Abstract

After the preeminence of logical positivism/empiricism during the most part of twentieth century, during the last decades many authors began to recognize the relevance of the Kantian thought for present-day philosophy of science. This chapter follows this general trend, adopting a realist reading of Kantian teachings. On this basis, I will delineate a Kantian-rooted realism according to which the worlds of science are always the result of a synthesis between the conceptual schemes embodied in scientific theories and practices and the independent noumenal reality. However, my position takes distance from the Kantian doctrine by admitting the possibility of different conceptual schemes, both diachronically and synchronically. This view not only leaves room for abrupt and discontinuous changes in the history of science, but also leads to an ontological pluralism that allows for the coexistence of irreducible and different, even incompatible ontological domains at the same historical time. I will focus particularly on the synchronic case to reject both ontological reductionism and emergentism from a perspective that denies any priority or dependence between domains, in resonance with a non-hierarchical articulation between scientific theories and disciplines.