plan dissertation philo science

La science - dissertations de philosophie

• L’expérience n’est-elle qu’empirique ?
• Apprendre est-ce seulement s'informer ?
• À quoi servent les sciences ?
• Comment les notions mathématiques dépendant de l'esprit peuvent-elles expliquer un réel qui n'en dépend pas ?
• D'où vient la force des préjugés ?
• En quoi consiste l'objectivité scientifique ?
• Est-ce le recours à l'expérience qui garantit le caractère scientifique d'une théorie ?
• Est-ce leur confirmation expérimentale qui fait le succès des sciences humaines ?
• Faut-il croire pour savoir ?
• La connaissance de soi comporte-t-elle des obstacles ?
• La philosophie a-t-elle encore une place dans un monde surtout dominé par la science ?
• La science découvre-t-elle ou construit-elle ses objets ?
• La science et la technique nous autorisent-elles à considérer notre civilisation comme supérieure aux autres ?
• La science ne fournit-elle que des certitudes ?
• La science se limite-t-elle à constater les faits ?

Dissertations corrigés de philosophie pour le lycée

Catégorie : La science

La science, entreprise intellectuelle et méthodique de l’exploration de la réalité, est l’un des piliers du progrès humain. Elle soulève des questions sur la connaissance empirique, la méthode scientifique, et les limites de notre compréhension du monde naturel. L’examen de la science nous conduit à réfléchir sur la manière dont elle éclaire notre perception de la réalité et sur son impact sur la société.

La science peut-elle satisfaire notre besoin de vérité

La science, souvent perçue comme un moyen privilégié pour accéder à la vérité, soulève la question de savoir si elle peut totalement combler notre soif de certitude. Est-elle réellement capable de satisfaire notre quête de vérité, ou ses limites intrinsèques nous obligent-elles à chercher ailleurs une réponse plus complète?

• Dissertations

D’où viennent nos connaissances ?

La question de l’origine de nos connaissances s’impose comme une problématique cruciale de la philosophie. Cette dissertation aborde-t-elle en scrutant particulièrement les théories empiriste et rationaliste pour mieux appréhender la genèse de notre savoir.

• La conscience

Dans quelle mesure les énoncés scientifiques peuvent-ils être considérés comme des vérités ?

La recherche de la vérité est un objectif fondamental en science. Toutefois, la notion de vérité en science est complexe et soulève de nombreuses questions philosophiques. Cette dissertation examinera donc la nature et la portée de la véracité des énoncés scientifiques.

Dans quelle mesure une connaissance scientifique donne-t-elle du pouvoir sur l’avenir ?

La connaissance scientifique, véhiculant un potentiel de prédiction et de contrôle, semble nous donner une maîtrise sur l’avenir. Cette dissertation va donc réfléchir à l’ampleur réelle de ce pouvoir attribué à la science.

Notre connaissance du réel se limite-t-elle au savoir scientifique ?

La dissertation philosophique qui suit se penche sur la question de la connaissance du réel. Est-elle uniquement définie par le savoir scientifique ? Ou existe-t-il d’autres moyens d’appréhender et de comprendre la réalité qui nous entoure ?

La morale doit-elle imposer des limites à la science ?

La question de l’interaction entre la morale et la science est un sujet complexe et délicat. Doit-on laisser la science progresser sans entrave ou la morale doit-elle imposer des limites pour prévenir d’éventuels abus ? Cette dissertation explorera ces questions cruciales.

A quelles conditions une démarche est-elle scientifique ?

La démarche scientifique est un processus rigoureux qui vise à découvrir et à expliquer les phénomènes naturels. Mais quels sont les critères qui définissent cette démarche ? Quelles conditions doivent être remplies pour qu’une démarche soit considérée comme scientifique ?

Faut-il attendre de la science qu’elle ait réponse à tout ?

La science, avec ses méthodes rigoureuses et ses résultats empiriques, est souvent perçue comme une source infaillible de vérité. Cependant, la question se pose : la science peut-elle vraiment répondre à tout ? Cette dissertation explorera les limites et les potentialités de la science dans la quête de la connaissance.

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• Dissertation

Exemple de dissertation de philosophie

Publié le 26 novembre 2018 par Justine Debret . Mis à jour le 7 décembre 2020.

Voici des exemples complets pour une bonne dissertation de philosophie (niveau Bac).

Vous pouvez les utiliser pour étudier la structure du plan d’une dissertation de philosophie , ainsi que la méthode utilisée.

Conseil Avant de rendre votre dissertation de philosophie,  relisez et corrigez  les fautes. Elles comptent dans votre note finale.

Table des matières

Exemple de dissertation de philosophie sur le travail (1), exemple de dissertation de philosophie sur le concept de liberté (2), exemple de dissertation de philosophie sur l’art (3).

