Metaphysics Of Science Research Articles

The aim and scope of scientific metaphysics

Over the recent years, the pursuit of scientific metaphysics has become a central enterprise in the philosophy arena. Issues about the nature of metaphysical research, the scope of metaphysical knowledge, and the role of metaphysics within the human Enlightenment project of the sciences have rapidly experienced a vivid renaissance. The volume under review undoubtedly presents an outstanding, cutting-edge contribution to this debate, and it may well be considered as the most comprehensive and philosophically penetrating book of its kind. The volume is comprised of ten independent papers. Contributors are Anjan Chakravartty, Daniel Dennett, Michael Friedman, Paul Humphreys, Jenann Ismael, Harold Kincaid, James Ladyman, Andrew Melnyk, Don Ross, and Mark Wilson. Among the main issues addressed are the state of art of scientific metaphysics (Chapter 1), problems regarding the prospects of naturalized metaphysics (Chapter 2), the critique of speculative ontology (Chapter 3), analysis of the naturalization project (Chapter 4), the bestiary of the manifest image (Chapter 5), the structural realist interpretation of quantum mechanics (Chapter 6), the influence of the scientific philosophy heritage on the contemporary debate (Chapter 7), the relativised Kantianstyle conception of scientific rationality (Chapter 8), remarks on naturalism (Chapter 9), and the place of free will within scientific ontology (Chapter 10). Throughout this review, I examine three core issues: first, problems resulting from the viability of scientific metaphysics; second, the critique of a priori analytic metaphysics; and third, a new positive attempt to pursue a scientific metaphysics. As

Renewing Legal Theory: History and the Unity of Legal Things

This is a comprehensive, speculative, non-naturalist and historicist framework of a theory of law. I address the relationship between nature and law in general; the nature of law; the nature and taxonomy of legal things; the effect of the Enlightenment on legal theory; the relationship between science and law, and between law and history; the poverty and dangers of both positivism and natural law theory; and I address several philosophical issues that are concomitant to an understanding of law in general, including the role of the universal, the centrality of the vision of life; the relationship between life and consciousness (critiquing Nagel’s new book in the process), consciousness and history, and history and law; sacrifice; evil, and the future, among other things. I explicitly place myself in the Aristotelian/Hegelian traditions. As a subtext, I grapple with containing the systematic problem science presents to legal/political order. By laying the groundwork for a renewal of legal theory outside of the constraints of positivism and natural law the framework also lays the groundwork for a reevaluation of the role science should play in the political/legal order, and therefore of science itself. The mechanism for these reevaluations is enabled by the specific grounding of the theory in the findings of neuroscience. Neuroscience teaches one of two irreconcilable things: either man has no free will; or there is a scope of free and real capacity for the mature human to make choices, to exercise free will (within constraints). The first of these two conclusions must be wrong because it contradicts not only experimental findings about man, but it contradicts the experience of every mature human. It is a philosophical conclusion based on Enlightenment metaphysics of science. If man has no free will, there is no basis for political order, for responsibility, etc., an argument we are familiar with but fail to understand and follow to its logical and historical implications, as now I do. I begin my argument with a theory of consciousness and freedom.

New work in metaphysics of science

Metaphysics of science is currently a flourishing field of philosophical research touching issues both in metaphysics and in philosophy of science. From the perspective of early twentieth-century philosophy of science, this is a rather surprising development. For as is well known, logical empiricists tended to banish metaphysical questions. Thus, the issue of realism versus anti-realism (or idealism) was classified as a pseudo-problem by Rudolf Carnap in the late 1920s and Ernest Nagel some 30 years later called it a ‘‘conflict over preferred modes of speech.’’ A major step towards the rehabilitation of metaphysical questions within philosophy of science and analytical philosophy in general was the development that led to the debate about scientific realism in the 1970s. It seemed to Putnam and others that, without taking into account that scientific terms refer to real entities, philosophy of science is unable to explain how theories can be compared trans-theoretically. At the same time, metaphysical or ontological questions became respectable again in areas such as philosophy of language, which ultimately led to what is now called analytical metaphyics (see Loux and Zimmerman 2003). During this period, philosophical problems that were formerly treated as pertaining exclusively the language of science were transformed into problems about metaphysical issues. Thus, for instance, theories of laws of nature in the 1950s aimed to define the characteristics of laws of nature entirely in terms of the syntactic structure of law statements. From the late 1970s on the question was what it is in the world that

