My Joomla - John P. McCaskey

Jacopo Zabarella, On Methods and On Regressus

Forthcoming, spring 2013. A collated Latin edition and original English translation for Harvard University Press’s I Tatti Renaissance Library.

Professor Higgins’ Philosophy of Science: Why Can’t Induction be More Like Deduction?

Draft (PDF)

Draft from September 2010 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.

Freeing Aristotelian Epagôgê from Prior Analytics II 23

Article (PDF)

An article in Apeiron, December, 2007, pp. 345–74.

History of the Relationship between Concepts and Induction

Presentation (ppsx)

The kick-off presentation at the Workshop on Concepts, Induction, and the Growth of Scientific Knowledge, Department of HPS, University of Pittsburgh, September 17–19, 2010.

Regula Socratis: The Rediscovery of Ancient Induction in Early Modern England

Dissertation (PDF)

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.

Whence the Uniformity Principle

Abstract (PDF)  •  Presentation (PowerPoint)

A presentation given at the eight congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, June 2010.

Bacon’s Idols and Harvey’s Eggs

Abstract (PDF)  •  Presentation (Powerpoint)

A presentation given at the eight congress of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, June 2010.

Whately’s Revolution

Abstract (PDF)  •  Presentation (Powerpoint)

A presentation given at the conference “Induction: Historical and Contemporary Approaches,” University of Ghent, July 2008.

Induction and Concept-Formation in Francis Bacon and William Whewell

Paper (PDF)

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.