Sujet de la dissertation   de philosophie  : « Le travail n’est-il qu’une contrainte ? ».

Il s’agit d’une dissertation de philosophie qui porte sur le concept de « travail » et qui le questionne avec la problématique « est-ce que l’Homme est contraint ou obligé de travailler ? ».

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Sujet de la dissertation   de philosophie  : « Etre libre, est-ce faire ce que l’on veut ? ».

Cette dissertation de philosophie sur la liberté interroge la nature de l’Homme. La problématique de la dissertation est « l’’Homme est-il un être libre capable de faire des choix rationnels ou est-il esclave de lui-même et de ses désirs ? ».

Sujet de la dissertation   de philosophie  : « En quoi peut-on dire que l’objet ordinaire diffère de l’oeuvre d’art ? ».

Cette dissertation sur l’art et la technique se demande si  l’on peut désigner la création artistique comme l’autre de la production technique ou si ces deux mécanismes se distinguent ?

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Debret, J. (2020, 07 décembre). Exemple de dissertation de philosophie. Scribbr. Consulté le 4 septembre 2024, de https://www.scribbr.fr/dissertation-fr/exemple-dissertation-philosophie/

Cet article est-il utile ?

Justine Debret

D'autres étudiants ont aussi consulté..., exemple de dissertation juridique, la méthode de la dissertation de philosophie , plan d'une dissertation de philosophie.

plans philo à télécharger pour préparer examens & concours     > tous nos plans

289 plans rédigés de philosophie à télécharger

Les sujets stars :).

• L’État peut-il être juste ?
• La conscience de soi est-elle une connaissance de soi ?
• L’homme a-t-il nécessairement besoin de religion ?
• L’homme doit-il travailler pour être humain ?
• La conscience est elle ce qui définit l’homme ?
• La conscience fait-elle de l’homme une exception ?
• Changer, est-ce devenir quelqu’un d’autre ?
• L’idée d’inconscient exclut-elle celle de liberté ?
• Peut-on parler pour ne rien dire ?
• L’art nous détourne-t-il de la réalité ?
• Sartre, L'Être et le Néant (1943), Tel, Gallimard, p. 88.
• Faut-il libérer ses désirs ou se libérer de ses désirs ?
• Peut-on renoncer à sa liberté ?
• Est-il raisonnable de croire en Dieu ?
• Annales BAC 2007 - Toute prise de conscience est-elle libératrice ?

Nouveaux sujets publiés

• Annales BAC 2021 - Est-il toujours injuste de désobéir aux lois ?
• Annales BAC 2021 - Sommes-nous responsables de l’avenir ?
• Annales BAC 2021 - L’inconscient échappe-t-il à toute forme de connaissance ?
• Annales BAC 2021 - Discuter, est-ce renoncer à la violence ?
• Annales BAC 2017 - Peut-on se libérer de sa culture ?
• Annales BAC 2017 - Pour trouver le bonheur, faut-il le rechercher ?

Sujets tendances

• Plaisir et bonheur

Notions les plus demandées

• La conscience et l'inconscient
• Le désir
• La liberté
• Le travail et la technique

Plan rédigé, sujet expliqué

Pour chaque sujet de dissertation ou commentaire de texte, un plan rédigé (le plus souvent en 3 parties avec 3 sous-parties) est disponible en téléchargement.

Votre sujet n'est pas dans la liste ? Obtenez en moins de 72h : - problématique entièrement rédigée - un plan détaillé rédigé complet, avec parties et sous-parties - la possibilité de questionner le professeur sur le plan proposé Prestation personnalisée réalisée par un professeur agrégé de philo

Bon à savoir : Tous nos corrigés sont préparés par des professeurs agrégés de philosophie en exercice.

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Méthodologie de la dissertation de philosophie (mise à jour, 2024)

Related Papers

Alexis Delamare

Exercice académique franco-français par excellence, la dissertation a de quoi surprendre. N’est-ce pas une folie que de prétendre régler en quelques heures une question philosophique discutée depuis des siècles ? L’énoncé même de certains sujets (« La connaissance ») apparaît presque ridicule comparé au temps dont on dispose pour le traiter. La dissertation traduirait ainsi une forme de mégalomanie philosophique. Une seconde critique régulièrement évoquée se concentre sur la totale liberté laissée aux étudiants : comment comparer entre elles des productions qui auront fait usage de thèses, d’auteurs, de références, totalement différents ? On comprend bien comment l’on note un commentaire : on met en regard le sens du texte et ce qu’en a compris l’étudiant. Mais pour la dissertation ? Sur quelle norme devrait-on se fonder pour juger la copie ? Enfin, on pourra encore ajouter ceci, que la dissertation, parce qu’elle nous pousse à défendre des thèses pour mieux les rejeter par la suite, est une forme d’absurdité. Pourquoi ne pas simplement défendre notre point de vue ? Pourquoi s’embarrasser de ces longs détours avant de parvenir enfin, épuisés, à la vérité de la dernière partie ?

wajdi hajlaoui

Méthodologie pour rédiger bonnement les bons sujet de mémoire ,littérature ,philosophie pour pouvoir réussir les grands concours tels l'agrégation et l'admission à l'école normale supérieure .

