While the special volumes of the series of Handbooks of the Philosophy of Science address topics relative to a specific discipline, this general volume deals ...

Hume: General Philosophy makes available the most significant essays published on the work of David Hume. It brings together an extensive array of often difficult to obtain essays in a convenient and accessible format for researchers, teachers and student alike. Featuring a full-length introduction form the editor, it is an indispensable international reference work.

This is a personal, incomplete, and very informal take on the role of logic in general philosophy of science, which is aimed at a broader audience. We defend and advertise the application of logical methods in philosophy of science, starting with the beginnings in the Vienna Circle and ending with some more recent logical developments.

The very idea of a general philosophy of science relies on the assumption that there is this thing called science —as opposed to the various individual sciences. In this programmatic piece I make a case for the claim that general philosophy of science is the philosophy of science in general or science as such. Part of my narrative makes use of history, for two reasons. First, general philosophy of science is itself characterised (...) by an intellectual tradition which aimed to develop a coherent philosophical view of science, qua a part of culture with distinctive epistemic features and a distinctive relation to reality. But, second, this tradition went through some important conceptual shifts which re-oriented it and made it more sensitive to the actual development of science itself. The historical narrative focuses on three such moments: the defining moment, associated with Aristotle, and two major conceptual turns, related to Kant and Duhem. The pressures on the very idea of a general philosophy of science that followed the collapse of the macro-models of science that became popular in the 1960s, the pressures that lay all of the emphasis on fragmentation and not on integration, can be dealt with by a new synthesis within general philosophy of science of the constitutive and the historical, in light of the intellectual tradition that has defined it. (shrink)

Book reviewed:D. S. Clarke, Philosophy’s Second Revolution.

Dancy, J., Reading ParfitMillgram, E., Practical Induction.

Book reviewed:D. S. Clarke, Philosophy’s Second Revolution.

The relatively recent trend seems to be to move away from General Philosophy of Science and towards the philosophies of the individual sciences and to relocate whatever content GPoS is supposed to have to the philosophies of the sciences. I argue that scepticism or pessimism about the prospects of GPoS is unwarranted. I also argue that there can be no philosophies of the various sciences without GPoS. Defending these two claims is the main target of this chapter. I (...) will show, however, that there is osmosis between GPoS and the Philosphies of the Sciences and that this osmosis is grounded on what I will call‘Science in general’ and the two important functions GPoS plays vis-à-vis Science-in-general: an explicative function and a critical function. (shrink)

The chapter addresses a problem that affects both regulatory and tort law efforts to control exposure to carcinogens. What should be done when a disease may be the result of “joint causation”? That is, there are two or more possible causes, each of which alone would be sufficient to explain the presence of disease. Tort law has developed a solution to this problem which has recently been adopted by some courts considering toxic torts. However, the problem of joint causation and (...) more general issues raised by causation reveal weaknesses in tort law for compensating victims exposed to toxic substances. Because of these and other problems with tort law, administrative institutions at least _in principle_ may better control human exposure to toxic substances. However, such institutions face enough practical problems that they will not always reliably protect people from toxic substances. In the end, the chapter argues, there are several good reasons for preferring administrative agencies to tort law to provide environmental health protection. However, these theoretical advantages should not blind us to some of the political shortcomings of relying on administrative agencies. For that reason such agencies should not replace tort law, which can continue to serve a backup function to the agencies in our legal system. (shrink)

Book reviewed:D. S. Clarke, Philosophy’s Second Revolution.

Touches the meaning of philosophy, its scope, metaphysics, epistemology, theology, religion, logic, mind, body, and value of reality.

This chapter provides an overview of the topics discussed in the book and likens the assessment of toxic substances to the experience of peering through a glass darkly. The work is divided into five main chapters and these chapters give an exploration of the scientific background necessary for understanding the subject. The book examines the practice of predicting risks from animal bioassays and addresses the normative implications of the scientific uncertainties in risk assessment. In addition, the book examines problems in (...) the statistics of human epidemiological studies and animal bioassay and considers practical evidence-gathering problems, theoretical difficulties, and traditional practices in interpreting epidemiological studies and offers an alternative to traditional practices. (shrink)

