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Philip Kitcher
Philip Stuart Kitcher (born 20 February 1947) is a British philosopher who is John Dewey Professor Emeritus of philosophy at Columbia University. He specialises in the philosophy of science, the philosophy of biology, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of literature, and more recently pragmatism. Life and career Born in London, Kitcher spent his early life in Eastbourne, East Sussex, on the south coast of the United Kingdom, where another distinguished philosopher of an earlier generation (A.J. Ayer) was also at school. Kitcher himself went to school at Christ's Hospital, Horsham, West Sussex. He earned his B.A. in Mathematics/History and Philosophy of Science from Christ's College, Cambridge in 1969, and his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from Princeton University in 1974, where he worked closely with Carl Hempel and Thomas Kuhn. Kitcher is currently John Dewey Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Columbia University. As chair of Columbia's Contem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Western Philosophy
Western philosophy encompasses the philosophical thought and work of the Western world. Historically, the term refers to the philosophical thinking of Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophy of the pre-Socratics. The word ''philosophy'' itself originated from the Ancient Greek (φιλοσοφία), literally, "the love of wisdom" grc, φιλεῖν , "to love" and σοφία '' sophía'', "wisdom"). History Ancient The scope of ancient Western philosophy included the problems of philosophy as they are understood today; but it also included many other disciplines, such as pure mathematics and natural sciences such as physics, astronomy, and biology (Aristotle, for example, wrote on all of these topics). Pre-Socratics The pre-Socratic philosophers were interested in cosmology; the nature and origin of the universe, while rejecting mythical answers to such questions. They were specifically interested in the (the cause or first principle) of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kyle Stanford
Kyle Stanford (born 1970) is an American philosophy professor at the University of California, Irvine, who specializes in the philosophy of science. Education and career He earned his B.A. with Honors in Philosophy and Psychology from Northwestern University in 1991, and did his graduate work at the University of California, San Diego, earning his M.A. in Philosophy, 1994, and his Ph.D. in Philosophy/Science Studies, in 1997, under the direction of Philip Kitcher. He joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine in 1997, and moved to the newly created Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science there in 1998, earning tenure in 2004. He has been a visiting professor in the History and Philosophy of Science department at the University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
American Psychological Association
The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It has 54 divisions—interest groups for different subspecialties of psychology or topical areas. The APA has an annual budget of around $115 million. Profile The APA has task forces that issue policy statements on various matters of social importance, including abortion, human rights, the welfare of detainees, human trafficking, the rights of the mentally ill, IQ testing, sexual orientation change efforts, and gender equality. Governance APA is a corporation chartered in the District of Columbia. APA's bylaws describe structural components that serve as a system of checks and balances to ensure democratic process. The organizational entities include: * APA President. The APA's president is elected by the membership. The president chairs ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Michael Weisberg
Michael Craig Weisberg (born October 20, 1976) is an American philosopher of science, currently Bess W. Heyman President's Distinguished Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also co-directs the Galápagos Education and Research Alliance. He is also Senior Faculty Fellow and Director of Postgraduate Programs for Perry World House and a Non-resident Senior Advisor for the International Peace Institute. Education and career Weisberg earned both a B.S. in chemistry and a B.A. in philosophy in 1999 from the University of California, San Diego, where he studied with Philip Kitcher. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy in 2003 at Stanford University under the supervision of Peter Godfrey-Smith. He has taught at the University of Pennsylvania since 2003. Weisberg is the editor-in-chief of the peer-reviewed journal ''Biology and Philosophy''. Philosophical work Weiseberg is known for his research in philosophy of science, especially the relation ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Patricia Kitcher
Patricia W. Kitcher (born 1948) is the Roberta and William Campbell Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, widely known for her work on Immanuel Kant and on philosophy of psychology. She has held many positions at different universities, is a founding chair of a committee at the University of California, and has a lead role in multiple professional organizations. Kitcher's most notable interests throughout her career regard cognition and Kantian ethics. She is the author of multiple papers and two books. Education and career Born Patricia Williams, she attended Wellesley College and then graduate school in philosophy at Princeton where she studied with George Pitcher. Kitcher has held faculty positions at the University of Vermont, the University of Minnesota, and University of California, San Diego, and a visiting position at University of Michigan. In 1998 she went to Columbia University where she became the Mark van Doren Professor of the Humanities and chair of the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Willard Van Orman Quine
