Fons DewulfTilburg University | UVT · Department of Philosophy
Fons Dewulf
Doctor of Philosophy
About
13
Publications
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51
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
October 2018 - September 2021
Publications
Publications (13)
In this paper I trace Ernest Nagel’s earliest ideas on explanation by investigating his course-notes of the 1930s. At Columbia University there was an increasing interest in the study of Aristotle. As I show, Nagel’s focus on the explanatory aim of science originated from his reading of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics. Through his teaching of Arist...
I argue that Carl Hempel’s pioneering work on scientific explanation introduced an assumption which Hempel never motivated, namely that explanation is an aim of science. Ever since, it largely remained unquestioned in analytic philosophy of science. By expanding the historical scope of the debate on explanation to philosophers from the first half o...
In this paper I argue that Carnap in the Aufbau and in his later writings consistently conceives the humanities and the social sciences as domains of knowledge that are epistemically equal to the natural sciences. I show that Carnap was skeptical about the philosophical theories of Dilthey, Rickert and Windelband which aimed to distinguish the natu...
In this article I will discuss two twentieth century philosophers, Rudolf Carnap and Leo Apostel, who aimed to remove ethics from philosophy. Carnap’s ideas about value judgments amount to a well-known, classical account of non-cognitivism in twentieth century meta-ethics. Although Apostel’s ideas are unknown, I will show that they are a direct res...
In this paper I criticise the thesis that value-laden approaches in American philosophy of science were marginalized in the 1960s through the editorial policy at Philosophy of Science and funding practices at the National Science Foundation. I argue that there is no available evidence of any normative restriction on philosophy of science as a domai...
In this paper, we investigate how the life and work of Louis Rougier relate to the broader political dimension of logical empiricist philosophy. We focus on three practical projects of Rougier in the 1930s and 1940s. First, his attempts to integrate French-speaking philosophers into an international network of scientific philosophers by organizing...
This paper situates Carl Hempel's 1942 paper "The Function of General Laws in History" within a broader debate over the philosophy of history in American academia between 1935 and 1943. I argue that Hempel's paper was directed against German neo-Kantianism, and show how the German debate over historiography continued between 1939 and 1943 in the co...
In this paper I investigate how intellectual problems concerning an epistemology of history and a historical view of knowledge played a role in the network of logical empiricist philosophers between 1930 and 1945. Specifically, I focus on the practical efforts of Hans Reichenbach and Otto Neurath to incorporate these intellectual stakes concerning...
This history of the modern concept of scientific explanation aims to have two effects. On the one hand, it aims to argue that the continued use of scientific explanation as a meta-concept should be constantly held accountable to the epistemological or metaphysical commitments that necessarily come with it. One cannot legitimate the use of scientifi...
This article investigates the various ways in which Rudolf Carnap incorporated contemporary epistemological problems concerning the Geisteswissenschaften in Der logische Aufbau der Welt. I argue that Carnap defends a nonreductive incorporation of the Geisteswissenschaften within the unity of science. To this end Carnap aims to solve the problem of...
In this paper I argue that understanding is an indispensable epistemic procedure when historians use texts as evidence. On my account understanding installs a norm that determines what kind of event or object a texts is evidence of. Historians can debate which norms should govern a body of texts, and if they reach consensus, they can use that body...
Projects
Project (1)
After the introduction of Carl Hempel’s Covering Law model in 1948, scientific explanation became a central topic of philosophical attention in early anglophone philosophy of science in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, philosophy of science became an academic subdiscipline, with its own societies, journals and graduate programs. Though many contemporary philosophers of science have distanced themselves from the philosophical methodology installed during this phase, scientific explanation continues to play an important role in the philosophical reflection over the sciences. However, for philosophers working before Hempel explanation was not an evident aim of scientific inquiry and so, explanation does not necessarily have to be a central topic in the philosophical reflection on science. Surprisingly, little is known about the reasons why scientific explanation so rapidly became a standard topic in early philosophy of science.
In this project, I investigate how the standardization of scientific explanation came about: what implicit or explicit methodological assumptions concerning the analysis of science drove the early debate on scientific explanation? Through this investigation I aim to uncover the broader methodological norms of reasoning that characterize early anglophone philosophy of science in the 1950s and 1960s. This historical research will then be used to assess the current philosophical motivations to discuss scientific activity in terms of explanation.