This chapter argues against the shift in paradigm in favor of scientific evidence in tort law cases. Recent proposals, seeking to require more demanding scientific evidence in toxic tort (and other) suits, are mistaken because these seem to impose a universal standard of evidence for quite different institutions—with the risk of distorting existing reasonable tort law relationships, and erring on the side of exclusion rather than admission of evidence. Since the plaintiff bears the burden of production, requiring that this be (...) met by proof equivalent to the criminal law's “beyond a reasonable doubt,” requirement, as some have argued, this substantially distorts the balance of interests between plaintiff and defendant. The appropriate paradigm is not that for scientific practice but the traditional tort law standard of evidence articulated in _Ferebee v. Chevron Chemical Co._, which said that the appropriate standard is not scientific certainty but “legal sufficiency.” The paradigm of choice in torts is in a sense inclined to retain much of the status quo. (shrink)

Virtue ethical inspired approaches to practical and professional ethics have long been endorsed across various disciplines. Journalistic ethics is no exception. Call such approaches Virtue Ethical Journalism (VEJ). Virtue ethics has also drawn considerable attention from the field of moral psychology, though not all of it is supportive. Among the critics, some take the view that character traits and virtues are not effective enough in guiding people’s behavior. As a result, they conclude that traits should be minimized in ethical thought. (...) Call this stronger view character skepticism. VEJ has taken character skepticism seriously. Many responses to character skepticism defending VEJ, however, raise similar points as those that defend a more general theory of virtue ethics from such skepticism. I argue, however, that such responses to character skepticism are not up to the task of defending VEJ. Accordingly, VEJ would benefit from novel responses to character skepticism or significant revision. (shrink)

This chapter continues the argument of why ideal levels of scientific accuracy should not be applied in torts and administrative law by focusing on two issues. Firstly, the standards of evidence ought to be appropriate to the institutional context. Secondly, justice requires that priority be given to avoiding false negatives and underregulation. One requires justification of the epistemic presupposition, the other, justification of the underlying moral view. The first issue states that the burden of proof that must be satisfied in (...) order to make a particular institutional decision will depend at least in large part upon the kinds of mistakes one seeks to avoid. For example, criminal law stringently protects against convicting innocent people. To avoid this, the equivalent of false positives, the state must overcome a high burden of proof to establish its case. By contrast, in screening patients for life-threatening diseases we might seek very much to avoid missing someone who has the disease, to avoid false negatives. The second issue comes from the premise that in the common law of torts, distributive issues are not decided as a matter of consistent theory but are developed by means of case-by-case adjudication between two parties. Although judges try to produce consistent decisions over time, but they do not always succeed. If the law is not necessarily consistent, it is especially important to have a better view of more fundamental and consistent normative principles to guide epistemology. (shrink)

The chapter discusses some of the risk assessment issues that arise in administrative agencies charged with regulating carcinogens. It is argued that present assessment strategies, as well as some recommended by commentators, both of which are inspired by the paradigm of research science—the use of careful, detailed, science-intensive, substance-by-substance risk assessments—paralyze regulation. The identification, assessment, and regulation of potential carcinogens are all too slow to evaluate adequately the existing universe of 50,000–100,000 chemical substances, and the 1,000–1,500 new ones that are (...) added each year. Thus, for identified carcinogens we need to adopt something like the expedited approximation procedures, which permit faster evaluation of potentially toxic substances. Alternative approaches to regulatory science which acknowledge and use normative considerations to guide assessment procedures and which recognize the importance of the rate of evaluation will expedite risk assessments and reduce regulatory false negatives and underregulation. (shrink)

This chapter provides some scientific background of risk assessment and sets up some of the institutional questions concerning the appropriate evidentiary standards needed within torts and administrative law to establish the requisite harms or risks of harm. The discussion here focuses on animal bioassays and human epidemiological studies, two aspects of carcinogen risk assessment relied upon in regulatory institutions to ascertain risks to human beings. The best evidence that proves that a substance causes cancer to human beings is provided by (...) _well-done_ epidemiological studies with large samples and sufficient follow-up. However, the chapter begins by considering animal studies, which is the evidence much more frequently relied upon by regulatory agencies, although it is less typically used in tort law and some jurisdictions give it little credence. There are uncertainties in animal bioassays which are large enough such that two different researchers using exactly the same data points from an animal study can come to much different conclusions. (shrink)

