The idealistic current of thought has been flowing since the time of Plato and before; and while it has been diverted from time to time and even partially dammed up, it has persisted and found its way into our own period. Those who decide philosophical questions on the strength of what they take the Zeitgeist to be have been sure for a long time that philosophical idealism in its variegated forms is at best a narrow trickle about to disappear in (...) the mud of scientific naturalism or the fine grained sand of Anglo-American analysis. Some view any idealistic utterance as a mere seepage, an oddity; others, in a self-ascribed posture of contemporary “maturity,” ignore even the presence of the seepage, perhaps fearing that it might be a spring. (shrink)

There is increasing evidence that a clear battleline is forming again between reductive materialism and general idealistic philosophy. In the days of Royce and Bowne in this country and Bradley and Bosanquet in Britain, the stimuli to a revived materialism came from the theory of evolution and from the natural sciences generally. And there was some growing analytic aversion to Hegel’s system. Idealists today have clearly shown that their views are not easily annulled by facile citations to modern scientific activity. (...) One need only call to mind the solid work of Errol Harris, whose brilliant Nature, Mind and Modern Science of 1954 has just been translated by Philip Mueller as Nature, l’esprit et science moderne. In a recent article dealing with the changing relations of nature, man, and modern science, Harris points out that current biology in conjunction with holistic physics has produced an organismic conception of nature which incorporates man and his activities “as a dialectical scale of forms in which human mentality is a late stage.” Nature is then not something to be exploited but to be viewed as an ecological system, a matrix of human life. (shrink)

This work opens with a development of the notion of Unfathomed Knowledge, which Bartley makes clear by using it to explain such recent scientific advances as the development of drugs for the treatment of AIDS, and by showing its implications for such far-flung fields as the Marxist theory of alienation, the sociology of knowledge, patent law, and morality.

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 as instrumental to practical concerns, (...) and issues only in context-specific and not general methodological principles. (shrink)

The Critical Mass in Collective Action: A Micro-Social Theory, Marwell Gerald and Oliver PamelaOn Social Facts, Gilbert Margaret.

Although 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 it possible to ascertain (...) the extent to which those who are marginalized in the larger society are also marginalized in science. (shrink)

This paper traces August Comte’s attempts to get clear about the concept of mathematical analysis at various stages in his intellectual development. Comte was especially concerned with distinguishing a method of analysis for the resolution of complex prolems from analysis in the sense of a method of drawing inferences. Geometrical analysis serves as his model for the former. In his attempt to get clear about this notion, he discovers an historical succession of different methods all of which may be labeled (...) “analytic.” In modern terms, Comte reveals how each of these methods of analysis characterizes a research program in mathematics, even showing us how more powerful methods came to supplant less powerful methods of analysis. (shrink)

Renouvier had argued that Comte's philosophy of science yielded very conservative normative advice regarding the sciences. Fedi, Becquemont, Logue, and Mouy have suggested the same charge could be leveled at Renouvier regarding evolutionary theory, non-Euclidean geometry, and set theory. This paper shows Renouvier's views were not unreasonable given what was known at the time. Further, Renouvier had a deeper appreciation than Comte of human fallibility and did not proscribe any area of research, even those with which he disagree.

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 capacities can then (...) be explained by natural selection remains an open question for empirical investigation. Key Words: categories • causality • cognition • Durkheim • evolutionary psychology. (shrink)

Ecological feminism is a feminism which attempts to unite the demands of the women's movement with those of the ecological movement. Ecofeminists often appeal to “ecology” in support of their claims, particularly claims about the importance of feminism to environmentalism. What is missing from the literature is any sustained attempt to show respects in which ecological feminism and the science of ecology are engaged in complementary, mutually supportive projects. In this paper we attempt to do that by showing ten important (...) similarities which establish the need for and benefits of on-going dialogue between ecofeminists and ecosystem ecologists. (shrink)