paleontological data. However, even though Zittel aimed at reaching precise and stable conclusions, his data cannot be used for elucidating evolutionary mechanisms: they are scientific in a purely descriptive sense, but completely useless for biological investigations. Finally, this paper examines how Zittel’s methodology affects the contemporary paleobiological enterprise and thereby reflects upon the notion of natural history. (shrink)

This paper considers the alleged pragmatism of Berkeley’s philosophy using the two Sellarsian categories of ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images of the world and human beings. The ‘manifest’ image is regarded as a refinement of the ordinary way of conceiving things, and the scientific image is seen as a theoretical picture of the world provided by science. The paper argues that the so-called Berkeleian pragmatism was an effect of Berkeley’s work towards a synthesis of ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images through the creation (...) of one unified synoptic vision of the world and was a part of a new conceptual framework within which these two images could be combined. (shrink)

This essay aims to sharpen debates on the pros and cons of historical epistemology, which is now understood as a novel approach to the study of knowledge, by comparing it with the history of epistemology as traditionally pursued by philosophers. The many versions of both approaches are not always easily discernable. Yet, a reasoned comparison of certain versions can and should be made. In the first section of this article, I argue that the most interesting difference involves neither the subject (...) matter nor goal, but the methods used by the two approaches. In the second section, I ask which of the two approaches or methods is more promising given that both historical epistemologists and historians of epistemology claim to contribute to epistemology simpliciter . Using traditional problems concerning the epistemic role of perception, I argue that the historical epistemologies of Wartofsky and Daston and Galison fail to show that studying practices of perception is philosophically significant. Standard methods from the history of epistemology are more promising, as I show by means of reconstructing arguments in a debate about the relation between perception and judgment in psychological research on the famous moon illusion. (shrink)

The ArgumentContrary to the dominant historiography of microscopy, which tends to maintain that there was no microscopical program in the Enlightenment, this paper argues that there was such a program and attempts to illustrate one aspect of its dynamic character. The experiments, observations, and interpretations on rotifers and their management by scholars of that period show that there did exist a precise axis of research that can be followed historically. Indeed, the various controversies these scholars engaged in imply that they (...) performed accurate microscopical experiments and observations and also carefully interpreted their visual data. Furthermore, the kinds of phenomena presented by the rotifer and other microscopic entities, such as their morphology or their revival from desiccation, helped to improve methodology on the use of the microscope. The paper also argues that this sort of inquiry is not fundamentally different from other research in the natural sciences of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

In the early modern age, two causal models are clearly identifiable: action at a distance—a typical Renaissance paradigm, widespread among thinkers involved in natural magic and seventeenth-century Neoplatonists—and action by contact, on which both the Aristotelians and the Cartesians agreed. Pierre Gassendi too seems to endorse the motto: ‘Nihil agit in distans nisi prius agit in medium’ [Nothing acts at a distance unless it acts through a medium]. In this essay, it will be shown that a third causal model exists, (...) according to which material bodies are surrounded by ‘atmospheres’ of effluvia or qualities, which spread within a circumscribed ‘sphere of activity’, whose extension is peculiar to each body. In particular, it will be shown: what the third causal model was like, from an ontological point of view, that is, how it centred on the concepts of effluvium and spiritus, or qualitas; what this model was like, from a gnoseological point of view; how it was theorized by... (shrink)

This paper explores Simon Stevin’s l’Arithmétique of 1585, where we find a novel understanding of the concept of number. I will discuss the dynamics between his practice and philosophy of mathematics, and put it in the context of his general epistemological attitude. Subsequently, I will take a close look at his justificational concerns, and at how these are reflected in his inductive, a postiori and structuralist approach to investigating the numerical field. I will argue that Stevin’s renewed conceptualisation of the (...) notion of number is a sort of “existential closure” of the numerical domain, founded upon the practice of his predecessors and contemporaries. Accordingly, I want to make clear that l’Aritmetique have to be read not as an ontological analysis or exploration of the numerical field, but as an explication of a mathematical ethos. In this sense, this article also intends to make a specific contribution to the broader issue of the “ethics of geometry.”. (shrink)