An important question facing contemporary philosophy of science is whether the natural sciences in terms of their historical records exhibit distinguishing developmental patterns or structures. At least two philosophical stances are possible in answering this question. The first pertains to the plurality of the individual sciences. From this stance, the various sciences are analyzed individually and compared with one another in order to derive potential commonalities, if any, among them. The second stance involves a general philosophy of (...) science in which a thorough theory of the natural sciences is developed. The latter stance strives to account for more than possible commonalities among the sciences but also to provide a broad-spectrum philosophical framework to account for, or to explicate, the nature of science itself and its progress. In this paper, the second stance is taken in which an evolutionary philosophy of science is proposed. To that end, Thomas Kuhn’s evolutionary philosophy of science is initially discussed and critiqued. An evolutionary philosophy of science is then proposed based on a revision of Kuhn’s evolutionary philosophy of science in terms of George Gaylord Simpson’s various tempos and modes for biological evolution. Next, two historical case studies from the biological sciences are reconstructed to illustrate the robustness of the proposed evolutionary philosophy of science for explicating the progress of the natural sciences. A concluding section discusses the proposed evolutionary philosophy of science with respect to providing a broad-spectrum framework or general philosophy of science for understanding the nature and progress of the natural sciences. (shrink)

Richard Morehouse has identified two crucial areas, central to the pedagogical core of Philosophy for Children. These, he claims enable techniques associated with P4C to be generalized to other contexts. After Lipman, he reminds us that the power of the P4C curriculum is found, first in the novels which are written to be "captivating and beguilding, designed to liberate the literary and illustrative powers of the children and to stimulate their thinking." This philosophical 'liberation' is both enabled by and (...) enables the child's insight into the individual as 'concrete wholes existing in relationships.' The reading of the novels is the basis for the other major program component, the discussion that prompts the 'reflection on that experience,' 'the pulling of leading ideas from the narrative and the application of conceptual tools to the understanding of those ideas.' The ideas that constitute the content of the P4C program are drawn from the philosophical texts and are applied to the text in the discussion. These ideas include the 'basic tools of philosophy.'. (shrink)

Dancy, J., Reading ParfitMillgram, E., Practical Induction.

The book elucidates the complex relationship between Jewish philosophy and general philosophy. At the same time it examines Jewish philosophy as an independent discipline of thought. The issue of particular and characteristic problems of Jewish thought is taken up in the third part of the book. Other philosophical topics - from the general as well as the Jewish angle - are the quiddity of philosophy, its aims and tasks, its value and purpose, and the (...) relations between philosophy, religion and theology, as reflected in general and Jewish thought. The concluding sections of the book highlight several basic problems of Jewish philosophy: its sources of inspiration and its influence, the motifs for philosophizing, the relation between reason and revelation, and lastly, the principal transformations in Jewish philosophy with the passage from medievalism to modernity. (shrink)

This paper aims to show that the development of Feyerabend’s philosophical ideas in the 1950s and 1960s largely took place in the context of debates on quantum mechanics. In particular, he developed his influential arguments for pluralism in science in discussions with the quantum physicist David Bohm, who had developed an alternative approach to quantum physics which (in Feyerabend’s perception) was met with a dogmatic dismissal by some of the leading quantum physicists. I argue that Feyerabend’s arguments for theoretical pluralism (...) and for challenging established theories were connected to his objections to the dogmatism and conservatism he observed in quantum physics. However, as Feyerabend gained insight into the physical details and historical complexities which led to the development of quantum mechanics, he gradually became more modest in his criticisms. His writings on quantum mechanics especially engaged with Niels Bohr; initially, he was critical of Bohr’s work in quantum mechanics, but in the late 1960s, he completely withdrew his criticism and even praised Bohr as a model scientist. He became convinced that however puzzling quantum mechanics seemed, it was methodologically unobjectionable – and this was crucial for his move towards ‘anarchism’ in philosophy of science. (shrink)

First published in 1927, this translation of Kulpe's 'Einleitung in die Philosophie', 1895, covered psychology, logic, ethics, esthetics and general philosophy. The author adopted a uniform approach of positivity, interest and impartiality, aiming his work at a wider public than students of philosophy. The volume was intended as an elementary but complete guide to philosophy, past and present and included facts and arguments previously confined to philosophical encyclopaedias.

