Online research in philosophy

For almost fifty years, David Armstrong has made major contributions in analytic philosophy. The aim of this volume is to collect papers that situate, discuss and critically assess Armstrong’s contributions. The book is organized in three parts. In Section I: Analytical Metaphysics and Its Methodology, certain basic principles of analytic metaphysics advocated by Armstrong (such as truthmaker maximalism and the Doctrine of Ontological Free Lunch) and their consequences are critically examined. The articles of Section II: Laws of Nature, Dispositions, and (...) Modality, study the constraints Armstrong’s naturalism sets to his ontology of modality, laws and dispositions. Finally, the articles of Section III: Mind and Epistemology, study and critically evaluate Armstrong’s contributions in epistemology, the philosophy of perception and color. The collection is meant for all philosophers and scholars interested in these central topics of analytic philosophy. (shrink)

In part because "imagination" is a slippery notion, its exact role in the production of scientific knowledge remains unclear. There is, however, one often explicit and deliberate use of imagination by scientists that can be (and has been) studied intensively by epistemologists and historians of science: thought experiments. The main goal of this article is to document the varieties of thought experimentation, not so much in terms of the different sciences in which they occur but rather in terms of the (...) different functions they fulfil. I argue that thought experimentation (and hence imagination) plays a role not only in theory choice but in singular causal analysis and scientific discovery as well. I pinpoint, moreover, some of the rules governing the use of thought experiments in theory choice and in singular causal analysis, that is, some of the criteria they should meet in order to fulfil those functions successfully. (shrink)

In some of the papers in which she develops and defends the mental modelview of thought experiments in physics, Nersessian expresses the belief that her account has implications for thought experiments in other domains as well. In this paper, I argue, firstly, that counterfactual reasoning has a legitimate place in historical inquiry, and secondly, that the mental model view can account for such "alternative histories". I proceed as follows. Firstly, I review the main accounts of thought experiments in physics and (...) point at some explanatory advantages of the mental model view. Subsequently, I argue that historians cannot dispense with counterfactual reasoning altogether and qualify a number of principled objections against the explicit use of alternative histories for theoretical purposes. Finally, I show that the mental model view can account for such thought experiments in history. (shrink)

Although the importance, both historically and systematically, of the seventeenth century distinction between primary and secondary qualities is commonly recognised, there is no consensus on its exact nature. Apparently, one of the main difficulties in its interpretation is to tell the constitutive from the argumentative elements. In this paper, we focus on the primary-secondary quality distinctions drawn by Boyle and Locke. We criticise, more specifically, MacIntosh’s analysis of them. On the one hand, MacIntosh attributes too many different primary-secondary quality distinctions (...) to Boyle and Locke. On the other hand, he forbears to attribute a particular primary-secondary quality distinction to them, which, at least in the case of Boyle, differs genuinely from his main distinction between the mechanical affections of matter and all of matter’s other qualities. (shrink)