Semi-realism, Sociability and Structure

Semi-realism offers a metaphysics of science based on causal properties. Insofar as these are understood in terms of dispositions for specific relations that comprise the concrete structure of the world it can be regarded as a form of structural realism. And insofar as these properties are ‘sociable’ and cohere into the groupings that comprise the particulars investigated by science, it captures the underlying intuition behind forms of entity realism. However, I shall raise concerns about both these features. I shall suggest that dispositionalism is not an appropriate metaphysics for modern physics and that ‘sociability’ should be understood in terms of the coherence revealed by symmetry principles. I hope to show how we can retain the virtues of semi-realism while dispensing with the problematic elements by recasting it in more thoroughly structuralist terms.

Looking for a realist metaphysics of science

Looking for a realist metaphysics of science

Two accounts of laws and time

Among the most important questions in the metaphysics of science are “What are the natures of fundamental laws and chances?” and “What grounds the direction of time?” My aim in this paper is to examine some connections between these questions, discuss two approaches to answering them and argue in favor of one. Along the way I will raise and comment on a number of issues concerning the relationship between physics and metaphysics and consequences for the subject matter and methodology of metaphysics.

Into the ‘regions of physical and metaphysical chaos’: Maxwell’s scientific metaphysics and natural philosophy of action (agency, determinacy and necessity from theology, moral philosophy and history to mathematics, theory and experiment)

Maxwell’s writings exhibit an enduring preoccupation with the role of metaphysics in the advancement of science, especially the progress of physics. I examine the question of the distinction and the proper relation between physics and metaphysics and the way in which the question relies on key notions that bring together much of Maxwell’s natural philosophy, theoretical and experimental. Previous discussions of his attention to metaphysics have been confined to specific issues and polemics such as conceptions of matter and the problem of free will. I suggest a unifying pattern based on a generalized philosophical perspective and varying expressions, although never a systematic or articulated philosophical doctrine, but at least a theme of action and active powers, natural and human, intellectual and material, with sources and grounds in theology, moral philosophy and historical argument. While science was developing in the direction of professional specialization and alongside the rise of materialism, Maxwell held on to conservative intellectual outlook, but one that included a rich scientific life and held science as part of a rich intellectual, cultural and material life. His philosophical outlook integrated his science with and captured the new Victorian culture of construction and work, political, economic, artistic and engineering.

Multiply realizing scientific properties and their instances

Thomas Polger and Lawrence Shapiro (or P&S) have recently (2008) criticized “causal-mechanist” views of realization that dominate research in the philosophy of mind and metaphysics of science. P&S offer the internal criticism that any account of realization focusing upon property instances, as views of causal-mechanist realization routinely do, must lead to incoherence about multiple realization. P&S's argument highlights important issues about property instances that have recently been neglected, as well as raising a challenge to the standard approach to understanding the non-causal relations between properties and their instances in the sciences. In response, I clarify some important background issues about property instances and their relations to properties which show why P&S's main argument fails. In addition, I provide a second reason to doubt their argument by highlighting reasons to think that instances, as well as properties, are plausibly sometimes multiply realized in the sciences.

Many Windows: Reflections on Robert Ulanowicz’s Search for Meaning in Science

This paper is an extended discussion of Robert Ulanowicz’s critique of mechanistic and reductionistic metaphysics of science. He proposes “process ecology” as an alternative. In this paper I discuss four sets of question coming out of Ulanowicz’s proposal. First, I argue that universality remains one of the hallmarks of the scientific enterprise even with his new process metaphysics. I then discuss the Second Law of Thermodynamics in the interpretation of the history of the universe. I question Ulanowicz’s use of the terms “random” and “chance” in his definition of process. Finally, I discuss what difference a relational and process metaphysics might make in addressing the political and practical problems in the twenty-first century.

Explanation in Metaphysics?

Arguments from explanation, i.e. arguments in which the explanatory value of a hypothesis or premise is appealed to, are common in science, and explanatory considerations are becoming more popular in metaphysics. The paper begins by arguing that explanatory arguments in science—even when these are metaphysical explanations—may fail to be explanatory in metaphysics; there is a distinction to be drawn between metaphysical explanation and explanation in metaphysics. This makes it potentially problematic to deploy arguments from explanation in, for instance, metaphysics of science. Part of this problem has its source in that the explanatory concept differs between contexts. The paper discusses a few explanatory concepts and their corresponding arguments from explanation. Towards the end of the paper, I identify two allegedly explanatory arguments in metaphysical discourse by the concluding decisions they give rise to: the rejection of X as a metaphysical fact if X does not explain anything (the argument from explanatory inability) and the rejection of X as a metaphysical fact if X can be non-metaphysically explained (the argument from the non-metaphysically explained). I ask: What kind of concept of explanation do these arguments rely upon, and is that concept suited to the metaphysical task? Two recent examples of these arguments are used as illustration. The preliminary conclusion is that several of the strengths of arguments from explanation in science seem not to be present in metaphysical contexts.

FROM PESSIMISM TO HOPE: A NATURAL PROGRESSION

AbstractMutual critique by scientists and religious believers mostly entails the pruning of untenable religious beliefs by scientists and warnings against scientific minimalism on the part of believers. John F. Haught has been prominent in formulating religious apologetics in response to the challenges posed by evolutionary theory. Haught's work also resonates with a parallel criticism of the conventional scientific metaphysics undergirding neo‐Darwinian theory. Contemporary systems ecology seems to indicate that nothing short of a complete reversal of the Enlightenment assumptions about nature is capable of repositioning science to deal adequately with the origin and dynamics of living systems. A process‐based alternative metaphysics substantially mitigates several ostensible conflicts between science and religion.

Moving beyond the subset model of realization: The problem of qualitative distinctness in the metaphysics of science

Understanding the ‘making-up’ relations, to put things neutrally, posited in mechanistic explanations the sciences is finally an explicit topic of debate amongst philosophers of science. In particular, there is now lively debate over the nature of the so-called ‘realization’ relations between properties posited in such explanations. Despite criticism (Gillett, Analysis 62:316–323, 2002a), the most common approach continues to be that of applying machinery developed in the philosophy of mind to scientific concepts in what is known as the ‘Flat’ or ‘Subset’ model of ‘realization’ (Kim, Mind in a physical world, 1998; Shapiro, J Philos XCVII:635–654, 2000; Clapp, J Philos XCVIII:111–136, 2001; Wilson, Philos Stud 145:149–169, 2009). My primary goal in this paper is to show in still more detail that the Subset model of realization is inadequate for the descriptive task of describing the ‘making-up’ relations posited between properties or their instances in mechanistic explanations in the higher sciences. And my secondary goal is to highlight why this critique of the Subset view as a first-order descriptive account also shows there are deep difficulties in using the Subset account to address second-order issues in the philosophy of science as well.

El amor a la verdad según san Alberto Magno / The Love for the Truth According St. Albert the Great

Albert the Great extracts the best contributions of Neo-Platonism and Aristotelism. He examines the Aristotelian doctrine on the desire for truth present in human nature and the science of Metaphysics, which allows for an inkling of the source of such desire, but this desire is examined more in-depth by the Pseudo-Dionysius, being Theology the science that grants more answers and the most universal because it enables for greater perfection, not just intellectual but of the whole person.