Comparative political theory is at best an embryonic and marginalized endeavor. As practiced in most Western universities, the study of political theory generally involves a rehearsal of the canon of Western political thought from Plato to Marx. Only rarely are practitioners of political thought willing (and professionally encouraged) to transgress the canon and thereby the cultural boundaries of North America and Europe in the direction of genuine comparative investigation. Border Crossings presents an effort to remedy this situation, fully launching a (...) new era in political theory. Thirteen scholars from around the world examine the various political traditions of West, South, and East Asia and engage in a reflective cross-cultural discussion that belies the assumptions of an Asian "essence" and of an unbridgeable gulf between West and non-West. The denial of essential differences does not, however, amount to an endorsement of essential sameness. As viewed and as practiced by contributors to this ground-breaking volume, comparative political theorizing must steer a course between uniformity and radical separation--this is the path of "border crossings.". (shrink)

The work of Arnout Geulincx (1624?1669), a Flemish Cartesian that developed a highly curious?parallelistic? view on the universe, shows striking prima facie resemblances to Stoicism. Should we label Geulincx a reinventor of Stoic tenets, albeit within a strict Cartesian theoretical framework? To answer this question, my contribution begins by discussing relevant aspects of Stoicism and by introducing the?existential? philosophy of Geulincx, whose metaphysical views on man brought him to adopt an ethics based upon absolute obedience and humility. It will (...) discuss Geulincx's own views on the Stoics and, finally, compare Geulincx's philosophy with the Stoic world view. The main argument will be that, despite a deep affinity and many parallels, one crucial difference remains, as the dualism any true Cartesian metaphysics implies has important consequences for Geulincx's ethics in general and for his view on man in particular. As we will see, man plays a very peculiar role in the cosmic drama that we call the?universe? (shrink)

General systems theory played a major role in the history of the sciences and the humanities since the 1950s. But the origins of general systems theory are blurred. While the major initiator of 20th-­ century general systems theory, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, acknowledged philosophical inspirations but ignored concrete precursors, subsequent scholars chose to ignore both. This study identifies an early formulation of general systems theory in Johann Heinrich Lambert's Systematologie (1767). An analysis of Lambert's systematology, contextualized by (...) his philosophy, which includes historical and structural touch points with Kant's subsequent critical conception of systematicity, demonstrates that the essential ground for general systems theory had already been established as early as the 1760s. Bertalanffy's own theoretical development cannot be treated exhaustively here. Rather, this paper uses his approach and historical position, which is rooted in a cognate and partly continuous traditional European philosophical background inspired by Kant and others, as a 20th-­ century comparative frame of reference to spot the true conceptual beginnings of general systems theory. This investigation corrects the historical record and shows that Bertalanffy and others did not invent the discipline but have in fact reinvented it in a new context and in a seemingly novel form. (shrink)

Throughout the medieval and modern periods, in various sacred and secular guises, the unification of all forms of knowledge under the rubric of ‘science’ has been taken as the prerogative of humanity as a species. However, as our sense of species privilege has been called increasingly into question, so too has the very salience of ‘humanity’ and ‘science’ as general categories, let alone ones that might bear some essential relationship to each other. After showing how the ascendant Stanford School (...) in the philosophy of science has contributed to this joint demystification of ‘humanity’ and ‘science’, I proceed on a more positive note to a conceptual framework for making sense of science as the art of being human. My understanding of ‘science’ is indebted to the red thread that runs from Christian theology through the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment to the Humboldtian revival of the university as the site for the synthesis of knowledge as the culmination of self-development. Especially salient to this idea is science‘s epistemic capacity to manage modality (i.e. to determine the conditions under which possibilities can be actualised) and its political capacity to organize humanity into projects of universal concern. However, the challenge facing such an ideal in the twentyfirst century is that the predicate ‘human’ may be projected in three quite distinct ways, governed by what I call ‘ecological’, ‘biomedical’ and ‘cybernetic’ interests. Which one of these future humanities would claim today’s humans as proper ancestors and could these futures co-habit the same world thus become two important questions that general philosophy of science will need to address in the coming years. (shrink)