Much feminist philosophy of science has been developed as a reaction against logical empiricism and the associated view that social factors play no role in good science. Recent accounts of the Vienna Circle that highlighted the ways in which some of its members attempted to combine their empiricism with emancipatory politics are used here as a basis on which to reassess the relationship between logical empiricism and feminism. The focus is chiefly on Otto Neurath.

Bas van Fraassen's anti-realist account of science has played a major role in shaping recent philosophy of science. His constructive empiricism, in particular, has been widely discussed and criticized in the journal literature and is a standard topic in philosophy of science course curricula. Other aspects of his empiricism are less well known, including his empiricist account of scientific laws, his relatively recent re-evaluation of what it is to be an empiricist, and his empiricist structuralism. This essay attempts to provide (...) an overview of these diverse aspects of van Fraassen's empiricism and to show how they relate to one another. It also focuses on the nature of van Fraassens's epistemic voluntarism and its relationship to his empiricist philosophy of science. (shrink)

Feminist critiques of science are widely dispersed and often quite inaccessible as a body of literature. We describe briefly some of the influences evident in this literature and identify several key themes which are central to current debates. This is the introduction to a bibliography of general critiques of science, described as the “core literature,” and a selection of feminist critiques of biology. Our objective has been to identify those analyses which raise reflexive (epistemological and methodological) questions about the status (...) of scientific knowledge and practice, both in general terms and in relation to biological research. We have abstracted these listings from a body of material compiled by members of the research project, “Philosophical Feminism: The Critiques of Science,” which covers a range of discipline-specific critiques beyond biology, as well as the more general philosophical critiques which constitute the core of the present bibliography. (shrink)

Attempts by twentieth-century historians to account for the successes and failures of the Hipparchian-Ptolemaic solar model provide valuable case studies for philosophers who are studying the relationship between observational data and theoretical constructs. A brief survey of recent literature on the solar model reveals that in some cases results which appear to be the product of highly accurate observation are, in fact, based on rather crude observations aided by a large measure of theoretical presupposition. On the other hand, mistaken results, (...) which have sometimes been explained as the outcome of theoretical bias or conscious deceit, can plausibly be accounted for as a result of honest mistakes at the observational level. (shrink)

This is a collection of twelve essays, most of which have appeared before in diverse places. They cover a broad range of topics and are loosely connected by a recurring set of themes. These themes are best understood as attacks by Midgley on certain characteristics of the philosophical enterprise as it is currently practised in the West. The tendencies and principles she calls into question include individualism, scholasticism, realism, instrumentalist conceptions of rationality, anthropocentrism, reductionism, scientism, and mechanism.