Kathleen Okruhlik

The Natural philosophy of Leibniz

Introduction: The Natural Philosophy of Leibniz.- The Problem of Indiscernibles in Leibnizs 1671 Mechanics.- Leibniz and the Foundations of Physics: The Middle Years.- Why Motion is Only a Well-Founded Phenomenon.- Monadic Relations.- Miracles and Laws.- The Status of Scientific Laws in the Leibnizian System.- Leibniz on the Side of the Angels.- Leibniz and Kant on Mathematical and Philosophical Knowledge.- Leibnizs Theory of Time.- Leibniz and Scientific Realism.

Feminist critiques of science: The epistemological and methodological literature*

Synopsis 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.

Kant on Realism and Methodology

Absolute space, pure earth, and fundamental forces of attraction and repulsion are among the theoretical entities invoked by Kant in his discussion of scientific and proto-scientific practice. I call them theoretical entities just in the sense that they are not directly accessible to observation but are employed by natural philosophers in order to facilitate description, explanation, and prediction. Absolute space, pure earth, and the fundamental forces share that much in common with one another. Furthermore, some role for each of the three is said by Kant to be legitimate and contributory to the development of science; no one of the three is dismissed as useless. I shall argue, however, that the roles of the three types of theoretical entity represented by these examples are significantly different from one another, and that an examination of each will shed considerable light on Kant’s philosophy of science. The most important results to emerge will show that Kant’s views on scientific realism and his views on scientific methodology are absolutely inseparable. His position, properly understood, has a great deal of strength and plausibility. Both realists and anti-realists involved in the current debates can learn something from it.

Kant on the Foundations of Science

The most common view of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MFNS)1 is that is represents an explicit effort by Kant to provide an a priori justification for the Newtonian world view. It is usually argued that Kant attempted to provide this justification by deducing the main tenets of Newtonian mechanics directly from his critical philosophy.

Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective (review)

For three decades, Bas van Fraassen’s constructive empiricism has been the most infl uential anti-realist position in philosophy of science. When logical empiricism lost its place as the leading philosophy of science, support for the anti-realism associated with it also waned. Van Fraassen’s brand of empiricism, although signifi cantly different from that of the logical empiricists, has kept alive the anti-realist spirit of the earlier enterprise. In Scientifi c Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective, the author develops and defends a position he calls ‘empiricist structuralism.’ He agrees with the slogan that ‘all we know in science is structure.’ His challenge is to explain how this slogan can be meaningfully interpreted in the absence of commitment to any corresponding real structure in the world. Because my disagreements with Scientifi c Representation are fairly deep and because this is not an easy book, I shall begin with an account of its contents and leave the assessment to a subsequent section.

The Foundation of All Philosophy: Newton’s Third Rule

The recent revival of the interest in scientific realism and the status of theoretical entities makes it appropriate to look once more at the debate surrounding Newton’s third “Rule of Philosophizing”. The questions at issue concern when (if ever) one is justified in making inferences from observation reports to claims about unobservable entities and what constraints (if any) must supplement the requirement of hypothetico-deductive adequacy in making such inferences.

The Status of Scientific Laws in the Leibnizian System

The aim of this essay is to secure as painless and as firm a grasp as possible on the very thorny problem of the status of scientific laws in the Leibnizian system. The thorniness of the problem is immediately evident when we realize that Leibniz maintains that laws of nature are absolutely contingent, hypothetically necessary, and (in some cases at least) a priori deducible.

Ghosts in the World Machine: A Taxonomy of Leibnizian Forces

The problem to be examined in this essay is arguably the most central and certainly the most discussed of all the difficulties which placed mechanism under strain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is the problem of how to account for activity in nature once matter has been stripped of all internal agency and rendered “indifferent to motion”. The ghosts of my title are simply the sources of agency which move the otherwise inert world machine.

The Interplay between Theory and Observation in the Solar Model of Hipparchus and Ptolemy

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.