Starting from the works by Aselli on the milky veins and Harvey on the motion of the heart and the circulation of the blood, the practice of vivisection witnessed a resurgence in the early modern period. I discuss some of the most notable cases in the century spanning from Aselli’s work to the investigations of fluid pressure in plants and animals by Stephen Hales. Key figures in my study include Johannes Walaeus, Jean Pecquet, Marcello Malpighi, Reinier de Graaf, Richard Lower, (...) Anton Nuck, and Anton de Heide. Although vivisection dates from antiquity, early modern experimenters expanded the range of practices and epistemic motivations associated with it, displaying considerable technical skills and methodological awareness about the problems associated with the animals being alive and the issue of generalizing results to humans. Many practitioners expressed great discomfort at the suffering of the animals; however, many remained convinced that their investigations were not only indispensable from an epistemic standpoint but also had potential medical applications. Early modern vivisection experiments were both extensive and sophisticated and cannot be ignored in the literature of early modern experimentation or of experimentation on living organisms across time. (shrink)

ArgumentFilm scholars have long posed the question of the specificity of the film medium and the apparatus of cinema, asking what is unique to cinema, how it constrains and enables filmmakers and audiences in particular ways that other media do not. This question has rarely been considered in relation to scientific film, and here it is posed within the specific context of cell biology: What does the use of time-based media such as film coupled with the microscope allow scientists to (...) experience that other visualization practices do not? Examining three episodes in the twentieth-century study of the cell, this article argues that the apparatus of microcinematography constitutes what might be thought of as a technical portal to another world, a door that determines the experience of the world that lies on the other side of it. In this case, the design of apparatuses to capture time-lapsed images enabled the acceleration of cellular time, bringing it into the realm of human perception and experience. Further, the experience of the cellular temporal world was part of a distinct kind of cell biology, one that was focused on behavior rather than structure, focused on the relation between cells, and between the cell and its milieu rather than on cell-intrinsic features such as chromosomes or organelles. As such, the instruments and technical design of the microcinematographic apparatus may be understood as a kind of materialized epistemology, the history of which can elucidate how cinema was and is used to produce scientific knowledge. (shrink)

Zusammenfassung: Seit Langem sieht die Welt sich wieder einer globalen pandemischen Bedrohung ausgesetzt, die nicht nur wissenschaftlich, wirtschaftlich, politisch und gesellschaftlich, sondern auch künstlerisch zu bewältigen versucht wird. Dabei dominieren vor allem zwei visuelle Phänomene die Bildwelten der journalistischen und sozialen Medien: das Bild der Maske und das Bild des Virus selbst. Beide Bilder sind insbesondere in der Verbindung mit epi- und pandemischer Erfahrung bereits hoch aufgeladen. Die Sichtbarkeit der Maske und die Sichtbarmachung des Virus verweisen auf ihre komplexen historischen (...) Dimensionen und rufen philosophisch-ethische Fragen auf. Durch eine Gegenüberstellung von künstlerischen Zeugnissen historischer und gegenwärtiger Seuchenerfahrung werden im vorliegenden Beitrag historisch tradierte Muster von narrativen und visuellen Seuchendarstellungen, die auch den gegenwärtigen Pandemiediskurs bestimmen, herausgearbeitet und kritisch hinterfragt. Dabei wird gefragt, wie Kunst und Literatur zu einer rhetorischen und metaphorischen Deeskalation aktueller und zukünftiger pandemischer Krisendiskurse beitragen und damit auch eine der Ästhetik inhärente Ethik aufzeigen können. (shrink)

At least Kant thinks it's a part of the concept that gold is to be a yellow metal. He thinks that we know this a priori, and that we could not discover it to be empirically false … Is Kant right about this? Gold [is] … a yellow malleable ductile high density metallic element resistant to chemical reaction. Nature considered materially is the totality of all objects of experience. Kant's joke. Kant wanted to prove in a way that would dumbfound (...) the common man that the common man was right: that was the secret joke of this soul. (shrink)