Willard Van Orman Quine (; known to his friends as "Van"; June 25, 1908 – December 25, 2000) was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor. He filled the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard from 1956 to 1978. Quine was a teacher of logic and set theory. Quine was famous for his position that first order logic is the only kind worthy of the name, and developed his own system of mathematics and set theory, known as New Foundations. In philosophy of mathematics, he and his Harvard colleague Hilary Putnam developed the Quine–Putnam indispensability argument, an argument for the Philosophy of mathematics#Empiricism, reality of mathematical entities.Colyvan, Mark"Indispensability Arguments in the Philosophy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Dewey
John Dewey (; October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. The overriding theme of Dewey's works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, "Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous." Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. He asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts and politici ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Carl Gustav Hempel
Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel (January 8, 1905 – November 9, 1997) was a German writer, philosopher, logician, and epistemologist. He was a major figure in logical empiricism, a 20th-century movement in the philosophy of science. He is especially well known for his articulation of the deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the raven paradox (also known as "Hempel's paradox"). Education Hempel studied mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Göttingen and subsequently at the University of Berlin and the Heidelberg University. In Göttingen, he encountered David Hilbert and was impressed by his program attempting to base all mathematics on solid logical foundations derived from a limited number of axioms. After moving to Berlin, Hempel participated in a congress on scientific philosophy in 1929 where he met Rudolf Carnap a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Kuhn
Thomas Samuel Kuhn (; July 18, 1922 – June 17, 1996) was an American philosopher of science whose 1962 book ''The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'' was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term '' paradigm shift'', which has since become an English-language idiom. Kuhn made several claims concerning the progress of scientific knowledge: that scientific fields undergo periodic "paradigm shifts" rather than solely progressing in a linear and continuous way, and that these paradigm shifts open up new approaches to understanding what scientists would never have considered valid before; and that the notion of scientific truth, at any given moment, cannot be established solely by objective criteria but is defined by a consensus of a scientific community. Competing paradigms are frequently incommensurable; that is, they are competing and irreconcilable accounts of reality. Thus, our comprehension of science can never rely wholly upon "objecti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Benacerraf
Paul Joseph Salomon Benacerraf (; born 26 March 1931) is a French-born American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mathematics who taught at Princeton University his entire career, from 1960 until his retirement in 2007. He was appointed Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, and retired as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy. Life and career Benacerraf was born in Paris to Moroccan Jewish parents. In 1939 the family moved to Caracas and then to New York City. When the family returned to Caracas, Benacerraf remained in the United States, boarding at the Peddie School in Hightstown, New Jersey. He attended Princeton University for both his undergraduate and graduate studies. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998. His brother was the Venezuelan Nobel Prize-winning immunologist Baruj Benacerraf. Philosophical work Benacerraf is perhaps best known for his two papers "What Numbers Coul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Selective Realism
Entity realism (also selective realism), sometimes equated with referential realism, is a philosophical position within the debate about scientific realism. It is a variation of realism (independently proposed by Stanford School philosophers Nancy Cartwright and Ian Hacking in 1983) that restricts warranted belief to only certain entities.Psillos, Stathis, ''Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth'', Routledge, 1999, p. 247. Overview Whereas traditional scientific realism argues that our best scientific theories are true, or approximately true, or closer to the truth than their predecessors, entity realism does not commit itself to judgments concerning the truth of scientific theories. Instead, entity realism claims that the theoretical entities that feature in scientific theories, e.g. 'electrons', should be regarded as real if and only if they refer to phenomena that can be routinely used to create effects in domains that can be investigated independently. 'Manipulative succ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Direct Reference Theory
A direct reference theory (also called referentialism or referential realism)Andrea Bianchi (2012) ''Two ways of being a (direct) referentialist'', in Joseph Almog, Paolo Leonardi, ''Having in Mind: The Philosophy of Keith Donnellan''p. 79/ref> is a theory of language that claims that the meaning of a word or expression lies in what it points out in the world. The object denoted by a word is called its referent. Criticisms of this position are often associated with Ludwig Wittgenstein.Severin Schroeder (2006), ''Wittgenstein''p. 30 "This view that the meaning of a word has to be explained in terms of what it stands for, its reference, I shall call referentialism." In the 19th century, mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege argued against it, and contrasted it with mediated reference theory.Emery J. Hyslop-Margison, Ayaz Naseem (2007), ''Scientism and Education: Empirical Research as Neo-Liberal Ideology''pp. 83–4/ref> In 1953, with his ''Philosophical Investigations'', Wittg ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
