scholarly journals Emily Herring, Kevin Matthew Jones, Konstantin S. Kiprijanov and Laura M. Sellers (eds), The Past, Present, and Future of Integrated History and Philosophy of Science

OEconomia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 727-730
Author(s):  
Jack Wright

This is the ninth volume of Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Religion. As with earlier volumes, these essays follow the tradition of providing a non-sectarian and non-partisan snapshot of the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion. This subdiscipline has become an increasingly important one within philosophy over the last century, and especially over the past half century, having emerged as an identifiable subfield with this timeframe along with other emerging subfields such as the philosophy of science and the philosophy of language. This volume continues the initial intention behind the series of attracting the best work from the premier philosophers of religion, as well as including work by top philosophers outside this area when their work and interests intersect with issues in the philosophy of religion. This inclusive approach to the series provides an opportunity to mitigate some of the costs of greater specialization in our discipline, while at the same time inviting wider interest in the work being done in the philosophy of religion.


Author(s):  
Stuart Glennan

The past twenty years have seen a resurgence of philosophical interest in mechanisms, an interest that has been driven both by concerns with the logical empiricist tradition and by the sense that a philosophy of science that attends to mechanisms will be more successful than traditional alternatives in illuminating the actual content and practice of science. In this chapter, the author surveys some of the topics discussed by the so-called new mechanists. These include the nature of mechanisms themselves, how mechanisms are discovered and represented via models, the debate over the norms of mechanistic explanation, and the relationship between mechanisms and causation.


1980 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 345-359 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. E. Michalson

Even the most casual observer of the contemporary theological scene knows that Wolfhart Pannenberg's theology relies heavily on the resurrection of Jesus as a genuinely historical event. The peculiarity of this is that a theologian who has accurately been called a ‘rationalist’ should so forthrightly embrace a claim that the entire thrust of post-Enlightenment theology has seemingly undermined. But Pannenberg himself contends that his reliance on the resurrection is not legitimated by the subterfuge of an existential ‘moment’ or ‘leap of faith’; instead, he argues for the acceptance of the resurrection on purely historical grounds. This argument implicitly rests on Pannenberg's conviction that ‘the truth is one’ and that the theologian's worst mistake is to cut the ties between theology and secular disciplines and modes of inquiry, a conviction that has recently received its most forceful statement in Pannenberg's Theology and the Philosophy of Science. This means that, insofar as belief in the resurrection of Jesus entails a claim about a past event, the standard methods by which we normally adjudicate claims about the past must be brought into play. Accordingly, the resurrection of Jesus is for Pannenberg not a ‘faith claim’, for ‘faith cannot ascertain anything certain about events of the past that would perhaps be inaccessible to the historian’. Instead, the resurrection of Jesus must be understood as the best historical explanation accounting for the New Testament witness and the rise of Christianity.


1972 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 796-817 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene F. Miller

The present controversy between “behavioral” and “postbehavioral” views of political inquiry reflects a larger dispute between two opposing theories of knowledge. Whereas the behavioral movement has its epistemological roots in positivism and, ultimately, in classical British empiricism, the most recent protest against behavioralism draws upon the theory of knowledge that has been the principal foe of empiricism over the past century. This theory of knowledge, which received the name “historicism” shortly after its emergence, had become the dominant epistemological position by the mid-twentieth century. This essay considers the general nature of historicism and its influence on the recent revolt against positivism in the philosophy of science. Finally, it examines the use that political scientists have made of historicist principles in opposing positivistic models of political inquiry. It argues that an epistemological relativism becomes unavoidable once certain premises of historicism are embraced.


Author(s):  
Armin W. Geertz

“On Religion and Cognition: A Brief Historical and Thematic Introduction”. This article is a brief introduction to the cognitive study of religion. Ten problems are identified which serve as the backdrop of the article. These concern the problems of historical depth in the study of cognition; the increase of many different disciplinary approaches; the resultant termino­logical confusion; the weaknesses of the natural sciences in terms of the philosophy of science; the corresponding weaknesses of the cognitive science of religion in terms of the philosophy of science; the need to replace strategic triumphalism on the one hand and strategic isolationism on the other with strategic sobriety; the need to maintain that the study of religion concerns origins, functions, forms, meanings and structures as well as texts; the realization that the methodological tools accompanying cognitive approaches should be handled with care and prudence; the reduction of cognition exclusively to processes in the brain ignores recent neurological research that points to alternative models of cognition; and there are many more possibilities in cognitive research than have been acknowledged by the pioneers of cognitive approaches to the study of religion. The article briefly discusses the many histories of research in cognition during the past 150 years and illustrates various cognitive themes which might be fruitfully pursued by scholars of religion.


Philosophy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Dallmann ◽  
Franz Huber

The term confirmation is used in epistemology and the philosophy of science whenever observational data and other information that is taken for granted speak in favor of or support scientific theories and everyday hypotheses. Historically, confirmation has been closely related to the problem of induction, the question of what to believe regarding the future given information that is restricted to the past and present. One relation between confirmation and induction is that the conclusion H of an inductively strong argument with premise E is confirmed by E. If inductive strength comes in degrees and the inductive strength of the argument with premise E and conclusion H is equal to r, then the degree of confirmation of H by E is likewise said to be equal to r.


2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Osbeck

The article draws from historical and contemporary resources to articulate the enduring or persistent responsibilities of general psychology, suggesting “common ground” and “point of view” as useful concepts in line with these. It then explores three important developments in the discipline over the past several decades—big data analytics, methodological proliferation, and critical psychology—and considers the role of general psychology in relation to these developments. The point of the article is to claim and illustrate that general psychology includes a philosophy of science from within, and that it has lasting importance to the broader discipline, even as the discipline itself transforms.


1987 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 363-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven J. Livesey

The publication of this volume appears to be the most recent in a group of works whose appearance marks renewed interest in Duhem. Over the past ten years, attention has been focused on Duhem's life (Jaki 1984), his physics (Jaki 1984; Nye 1986, 208–23), his philosophy of science (Jaki 1984, chap. 9; Paul 1979, chap. 5; Ariew 1984),' and his history of science (Jaki 1984, chap. 10; Martin 1976). But the significance of this translation is that - leaving asideTo Save the Phenomena– for the first time we have a partial translation into English of one of the two great historical works that revitalized the study of medieval science.


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