Purpose With the increasing sophistication of neuroimaging technologies in medicine, new language is being sought to make sense of the findings. The aim of this paper is to explore whether the brain-reading metaphor used to convey current medical or neurobiological findings imports unintended significations that do not necessarily reflect the genuine findings made by physicians and neuroscientists. Methods First, the paper surveys the ambiguities of the readability metaphor, drawing from the history of science and medicine, paying special attention to the (...) sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Next, the paper addresses more closely the issue of how metaphors may be confusing when used in medicine in general, and neuroscience in particular. The paper then explores the possible misleading effects associated with the contemporary use of the brain-reading metaphor in neuroimaging research. Results Rather than breaking new ground, what we see in current scientific language is a persistence of both a constraining and expansive set of language practices forming a relatively continuous tradition linking current neuroimaging to past scientific investigations into the brain. Conclusions The use of the readability metaphor thus carries with it both positive and negative effects. Physicians and neuroscientists must resort to the use of terms already laden with abstracted meanings, and often burdened by tradition, at the risk of importing through these words connotations that do not tally with the sought-after objectivity of empirical science. (shrink)

The invention of photography in the early 19th century changed the way that we see the world, and has played an important role in the development of western science. Notably, photographic vision is implicated in the definition of a new temporal relation to the natural world at the same time as modern biological science emerges as a disciplinary formation. It is this coincidence in birth that is central to this study. I suggest that by examining the relationship of early photography (...) to nature, we can gain some insight into the technological and epistemological underpinnings of biological vision. To this end, this article is primarily concerned with the role of photographic technology in the genealogy of biological vision. I argue that photography has always been ambiguously located between art and science, between nature and culture, and between life and death. Hence, while it may be a technological expression of the scientific desire to know and to control nature, photographic vision has continually disrupted and frustrated the ambitions of biological technoscience. The technovision of early biological science illustrates that the elusive temporality of nature has always been central to the production of knowledge of life. (shrink)

One of Leibniz’s most original ideas is his conception of the living individual as a hierarchical network of living beings whose relationships are essential to the proper functioning of its organic body. This idea is also valid to explain any existing order in nature that depends on the set of relationships of living beings that inhabit it. Both ideas are present in the conception of the natural world that Leibniz presents in his Monadology through his idea of biological infinitism. According (...) to this idea, nature consists of infinite theatres where living beings unfold their vital functions. Through this idea Leibniz defines both the biological complexity of nature and the living individual, which is in turn a portion of nature that unfolds from an infinite set of inferior living beings. The thesis that I defend in this work is that this Leibnizian understanding of the living individual and the natural complexity that includes infinite hierarchical levels of individuality has a marked ecological sense, as we would say today. This Leibnizian metaphysics of individuality that we could call biological is also interesting in light of the recent studies in the philosophy of biology. (shrink)

Is Leibnizian dynamics the New Physics sought in his youth to provide a solution to the problem of body unity/composition? This question can only be answered tentatively. The thesis that I will develop in this second part is that chemical-combinatoria project is not complete without some ideas of dynamics. The idea of form, which since the early Leibniz’s philosophy is projected to give a foundation to the corpuscular theory, only reaches this objective with the theory of conspiring movements that Leibniz (...) develops as the last phase of his dynamics. Within this general objective, this second part develops three secondary issues of importance: Leibniz’s emergent and realistic position, his theory of compounds and the interpretation of the Combinatoria or Characteristica project as a science of forms. (shrink)

According to Margaret Cavendish the entire natural world is essentially rational such that everything thinks in some way or another. In this paper, I examine why Cavendish would believe that the natural world is ubiquitously rational, arguing against the usual account, which holds that she does so in order to account for the orderly production of very complex phenomena (e.g. living beings) given the limits of the mechanical philosophy. Rather, I argue, she attributes ubiquitous rationality to the natural world in (...) order to ground a theory of the ubiquitous freedom of nature, which in turn accounts for both the world's orderly and disorderly behavior. (shrink)

