Brian Ellis

Brian Ellis
La Trobe University · Philosophy

Bachelor of Arts, BSc., BPhil., D.Litt

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50
Publications
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1,649
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Publications

Publications (50)
Chapter
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, the most urgent problem for philosophers of science appeared to be that of reconciling their philosophies with the astonishing discoveries in space-time theory and electromagnetism. Albert Einstein had written his remarkable paper on the electrodynamics of moving bodies, better known as the S...
Chapter
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This chapter is concerned primarily with the educational roles and academic contributions of programs in history and philosophy of science (hereafter HPS) in Australasia. It focuses mainly on those that are most relevant to the overall project of writing a history of philosophy in Australasia. The philosophy of science has always been an important...
Book
While the phrase "metaphysics of science" has been used from time to time, it has only recently begun to denote a specific research area where metaphysics meets philosophy of science-and the sciences themselves. The essays in this volume demonstrate that metaphysics of science is an innovative field of research in its own right. The principle areas...
Article
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A theory of morality acceptable to humanists must be one that can be accepted independently of religion. In this paper, I argue that while there is such a theory, it is a non-standard one, and its acceptance would have some far-reaching consequences. As one might expect, the theory is similar to others in various ways. But it is not the same as any...
Article
In The Metaphysics of Scientific Realism, Brian Ellis develops the metaphysics of scientific realism to the point where it begins to take on the characteristics of a first philosophy, that is, as a theory about the nature of reality that can reasonably adjudicate on theories in other fields of enquiry in which assumptions are made about the basic n...
Article
The aim of this paper is to argue that there are categorical properties as well as causal powers, and that the world would not exist as we know it without them. For categorical properties are needed to define the powers—to locate them, and to specify their laws of action. These categorical properties, I shall argue, are not dispositional. For their...
Article
Physical realism is the thesis that the world is more or less as present-day physical theory says it is, i.e. a mind-independent reality, that consists fundamentally of physical objects that have causal powers, are located in space and time, belong to natural kinds, and interact causally with each other in various natural kinds of ways. It is thus...
Article
There are three outstanding issues raised by my critics in this volume. The first concerns the nature and status of universals (John Heil). The second is the essential problem', which is the issue of how to distinguish the essential properties of natural kinds from their accidental ones, and the related question of whether we really need to believe...
Article
For scientific essentialists, the only logical possibilities of existence are the real (or metaphysical) ones, and such possibilities, they say, are relative to worlds. They are not a priori, and they cannot just be invented. Rather, they are discoverable only by the a posteriori methods of science. There are, however, many philosophers who think t...
Article
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Article
In this paper it will be argued that causal laws describe the actions of causal powers. The process which results from such an action is one which belongs to a natural kind, the essence of which is that it is a display of this causal power. Therefore, if anything has a given causal power necessarily, it must be naturally disposed to act in the mann...
Article
It has been evident for some time now that God is back as a force to be reckoned with. Physicists, chemists, mathematicians, cosmologists, biologists and philosophers are all taking him very seriously. They are not generally persuaded that he has any of the powers or concerns usually attributed to him, or even that he exists. But they are acutely a...
Article
Part 1 Ontology: the scientific point of view the ontology of science scientific realism and empiricism. Part 2 Truth: the programme of analysis the bearers of truth redundancy theories. Part 3 Epistemology: naturalistic truth and epistemic evaluation the problem of induction realism and epistemic naturalism.
Article
Traditionally, forces are causes of a special sort. Forces have been conceived to be the direct or immediate causes of things. Other sorts of causes act indirectly by producing forces which are transmitted in various ways to produce various effects. However, forces are supposed to act directly without the mediation of anything else. But forces, so...
Article
I argue in this paper that anyone who accepts the ontology of scientific realism can only accept a pragmatic theory of truth, i.e., a theory on which truth is what it is epistemically right to believe. But the combination of realism with such a theory of truth is a form of internal realism; therefore, a scientific realist should be an internal real...
Article
Pour justifier et expliquer nos pratiques inductives, il faut selon l'A. une theorie de la rationalite qui definisse celle-ci en termes de strategies optimales pour une maximisation de la valeur epistemique. L'A. propose cette epistemologie fondee sur des valeurs, qu'il oppose a celle de l'empirisme, fondee sur des regles. Les valeurs epistemiques...
Article
Beauregard ([1], p. 488) claims that Bowman and I were mistaken in saying that “… if the empirical predictions of the Special Theory regarding clock transport are correct, [then] a slow transport definition of simultaneity can be constructed that is logically independent of any signal definition, but is in fact equivalent to the standard signal def...
Article
In his original paper of 1905, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”, Einstein described a procedure for synchronizing distant clocks at rest in any inertial system K. Clocks thus synchronized may be said to be in standard signal synchrony in K. It has often been claimed that there are no logical or physical reasons for preferring standard sign...
Article
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Questions

Question (1)
Question
I have been developing the idea of scientific realism as a first philosophy. My ideas have been developed in my books of 2009,, 2012, and 2017, in all of which moral and political philosophies, compatible with scientific realism has been developed. Thus my question.

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