One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics: Books Alpha-Delta (review)

Reviewed by: One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics: Books Alpha-Delta Anthony K. Jensen Edward C. Halper . One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics: Books Alpha-Delta. Las Vegas-Zurich-Athens: Parmenides Publishing, 2009. Pp. xli + 524. Hardcover, $45.00. Twenty years after the appearance of the first of his three-volume One and Many in Aristotle's Metaphysics, Edward Halper has produced his much anticipated prequel commentary on the opening books of the Metaphysics. Readers of the chronologically prior Central Books will not be disappointed here. The analytic detail, the remarkably comprehensive yet deftly critical attention to the vast history of Aristotle scholarship, the clarity and precision of compositional style—all hallmarks of Halper's earlier work—are here in abundance as he works through his singularly sweeping vision of the unity of Aristotle's book. Halper's central argument is that the problem of the One and the Many is Aristotle's most crucial and pervasive concern in the Metaphysics. While Aristotle himself never declares this—not even in those passages on the Presocratic philosophers where this problem features most prominently—Halper argues convincingly that Aristotle's conviction about the possibility of a science as determined by a necessary degree of unity among the objects it studies must itself assume the solvability of the One and Many problem. As explicated in the Posterior Analytics, any science must be able to fully explain the first principles of the genus it treats if it is a science at all. If metaphysics is a legitimate scientific study, then it follows that its content must evince a suitable degree of unity such that it could be understood under a single scientific heading. Yet there is no single characteristic, as Aristotle himself claims, that all beings share commonly. As such, it seems as if there should not be a single [End Page 237] science that could consider the highest principles of all things, which would mean, in turn, that there should be no science of metaphysics. In this way, the problem of the One and Many is no mere historical curiosity among Presocratic philosophers. Its solution is, in fact, the precondition for the possibility of that same inquiry. Aristotle's metaphysics must, then, determine its own nature by working through the subject matter it treats. And this, Halper explains in a dizzyingly thorough analysis of the text, Aristotle does accomplish provisionally in Book Gamma by introducing the notion of a pros hen genus (299–307). Being turns out to be the unifying nature of all beings rather than a single common characteristic shared by them: "The 'nature' common to every being, that is, being qua being, is simply its having some sort of essence" (480; his italics). Thus, "having an essence" is conceived as the unifying nature of all beings. Accordingly, beings are sufficiently one so as to permit inquiry into their first principles within a single science. Therefore, the conclusion of the "science-he-seeks," which hinged on the solution to the One and Many problem, will of itself justify the possibility of pursuing that same science. Halper's view of unity has important consequences not only for the content of Aristotle's views, but also for our own interpretive strategies. Scholars who overlook the One and Many problem—and most do—have obscured the compositional unity of the book. Excepting notable names like Sachs and Madigan, the great majority of twentieth-century scholars have doubted the coherence of the Metaphysics on the grounds that the oft-noted inconsistencies and repetitions present either a patchwork of notes or else the developing thoughts of an "artist at work" (32–38). Operating within either hermeneutical framework, these scholars have failed to see that the unifying theme of the book is in fact Aristotle's concern about unity itself. The Metaphysics certainly does contain oddities and aporiai, which Halper, rightly, does not dismiss. He insists instead that, when the text as a whole is read with a mind to the problem of One and Many, Aristotle should be interpreted as attempting to resolve those aporiai in a dialectical way. Instead of presenting established conclusions, Aristotle engages in active philosophical thinking by pursuing this single...