In 1669, Malpighi published the first systematic dissection of an insect. The manuscript of this work contains a striking water-colour of the silkworm, which is described here for the first time. On repeating Malpighi's pioneering investigation, Swammerdam found what he thought were a number of errors, but was hampered by Malpighi's failure to explain his techniques. This may explain Swammerdam's subsequent description of his methods. In 1675, as he was about to abandon his scientific researches for a life of religious (...) contemplation, Swammerdam destroyed his manuscript on the silkworm, but not before sending the drawings to Malpighi. These figures, with their rich and unique use of colour, are studied here for the first time. The role played by Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, in encouraging contact between the two men is emphasized and the way this exchange reveals the development of some key features of modern science -- replication and modern scientific illustration -- is discussed. (shrink)

Can a constructive empiricist make sense of scientific representation? Usually, a scientific model is an abstract entity, and scientific representation is conceptualized as an intentional relation between scientific models and certain aspects of the world. On this conception, since both the models and the representation relation are abstract, a constructive empiricist, who is not committed to the existence of abstract entities, would be unable to invoke these notions to make sense of scientific representation. In this paper, instead of understanding representation (...) as a relation between abstract entities, I focus on the activity of representing, and argue that it provides a way of making sense of representation within the boundaries of empiricism. The activity of representing doesn’t deal with abstract entities, but with concrete ones, such as inscriptions, templates, and blueprints. In the end, by examining the practice of representing, rather than an artificially reified product—the representation—the constructive empiricist has the resources to make sense of scientific representation in empiricist terms. (shrink)

In the First of the Three Dialogues, Berkeley’s Hylas, responding to Philonous’s question whether extension and motion are separable from secondary qualities, says: What! Is it not an easy matter, to consider extension and motion by themselves,... Pray how do the mathematicians treat of them?

Microphotography was one of the earliest applications of photography in science: The first monograph on tissue organization illustrated with microphotographs was published in 1845. In the 1860s, a large number of introductions to scientific microphotography were published by anatomists. They argued that microphotography was a means of documenting the results of microscopic analysis, uncontaminated by the subjectivity of the observer. In the early decades of the 19th century, before the general acceptance of cell theory, such a technique was of special (...) importance, as no criteria were available to distinguish between important and superficial characters in the description of tissue microstructures. Microphotography was praised as the method of choice for documenting the scientific observations of microscopic material. Some of the microphotographic practices described in these early manuals, however, did not conform with the idea of a purely mechanical process of documentation. The authors of these manuals saw photography not as a technique which produced artifacts, but as a complete and reliable substitute for the original preparations. Thus, according to these authors, the artificial world of photography was seen as the actual representation of the microworld. Consequently, they tried to understand the microcosm by analyzing photographs instead of the microscopic preparation themselves. Such attitudes discredited the use of microphotography in the sciences. Consequently, the definitive breakthrough of scientific microphotography was delayed until the 1880s and was largely due to the efforts of Robert Koch, who made microphotography a central tool of bacteriology. (shrink)

In recent years a certain emphasis has been put by some scholars on Leibniz’s concern about empirical sciences and the relations between such concern and the development of his mature metaphysical system. In this paper I focus on Leibniz’s interest for the microscope and the astonishing discoveries that such instrument made possible in the field of the life sciences during the last part of the Seventeenth century. The observation of physical bodies carried out by the “magnifying glasses” revealed a matter (...) swarming everywhere with life and activity, contrary to the cartesian and atomistic view of matter as something sterile and passive. Moreover, the discovery of uncountable complete “animalcula” living in the smallest drop of water provided evidence for the idea of the preformation of every organism. During his lifetime, Leibniz was extremely watchful about the new microscopical discoveries and came into contact with some of the major “observers” of his time, such as Hooke, Leeuwenhoek, Swammerdam and Malpighi. Relying both on some passages in Leibniz’s texts and on recent critical studies, I will argue that important aspects of his metaphysics have been strongly affected by the empirical observation of the “invisible world” which the microscope made possible. In the last part of the paper I show how the concept of “preformation”, originally drawn from the context of the life sciences, comes to play in Leibnizʼs philosophy a very general role, going far beyond the scope of biology and shaping important aspects of his overall philosophical system. (shrink)

