Hi everyone,
The next Macquarie Philosophy seminar for 2008 will be held on Tuesday
8 April , 11am-1pm, in Room 107, W6A.
Anjan Chakravartty (University of Toronto and Sydney Centre for
the Foundations of Science) will present a paper
ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SCIENCE AND METAPHYSICS
Subsequent to the transition from the era of natural philosophy to
what we now recognize as the era of the modern sciences, the latter
have often been described as independent of the major philosophical
preoccupations that previously informed theorizing about the natural
world. The extent to which this is a naïve description is a matter
of debate, and in particular, views of the relationship between the
modern sciences and metaphysics have varied enormously. Logical
positivism spawned a distaste for metaphysics within
the philosophy of science which lasts to this day, but in recent
years, a renaissance in analytic metaphysics has been embraced by a
growing number of philosophers of science. Those moved by distaste
commonly subscribe either to a minimalist Humean metaphysic, or to a
quietism about metaphysical questions generally, and often maintain
that such stances are operative in scientific practice itself. Those
moved by attraction contend that metaphysical investigations into the
natures of things like properties, causation,
laws, and modality, are required in order to interpret descriptions of
the world furnished by our best scientific theories, and often suggest that
metaphysical commitments with respect to issues such as these likely play a
significant role in scientific theorizing itself. In this paper, I
will attempt to enumerate the philosophical presuppositions separating these
approaches to scientific knowledge, and consider some prospects for their
resolution.
All welcome
_______________________________________________
SydPhil mailing list
[email protected]
List Info: http://lists.arts.usyd.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/sydphil
NEW LIST ARCHIVE: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
