My Joomla - John P. McCaskey

Jacopo Zabarella, On Methods and On Regressus

A collated Latin edition and original English translation for Harvard University Press’s I Tatti Renaissance Library. To be released October 28, 2013. 

Induction in the Socratic Tradition

First few paragraphs from my contribution to a volume on unconventional looks at induction, being edited by Paolo Biondi and Louis Groarke.

Aristotle said that induction (epagōgē) is a proceeding from particulars to a universal, and the definition has been conventional ever since. But there is an ambiguity here. Did Aristotle mean particular things and universal ideas, or particular and universal statements? Induction in the Scholastic and the (so-called) Humean tradition has presumed the second. Recent scholarship is so steeped in this tradition that we have virtually forgotten the other. But the alternate view prevailed until late antiquity and then again from the time of Francis Bacon until the mid-nineteenth century. This essay seeks to recover that alternate tradition, a tradition whose leading theoreticians were William Whewell, Francis Bacon, Socrates, and in fact Aristotle himself.

When Induction Was About Concepts

Draft (PDF) for an upcoming volume on concepts, induction, and the growth of scientific knowledge, being edited by Richard Burian and Allan Gotthelf.

The first part of this paper summarizes the history of induction. The second part explores three cases in the history of science where an inductive inquiry concluded with universal statements that were true by definition. The statements were both true by definition and true by induction.

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.