When a novel scientific theory conflicts with otherwise plausible moral assumptions, we do not treat that as evidence against the theory. We may scrutinize the empirical data more keenly and take extra care over its interpretation, but science is in some core sense immune to moral refutation. Can the same be said of philosophical theories (or the non-ethical, ‘metaphysical’ ones at least)? If a position in the philosophy of mind, for example, is discovered to have eye-widening moral import, does that (...) count against it at all? Actual responses by philosophers to the question of whether unanticipated moral consequences of metaphysical theories have evidential force are scattered, implicit, divergent, under-argued, and sometimes even self-undermining. The present discussion is, most immediately, an attempt to sort out the confusion. Beyond that, it exploits the new perspective this question gives us on a familiar topic: the relation of philosophy to science. (shrink)

This thesis offers a naturalist revision of Alain Badiou’s philosophy. This goal is pursued through an encounter of Badiou’s mathematical ontology and theory of truth with contemporary trends in philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science. I take issue with Badiou’s inability to elucidate the link between the empirical and the ontological, and his residual reliance on a Heideggerian project of fundamental ontology, which undermines his own immanentist principles. I will argue for both a bottom-up naturalisation of Badiou’s philosophical approach (...) to mathematics and a top-down naturalisation. Articulating my particular understanding of what realism and naturalism should commit us to, I propose a creative fusion of Badiou’s attention to metamathematical results with a structural-informational metaphysics, proposing a ‘matherialism’ uniting the more daring speculative insights of the former with the naturalist and empiricist commitments motivating the latter. (shrink)

Philosophy and Memory Traces defends two theories of autobiographical memory. One is a bewildering historical view of memories as dynamic patterns in fleeting animal spirits, nervous fluids which rummaged through the pores of brain and body. The other is new connectionism, in which memories are 'stored' only superpositionally, and reconstructed rather than reproduced. Both models, argues John Sutton, depart from static archival metaphors by employing distributed representation, which brings interference and confusion between memory traces. Both raise urgent issues about control (...) of the personal past, and about relations between self and body. Sutton demonstrates the role of bizarre body fluids in moral physiology, as philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Coleridge struggled to control their own innards and impose cognitive discipline on 'the phantasmal chaos of association'. Going on to defend connectionism against Fodor and critics of passive mental representations, he shows how problems of the self are implicated in cognitive science. (shrink)

While historians of the microscope currently consider that no programme of microscopy took place during the Enlightenment, the thesis challenges this view and aims at showing when and where microscopes were used as research tools. The focus of the inquiry is the research on microscopic animalcules and the relationship of European microscope making and practices of microscopy with topical trends of the industrial revolution, such as quantification. Three waves of research are characterised for the research on animalcules in the Enlightenment: (...) 1. seventeenth-century observations on animalcules crowned by Louis Joblot's 1718 works in the milieu of Paris Académie royale des sciences, 2. mid eighteenth-century observations and experiments on polyps and animalcules (Trembley, Baker and Hill) and, 3. between 1760 and 1790, OF Müller's establishment of the systematics of infusoria in Denmark and Germany. (shrink)

Descartes is usually taken to be a strict reductionist, and he frequently describes his work in reductionist terms. This dissertation, however, makes the case that he is a nonreductionist in certain areas of his philosophy and natural philosophy. This might seem like simple inconsistency, or a mismatch between Descartes's ambitions and his achievements. I argue that here it is more than that: nonreductionism is compatible with his wider commitments, and allowing for irreducibles increases the explanatory power of his system. Moreover, (...) Descartes depends on nonreductionist knowledge and on irreducibles in order to maintain his epistemology and metaphysics. That is, there is more in the Cartesian world than mind, matter, and God. (shrink)