Content uploaded by Victor M. Hernandez
Author content
All content in this area was uploaded by Victor M. Hernandez on Dec 10, 2018
Content may be subject to copyright.
A preview of the PDF is not available
Filosofía de la ciencia: una mirada histórico-sociológica
Abstract
Este capítulo se ocupa del proceso de formación de la filosofía de la ciencia como subdisciplina filosófica estableciendo sus rasgos peculiares desde el punto de vista de lo que podría llamarse historia cultural, o bien, la interacción entre la historia externa e historia interna de la nueva disciplina, y sus cruces con aquella disciplina paralela denominada sociología del conocimiento o de la ciencia.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This volume critically reexamines Otto Neurath’s conception of the unity of science. Some of the leading scholars of Neurath’s work, along with many prominent philosophers of science critically examine his place in the history of philosophy of science and evaluate the relevance of his work for contemporary debates concerning the unity of science.
1. The plot of traditions: towards a new history of analitic philosophy In the last few years increasing interest has been shown in a more detailed and comprehensive history of European analytic philosophy, i.e. one that does not merely confine itself to dealing with the currents best known to historians (such as the Vienna Neo-Positivists and the English analytic school), but which also examines less well-known national thinkers and traditions. It has recently become clear that the historical stereotype which viewed analytic philosophy as being an exclusively British, and subsequently American, domain has been put aside. As Simons aptly puts it: In the nineteenth century, mainstream philosophy throughout Europe was Kantian or Hegelian idealism. Analytic philosophy came into being in Cambridge around the turn of the century as a reaction to this. Most British were swiftly converted, most continentals ('Europeans', as many British still call them) were not. The exceptional continentals (in Vienna for instance) who survived the Nazi terror emigrated mainly to America and joined the analytic mainstream, leaving the continentals (assorted phenomenologists, existentialists, Marxists, structuralists etc.) to their own devices. A great divide of method and interests separates the two ways of doing philosophy; clusters of characteristics distinguish them. Analytic philosophy is objectivistic, rigorous, logico-linguistic, ahistorical, impersonal, value-free, naturwissenschaf tlich. Continental philosophy is subjectivistic, hermeneutic, psychological, historical, personal, value-laden, geisteswissensch aftlich. Malcontents on either side of the divide, conveniently associated with the English Channel, look to the other side for inspiration and may "convert". One is either "analytic" or "continental": tertium non datur u The common Central European roots of both analytic philosophy, as it was to be practised in Britain, and the scientific philosophy introduced in Poland by Twardowski have also been pointed out by Dummett, according to whom qualifying analytic philosophy as 'Anglo-American', means "completely distorting the historical context in which analytic philosophy arose"; 2 it could just as well
To date there has been little detailed research into the history of institutionalized science teaching in the eighteenth century, apart from work done on the British Isles, France, and the Netherlands. The paucity of data reflects the fact that until recently historians of eighteenth-century natural philosophy have taken little interest in the history of science in the classroom, assuming the subject of small importance. This chapter aims to demonstrate that such a judgment is misguided even if the conclusions of such a study must necessarily be provisional. The history of science teaching in the Age of Reason throws light on the speed and manner with which new theories and discoveries became part of the European cultural inheritance. More important, it also advances our understanding of the way in which distinctive natural sciences came to be defined and stabilized and distinctive national scientific traditions began to emerge at the end of the period. AROUND 1700 Traditionally, public teaching in the natural sciences was the preserve of the universities, where the resposibility for teaching the gamut of human knowledge was divided among the faculties of arts, theology, law (sometimes divided into separate canon and civil law faculties), and medicine. By 1700, after three centuries of expansion, the number of Europe’s universities had grown from 40 to some 150, and they were to be found in all parts of the continent except Russia. A further fifteen or so universities or university colleges had also been founded in the New World, including three in the then English North American colonies: Harvard, Yale, and the College of William and Mary at Williamsburg.
Part I. The Semantic Tradition: 1. Kant, analysis, and pure intuition 2. Bolzano and the birth of semantics 3. Geometry, pure intuition and the a priori 4. Frege's semantics and the a priori in arithmetic 5. Meaning and ontology 6. On denoting 7. Logic in transition 8. A logico-philosophical treatise Part II Vienna, 1925-1935: 9. Schlick before Vienna 10. Philosophers on relativity 1. Carnap before Vienna 12. Scientific idealism and semantic idealism 13. Return of Ludwig Wittgenstein 14. A priori knowledge and the constitution of meaning 15. The road to syntax 16. Syntax and truth 17. Semantic conventionalism and the factuality of meaning 18. The problem of induction: theories 19. The problems of experience: protocols Notes References Index.
This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political projects. In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies.