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Seminar Courses at Stanford UniversityMoral Foundations of Capitalism
American capitalism, at least as originally promulgated, presumed a moral foundation of selfish individualism. Critics of such a morality have consequently denigrated capitalism. But others have tried to defend it either by appealing to an alternate foundation or by defending the morality of selfish individualism. In this course, we will explore three such groups of defenders: free-market economists who have defended capitalism on social, economic, or collective grounds; theologians and conservatives who have defended capitalism using a religious or altruist foundation; and Ayn Rand, who has proposed to defend the morality of selfishness. The History of Scientific Methods, Pythagoras to Popper How do scientists know what they know—or claim to know? It’s an important question, not just for scientists themselves, but for any of us who drive on bridges without fear, subject ourselves to doctor’s prescriptions, or must decide whether grade-school teachers should teach evolution or intelligent design. Science and its products pervade our personal, political, institutional, and cultural lives. We need to know where it comes from and whether it is reliable. How do scientists know what they know? Well, we might say, they use the “scientific method.” But, alas, there are now and have long been vigorous disagreements over exactly what a proper scientific method is. Scientific debates often come down to disagreements over method, and the results of the debates can be deadly. Millions of people have died from crackpot science, teachers have been condemned for teaching science developed with unauthorized methods, and scientists have been jailed and put to death for using particular methods. To learn about how scientists know what they know, we will look at this interplay between science and scientific methods from Ancient Greece to modern times. We will face an age-old question whether scientists must be content to accurately describe what they observe or can also be justified in claiming to know how things really are. We will examine conflicts between independent judgment and religious dogma. We will meet Pythagoras, Euclid, Plato, Aristotle, Ockham, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Darwin, Heisenberg, and others. We will meet great scientists, great philosophers of method, and some who were both. When we finish, you will have an understanding of the different ways scientists have tried to understand nature and the implications of those attempts—both for them and for us. Nineteenth-Century Philosophy of Science The nineteenth century was the center of what has been called the Second Scientific Revolution. There was also a revolution—or rather several overlapping revolutions—in the philosophy of science. The century opened with a virtually universal belief in a Newtonian world of deterministic laws and in the method of inductive inquiry developed by Francis Bacon. By the end of the century, statistically oriented science was replacing deterministic and Bacon’s inductive method was mocked. In this course we will explore this revolutionary shift.
Seminar Courses at Stevens Institute of TechnologyHistory of Modern Science and Technology
Advances in science and technology since the Renaissance have been extraordinary. In this course, we will survey those advances—in physics, industrial technology, chemistry, electricity, biology, social science, and medicine. Of particular interest will be the methods that distinguish modern science. It is not just that
Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, or Koch discovered things their predecessors did not, it’s that
they went about their work in a way different from the way a scientist (or “natural philosopher”)
in pre-modern times did. In watching these scientists at work, we want to understand their methods. We will
find they were not all using “the scientific method” as we learn it today. What can they teach us about
how best to pursue our own scientific, technological and engineering work?
Students’ Evaluations
ScholarshipMy research is on the history of the philosophy of science, especially the history of the concept of induction from Socrates to Popper, with Francis Bacon seemingly always at the center. Jacopo Zabarella, De Methodis and De Regressu Big current project. A collated Latin edition and original English translation for Harvard University Press’s I Tatti Renaissance Library. Want to read the draft? Professor Higgins’ Philosophy of Science: Draft of an historical account of the philosophy of induction. Too long to be an article and too short to be a monograph, this nevertheless provides an accessible summary of what I have found in my several years’ research into this topic. In My Fair Lady, frustrated in his dealings with Miss Eliza Doolittle, Professor Henry Higgins sings, ‘Why can’t a woman be more like a man / Men are so honest, so thoroughly square / Eternally noble, historically fair. / . . . / Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ By this thinking, man and woman are two kinds of something, one the ideal, the other the deficient. The more a woman can be madeto be like a man—by adding some bits, by suppressing others, by forcible contortion if necessary—the better she will be. Many philosophers have a similar attitude toward induction. It is a type of inference, they say, but not the ideal kind. The ideal kind is deduction. As Nicholas Rescher put it, ‘An inductive inference can always be looked upon as an aspiring but failed deductive inference.’ Like Professor Higgins dealing with Miss Doolittle, the modern philosopher judges induction by the standard of deduction, finds it wanting, and struggles in frustration to correct its shortcomings. The attitude is not just modern. It was standard from Alexandrians of the sixth century to Zabarella in the sixteenth. All conceived of induction as a kind of propositional inference inferior to deduction. John Stuart Mill and countless writers since have shared the view. But it has not been universal. Bacon, Hume, and Whewell did not share it. Neither did Cicero, the man who gave us the term inductio. Not only did they not think of induction as inferior, they did not even think of it as, fundamentally, a kind of inference. We can get an excellent overview of the history of the concept of induction simply by tracing the alternating attitudes toward the relationship between induction and deduction. There have been four major phases in that history. In two, Professor Higgins’ attitude prevailed, and in two it did not. This essay will describe all four. History of the Relationship between Concepts and Induction
The kick-off presentation at the Workshop on Concepts, Induction, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Department of HPS, Pittsburgh, September 17–19, 2010. Bacon’s Idols and Harvey’s Eggs • Flyer (PDF) A presentation given at the College of Arts and Letters, Stevens Institute of Technology, September 15, 2010. Whence the Uniformity Principle
A presentation given at the eight congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, June 2010. Where did we get the idea that every induction includes some uniformity principle as a presumed premise? The idea is not in Socrates, Aristotle, or Cicero; it is not in medieval writings, Arabic or Latin; it is not in the Scholastics or the Renaissance Humanists; it is not in Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, Thomas Reid, or William Whewell; in fact, it is not even per se in David Hume. It is definitely in John Stuart Mill, but Mill claims to have gotten it from someone else. It turns out we got the idea from Richard Whately (1787-1863), Oxford professor, author of Elements of Logic (1826), and later bishop of Dublin. This paper recounts the relevant background and then how the idea originated, spread, and became in the second half of the nineteenth century a canonical part of our understanding of induction. Bacon’s Idols and Harvey’s Eggs
A presentation given at the eight congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, June 2010. In the introduction to De Generatione Animalium, William Harvey used distinctly Baconian tropes and vocabulary; in the transition from the first part of the book to the second, he said he was following a key part of Bacon’s method; in surviving marginalia, he cited one of Bacon’s works for elaboration of his own views on scientific method. The mistaken belief that Harvey and Bacon advocated opposing methods has two sources—an over-reading of a biographical note by John Aubrey and a misunderstanding of Bacon’s method and Harvey’s Aristotelianism. Addressing the first is a small matter of correcting a misreading of the historical record. Addressing the second, however, is much more important—important for our understanding of a crucial transition in early modern philosophy of science.
Louis Groarke, An Aristotelian Account of Induction: Creating A book review in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews . . . Groarke is surely right that Aristotle believed the cognitive hierarchy he described in Posterior Analytics B 19 is central to, and not antithetical to, validating the syllogism described in Prior Analytics B 23. But did Aristotle really believe induction ultimately relies on what Groarke calls “a stroke or leap of understanding,” “immediate illumination,” “moment of immediate cognition,” “a direct insight,” “moment of illumination,” and so on? . . . Overall, what Groarke says here is provocative and inviting, even if not definitive. Jacopo Zabarella’s Real Influence on Early Modern Science
A presentation given at the History of Science Society Annual Meeting, November 2009. Steven Matthews, Theology and Science in the Thought of Francis Bacon
A book review in Technology and Culture 50, July 2009. This work intentionally joins Stephen A. McKnight’s The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s Thought in arguing that Sir Francis Bacon was more deeply religious than he is conventionally thought to have been. Though the book is full of interesting suggestions, a lack of breadth, rigor, and precision will leave many readers unconvinced. . . . Those who know the corpus and secondary literature enough to read critically will find here provocative suggestions and intriguing leads. Others will need to be cautious about the book’s arguments and conclusions. Bacon’s Idols and Harvey’s Eggs • Flyer (PDF) A presentation given at Case Western Reserve University, October 2009. Jacopo Zabarella: The Last of the Renaissance Aristotelians and His Influence on Early Modern Science
A presentation given at Northern California Renaissance Conference, May 2009. Whately’s Revolution • Abstract (PDF) • Presentation (ppsx) A presentation given at the conference “Induction: Historical and Contemporary Approaches,” University of Ghent, July 2008. Laura J. Snyder, Reforming Philosophy: A Victorian Debate on Science and Society • Article (PDF) A book review in The Objective Standard, Summer 2008. The 19th-century philosopher John Stuart Mill is widely regarded as one of history’s leading proponents of inductive science and of political liberty. Yet, oddly, philosophers working in his train have been remarkably unsuccessful in saying exactly what is wrong with the scientific skepticism or the political tyrannies of the past one hundred and fifty years. Is it possible that Mr. Mill was not such a good guy after all? Freeing Aristotelian Epagôgê from Prior Analytics II 23