Idea metafizyki w filozofii Immanuela Kanta

The article investigates the notion of “metaphysics” in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, with emphasis on the idea and significance of metaphysics in the theoretical and practical use of reason. The author presents the Kantian interpretation of the term “metaphysics”, which determines the way Kant understood the task of the science of metaphysics. Metaphysics is also treated as the unavoidable outcome of the use of reason, which pursues completeness in knowledge. Nevertheless, the outcome of metaphysical speculation can never satisfy reason in its theoretical aspirations. The article also presents the consequences of the Kantian transposition of the objects of metaphysics to the terrain of practical reason, where their reality is postulated in view of moral perfection, which is the goal of mankind.

The Modal Nature of Structures in Ontic Structural Realism

Ontic structural realism is the view that structures are what is real in the first place in the domain of fundamental physics. The structures are usually conceived as including a primitive modality. However, it has not been spelled out as yet what exactly that modality amounts to. This paper proposes to fill this lacuna by arguing that the fundamental physical structures possess a causal essence, being powers. Applying the debate about causal vs categorical properties in analytic metaphysics to ontic structural realism, I show that the standard argument against categorical and for causal properties holds for structures as well. Structural realism, as a position in the metaphysics of science that is a form of scientific realism, is committed to causal structures. The metaphysics of causal structures is supported by physics, and it can provide for a complete and coherent view of the world that includes all domains of empirical science.

The Legitimacy of Metaphysics

Part of Kant's legacy to Peirce was a lasting conviction that metaphysics can and should be set on the secure path of a science. However, Peirce's understanding of metaphysics, unlike Kant's, uses the method of science, i.e., of experience and reasoning; but requires close attention to experience of the most familiar kind rather that recherche experience needed by the special sciences. This distinctively plausible reconstruction of what a genuinely scientific metaphysics would be is part of Peirce's legacy to philosophy today, enabling us to steer clear both of apriorism and scientism - the Scylla and Charybdis of recent metaphysics.

Fall and Rise of Aristotelian Metaphysics in the Philosophy of Science

The paper examines the fortunes of Aristotelian metaphysics in science and the philosophy of science. It considers the Enlightenment claim that such a metaphysics is fundamentally unscientific, and that its abandonment was essential to the scientific revolution. The history of the scientific revolution and the metaphysical debates involved in it is examined, and it is argued that the eclipse of Aristotelian views was neither complete, nor merited. The evolution of Humeian and positivist accounts of science is described, and it is shown how the severe problems with these accounts, together with a revival of Aristotelian concepts in philosophy, have led to the rebirth of broadly Aristotelian accounts of the metaphysics underlying science.

African musical arts creativity and performance: The science of the sound

Published literature on African musical arts and other indigenous knowledge systems have been found to be fraught with ignorant representations and interpretations of the nature, meaning and virtues of African Worldview. This paper debunked misconceptions on African musical arts creativity and performance by digging into the scientific principles underlying the arts. Even when spontaneous, the process is rather grounded on theoretical principles and systematic creative-performance procedures. The paper propounds three scientific theories: ‘the African science of the mind' as the metaphysical science of spiritual health, ‘the science of musical structures' in which the musical arts idioms, ensemble rationalizations and performance norms aim to humanize the individual and bond humanity, and ‘the African science of instrument technology' which proves that scientific research informed the design, material and construction of peculiar timbres or sonic vibrancies of indigenous music instruments. Nigerian Music Review Vol. 6 2005: pp. 1-8

Delegitimizing Science: Risk or Opportunity?

This response argues that the delegitimization of scientific authority provides a much‐needed opportunity to examine the ethics, pragmatics and metaphysics of science’s relationship to other forms of knowledge. While sharing Nanda’s concerns about an unreflexive valorizaion of indigenous knowledge particularly as it applies to Hindu‐nationalist justifications of its own reactionary project, I suggest that the political implications of science critique can only be evaluated fairly through an understanding of what is at stake in specific contexts. Rather than rejecting STS approaches and visions of ‘alternative modernities’ tout court, I argue that they can assist in furthering the Enlightenment project of critical reason. Using empirical examples form research on health and the environment, the paper suggests ways in which the blurring of nature, technology, society and the human could be politically productive.