February 2012    At Stanford this quarter, I’m teaching “Moral Foundations of Capitalism.” In spring, I’ll teach “History of Scientific Methods.”   I’ve submitted to ITRL the manuscript for my Latin edition and English translation of Jacopo Zabarella’s On Methods and On Regressus. Now I need to write the introduction.   I’ve been messing around with TEI and XSLT, designing a stylesheet for displaying parallel corpora.

Scholarship

The main theme of my research is that the philosophical problem of induction is an artifact of a bad turn taken in the early 19th century, by which induction came to be conceived as a kind of propositional inference that depends on a suppressed uniformity principle. In antiquity and from Bacon to Whewell, induction was instead conceived as an aspect of concept-formation.

Teaching

Every year at Stanford University I teach a course on the history of scientific methods and a course on rival theories of the moral foundations of capitalism. This year, I also taught a course on history of science at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Service

Students’ Comments

“The readings were so inspiring for discussion: controversial, challenging, incomprehensible at times (in an insightful way)”

“The best professor I’ve had at Stanford—intelligent, interesting and interested, enthusiastic and endlessly encouraging.”

“McCaskey’s passion for the material influences his students, and results in an incredibly enjoyable and informative 2 hour discussion seminar.”

“Got students to think without belittling them, an unusually rare skill. I felt challenged and respected.”

Photograph of JohnAfter spending twenty years in the computer business, I went back to school and got a PhD in history from Stanford. I mostly now research and teach the history of philosophy of science, but I also teach some history of 20th century political philosophy.

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