An article in Apeiron, December, 2007, pp. 345–74. Interpretations of Aristotelian epagôgê (induction) have swung widely, and the largest factor in the variation has been the role played by Prior Analytics II 23. From Boethius in the sixth century to the medieval rediscovery of Aristotelian texts in the twelfth, this one short chapter was nearly all that was known of Aristotelian induction and was taken as saying that induction is a kind of deduction made valid by a complete enumeration of particulars. Scholastic logicians from Aquinas to Zabarella, though they had access to the full corpus, continued to treat Prior Analytics II 23 as the definitive text and to read it the same way. They overlooked or dismissed seemingly contradictory statements elsewhere in the corpus. Renaissance humanists, who gave the Topics and Rhetoric more attention, found there an image of induction more like Socrates’s search for definitions than Aristotle’s treatment of the syllogism. Francis Bacon’s influential work on induction early in the seventeenth century contributed to a further minimizing of Prior Analytics II 23. Efforts early in the nineteenth century to revive Scholastic logic included a project to reconcile induction as practiced by Baconian natural philosophers and induction as understood by the earlier logicians. Prior Analytics II 23 again became central, but discrepancies with the rest of the corpus still thwarted attempts to form a single, cohesive view of Aristotelian induction. Sir David Ross influentially held that Aristotle was simply confused about the matter. More recent research has sought a unified, cohesive view behind a veil of disparity. A minority has suggested Prior Analytics II 23 has been misread, but this minority has failed to offer a fully persuasive replacement and with it a cohesive cross-corpus interpretation of Aristotelian epagôgê. This essay adopts the minority suggestion while attempting to correct its shortcomings. A close and careful parsing of Prior Analytics II 23 will suggest how the chapter should be read, and a view of Aristotelian epagôgê that is unconstrained by the prior misreadings of Prior Analytics II 23 will be attempted. No evidence will be found that Aristotle was confused. He will be seen to hold that induction is simply the compare-and-contrast method practiced by Socrates, a process that if done properly leads to a mental conviction as trustworthy as the conclusion of a demonstrative deduction. Stephen A. McKnight, The Religious Foundations of Francis Bacon’s A book review in Technology and Culture, 48, July 2007. In this well-structured monograph, Stephen A. McKnight seeks to correct the view that Francis Bacon's use of religious motifs and tropes is “manipulative,” “cynical,” and “disingenuous,” a view McKnight considers the “prevailing” one. To accomplish his goal, McKnight subjects several of Bacon’s works to a close reading. He concludes that the “pervasiveness of religious motifs, scriptural references, and biblical doctrines” in Bacon’s writings “establish the central role religion plays in Bacon’s thought”. McKnight holds that Bacon's religiosity is not disingenuous, but sincere. Myths in the History of Induction • Presentation (ppsx) A presentation given at St. John’s University, Queens, NY, October 2007. Regula Socratis: The Rediscovery of Ancient Induction in Early My dissertation of 2006. A revisionist account of how philosophical induction was conceived in the ancient world and how that conception was transmitted, altered, and then rediscovered. I show how philosophers of late antiquity and then the medieval period came step-by-step to seriously misunderstand Aristotle’s view of induction and how that mistake was reversed by humanists in the Renaissance and then especially by Francis Bacon. I show, naturally enough then, that in early modern science, Baconians were Aristotelians and Aristotelians were Baconians. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum • Wiki site (www) An edition constructed for wikisource.org. Includes Latin original and multiple translations. Induction and Concept-Formation in Francis Bacon and William Presented at Concepts Workshop, a workshop primarily on aspects and applications of Ayn Rand’s theory of concepts, Department of HPS, Pittsburgh, May 2004. A paper about the relationship between concept formation and induction in Bacon and Whewell. This includes what I think is the world’s best 2000-word introduction to Whewellian induction. PersonalGrew up near Cleveland, Ohio. Got BSEE, MSEE, and MBA (all in 5 years!) at Case Western Reserve University. One patent. Moved to Boston to work for a computer company. Fell in love with a woman who said “I’m moving back to California. You coming with me or not?” Joined a Silicon Valley start-up founded by John Hennessey, now Stanford’s president. Married the woman. In ’97 got MLA from Stanford. Founded a software company with Steve Blank and two other guys. Did well. Several software patents. IPO in ’99. Moved to London. Returned. Got PhD in history of science from Stanford in ’06. Visited twice at Pitt. Now research, write, and teach part-time in Stanford’s History and Philosophy of Science and Technology Program and Ethics in Society Program and in the College of Arts and Letters at Stevens Institute of Technology. Live in Saratoga, CA and Manhattan. Still in love with the same woman. |