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- Thomas Mormann (1999). Idealistische Häresien in Der Wissenschaftsphilosophie: Cassirer, Carnap Und Kuhn. Journal for General Philosophy of Science 30 (2):233 - 270.Idealist Heresies in Philosophy of Science: Cassirer, Carnap, and Kuhn. As common wisdom has it, philosophy of science in the analytic tradition and idealist philosophy are incompatible. Usually, not much effort is spent for explaining what is to be understood by idealism. Rather, it is taken for granted that idealism is an obsolete and unscientific philosophical account. In this paper it is argued that this thesis needs some qualification. Taking Carnap and Kuhn as paradigmatic examples of positivist and postpositivist philosophies of science it is shown that these accounts share important features with Cassirer's idealist philosophy of science developed in the first half of this century. As it turns out, often Cassirer is more modern than those classical philosophers of (post)posivitist philosophy of science. For instance, Quine's criticism against Carnap's empiricist philosophy of science launched in Two Dogmas of Empiricism is anticipated by Cassirer for several decades.In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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In recent years, a revisionist process focused on logical positivism can be observed, particularly on Carnap’s work. One aspect of this revisionism is the thesis that Carnap’s later writings are compatible with Kuhn and even that Carnap anticipates some relevant points of Kuhn’s theory of science. In this paper I argue against the revisionist’s interpretation of the fact that Kuhn’s “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” having been published in the “Encyclopedia of Unified Science”, co-edited by Carnap, is evidence of the (...)
In recent years, it may be observed a revisionist process focused on logical positivism, particularly on Carnap’s work. One aspect of this revisionism is the thesis that Carnap’s later thought is compatible with that of Kuhn and even that Carnap anticipates some relevant points of Kuhn’s theory of science. In this paper I argue against revisionist’s interpretation to the fact of publication of Kuhn’s "The Structure o Scientific Revolutions" in the "Encyclopedia of Unified Science", co-edited by Carnap, as evidence of (...)
The notion of idealization has received considerable attention in contemporary philosophy of science but less in philosophy of mathematics. An exception was the ‘critical idealism’ of the neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer. According to Cassirer the methodology of idealization plays a central role for mathematics and empirical science. In this paper it is argued that Cassirer's contributions in this area still deserve to be taken into account in the current debates in philosophy of mathematics. For extremely useful criticisms on earlier versions (...)
Thomas Kuhn was undoubtedly the strongest influence on the philosophy of science in the last third of the twentieth century. Yet today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century it is unclear what his legacy really is. In the philosophy of science there is no characteristically Kuhnian school. This could be because we are all Kuhnians now. But it might also be because Kuhn’s thought, although revolutionary in its time, has since been superseded. In a sense both may be true. (...)
We compare Carnap's and Kuhn's views on science. Although there are important differences between them, the similarities are striking. The basis for the latter is a pragmatically oriented semantic conventionalist picture of science, which suggests that the view that post-positivist philosophy of science constitutes a radical revolution which has no interesting affinities with logical positivism must be seriously mistaken.
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| | Other links: bjps.oxfordjournals.org jstor.org | Scholar | More.. In A Parting of the Ways Michael Friedman proposed to conceive the contemporary divide between analytic philosophy (AP) and continental philosophy (CP) as the outcome of the bifurcation between the Neokantians of Heidelbarg and Marburg. According to Friedman, Carnap can be characterized as the executor of the Marburg school, while Heidegger is to be considered as the heir of the Southwest Neokantianism. In this paper it is argued that Carnap was much closer to the Southwest Neokantianism than usually recognized. To (...)
I defend against criticism the following claims concening Thomas Kuhn: (i) there is a strong naturalist streak in The structure of scientific revolutions, whereby Kuhn used the results of a posteriori enquiry in addressing philosophical questions; (ii) as Kuhn's career as a philosopher of science developed he tended to drop the naturalistic elements and to replace them with more traditionally philosophical a prior approaches; (iii) at the same there is a significant residue of positivist thought in Kuhm, which Kuhn did (...)
