Kant on Concepts, Intuitions, and the Continuity of Space

This paper engages with Kant‘s account of space as a continuum. The stage is set by looking at how the question of spatial continuity comes up in a debate from the 1920s between Ernst Cassirer and logical empiricist thinkers about Kant‘s conception of spatial representation as a pure intuition. While granting that concrete features of space can only be known empirically, Cassirer attempted to save Kant‘s conception by restricting it to the core commitment of space as a continuous coexistent manifold. Cassirer did not however come up with a transcendental argument for spatial continuity. The paper presents such an argument by providing a reading of Kant‘s from which it transpires that Kant does not simply rely on supposed into the continuity of space. It is by way ofinstead that we can know space to be continuous and Kant’s distinction between intuitions and concepts does hinge on such knowledge.

Verificationism and (Some of) its Discontents

Verificationism has had a bad press for many years. The view that the meaning of our words is bound up with the discernible difference it would make if what we say, think or write were true or false, nowadays is scorned as “positivist” though it was shared by eminent empiricists and pragmatists. This paper seeks to sort through some of the complexities of what is often portrayed as an unduly simplistic conception. I begin with an overview of its main logical empiricist varieties before considering which aspects of it fall victim to which of the three major types of objection that have been raised against it. I will conclude that what is left standing is a modest proposal that seems worth further investigation.

Paul A. Roth and the Revival of Analytical Philosophy of History

Krzysztof Brzechczyn’s important collection around Roth’s “revival” stimulates thought about the approaches adopted by analytical philosophers of history. Roth revives Danto’s 1965 pragmatic “constructivist” insights: in a narrative, earlier “events under a description” are described in terms of possibly unknowable later ones and, following Mink, in terms of possibly unknowable later concepts. Roth thinks of the resulting narrative explanation as justified in virtue of its constituting the object explained. However, earlier analytical philosophers of history faced different issues and adopted two different approaches: the positivist logical empiricist analysis used by Hempel (1942) and the nonpositivist “ordinary language” conceptual analysis of Oxford linguistic philosophers used by Dray (1957). Hempel’s Hume-sourced model of historical explanation set a scientific standard to be achieved, while Dray “tested” that analysis against historiographical practice. Both dubiously made “explanation” epistemologically central, as does Roth. Neither they nor later “narrativists” saw that more problematic was “compositionality”, the Hume-sourced view that the meanings of narratives were fully given by the meanings of their constituent sentences.

Metaphysics, Function and the Engineering of Life: the Problem of Vitalism

Vitalism was long viewed as the most grotesque view in biological theory: appeals to a mysterious life-force, Romantic insistence on the autonomy of life, or worse, a metaphysics of an entirely living universe. In the early twentieth century, attempts were made to present a revised, lighter version that was not weighted down by revisionary metaphysics: “organicism”. And mainstream philosophers of science criticized Driesch and Bergson’s “neovitalism” as a too-strong ontological commitment to the existence of certain entities or “forces”, over and above the system of causal relations studied by mechanistic science, rejecting the weaker form, organicism, as well. But there has been some significant scholarly “push-back” against this orthodox attitude, notably pointing to the 18th-century Montpellier vitalists to show that there are different historical forms of vitalism, including how they relate to mainstream scientific practice (Wolfe and Normandin, eds. 2013). Additionally, some trends in recent biology that run counter to genetic reductionism and the informational model of the gene present themselves as organicist (Gilbert and Sarkar 2000, Moreno and Mossio 2015). Here, we examine some cases of vitalism in the twentieth century and today, not just as a historical form but as a significant metaphysical and scientific model. We argue for vitalism’s conceptual originality without either reducing it to mainstream models of science or presenting it as an alternate model of science, by focusing on historical forms of vitalism, logical empiricist critiques thereof and the impact of synthetic biology on current (re-)theorizing of vitalism.

What Is the New Mechanical Philosophy?

This chapter introduces the New Mechanical Philosophy and situates it within the history of science and its philosophy. The New Mechanism is an extension and revision of older mechanical philosophies, and extends themes from the last fifty years of post-logical empiricist philosophy of science. The chapter introduces a central theme of the book, namely the essential tension between the particularity of mechanisms and the scientific craving for general representations. It also offers an overview of methodology, arguing for the possibility of a scientifically informed metaphysics and a philosophy of science that honors both the unity and diversity of the sciences.

REALISMO SCIENTIFICO SENZA SCIENTISMO: LA PROPOSTA DI HILARY PUTNAM

The reflection of Hilary Putnam over the scientific realism endured frequent distortions inside the contemporary epistemologic debate. Just recently, in fact, in Philosophy in an Age of Science (2012), Putnam himself wanted to explicitly denounce the undeserved identification of his originary scientific realism with the scientism, as well as the illegitimacy of the resulting criticism of incoherence considering the new appreciation of metaphysics of the Nineties. On the other hand, in Mathematics, matter and method (1975), Putnam has already led a fierce criticism against the logical empiricist scientism and its deceptive and non realistic concept of science. The paper intents to present this criticism starting with the analysis of some essays from the first volume of the Philosophical Papers, in order to bring to the “backlight” surface the actual nature of his scientific realism. The scientific realism will, first of all, show itself like the attitude of the phylosopher, or rather of the scientist, in front of the scientific activity: differently from the non-realistic “deductivism” which prior imposes its own methodological rules as an essential warrancy of truth, the scientific realism refuses such “feticism” of the method, sure that the scientific activity works by itself in the sphere of truth, as in inside the space defined by the relationship between a subject and something else. Such polarity will be verified through Putnam’s criticism against the geo-chronometric conventionalism of Adolf Grünbaum (An Examination of Grünbaum’s Philosophy of Geometry, 1963), in terms of “existential relevance” of scientific theories, even when recognising conventional elements in the definition with reference to physical quantities.

Mechanisms and Mechanical Philosophy

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.