Lamiaa Khaldoune

Michael D Rosenfeld

Le séminaire proposé n’est pas un séminaire de recherche sur la théorie de la littérature. Son ambition est de montrer au public visé (doctorants surtout, étudiants de deuxième année de master aussi) quel intérêt pratique (méthodologique) la théorie de la littérature a pour leur propre recherche : la théorie permet de définir des problématiques plus pertinentes, plus cohérentes, plus rigoureuses que l’approche empirique. La théorie est abordée ici comme un outil, non comme un objet en soi, ni, surtout, comme un obstacle à surmonter. Les textes servant de base aux séances ont été choisis pour leur intérêt méthodologique, mais aussi pour leur clarté et leur accessibilité intellectuelle. Ils sont en général assez courts, et on les trouve facilement. Il est demandé aux étudiants de choisir et d’orienter leurs exposés de façon à faire ressortir ce que le corpus théorique étudié peut apporter à leur propre recherche. À côté d’un travail d’élucidation, les interventions des enseignants ont pour objectif de partager une expérience. Elles indiquent en particulier en quoi telle ou telle ressource théorique (tel ouvrage, tel concept, telle idée) a pu susciter leur questionnement, étayer leurs travaux (à commencer par leurs propres thèses de doctorat et habilitation à diriger des recherches), résoudre telle ou telle difficulté rencontrée dans la conduite d’une recherche. Les trois responsables du séminaire assistent ensemble à la totalité des séances. Équipe : Serge Rolet (Lille 3), Vincent Vivès (Valenciennes), Damien Zanone (UCL)

Raphaël Verchère

Cet ouvrage permet aux élèves de Terminale de s’approprier de façon autonome, concrète et directement utilisable les connaissances et les compétences attendues pour l’épreuve de philosophie au Bac : - des fiches méthodologiques sur les deux épreuves : dissertation et explication de texte ; - des fiches de cours sur les notions au programme ; - des exercices variés et ciblés avec les commentaires du prof ; - des sujets d’annales commentés et corrigés ; - des conseils et astuces. En bonus - Les repères du programme expliqués - Les clés de l’oral de rattrapage

Comme pour la dissertation, l’introduction est un moment absolument fondamental du commentaire. L’on pourrait penser, à première vue, que la tâche de l’introduction du commentaire est moins significative que celle de la dissertation, en disant à peu près : dans la dissertation, il s’agit d’inventer un problème, tandis que, dans le commentaire, le texte, donc le problème, est déjà devant nous : il n’y a rien à inventer, seulement à découvrir. Une telle conception est erronée. On a vu, dans la dissertation, que même les sujets-question devaient être problématisés : il fallait montrer en quoi la question constituait un problème, il fallait transformer la question en problème. La tâche est assez similaire pour le commentaire : il faut montrer en quoi le texte pose un problème, en quoi la question abordée par le texte ne va pas de soi et exige donc une résolution. Le développement du commentaire, de même que pour la dissertation, va consister à montrer comment le texte répond au problème que l’on aura identifié en introduction.

Boris Barraud

La dissertation est, au sein des facultés de droit françaises, l'un des exercices les plus anciens et les plus classiques. À travers lui, l'enseignant cherche à évaluer non les connaissances de l'étudiant mais sa capacité à comprendre, à penser et à synthétiser le droit. Surtout, parce que, en droit, la forme compte autant que le fond, l'enseignant cherche à mesurer l'acceptation et la compréhension par l'étudiant de certains canons en vigueur parmi les facultés de droit françaises, canons qui ont pour seule justification le fait qu'ils sont des canons, i.e. des usages, loin de toute légitimité scientifique. L'objectif de la dissertation est, à partir d'un sujet donné, d'isoler une problématique (non la problématique qui n'existe pas) dans une introduction et d'y répondre dans un plan et dans des développements objectifs mais aussi personnels. Cet exercice fait appel à de nombreuses qualités qu'il faut cultiver : capacité d'analyser le sujet, esprit de synthèse, capacité de communication des connaissances, habileté de présentation et d'exposition de celles-ci. Les sujets des dissertations peuvent être de toutes sortes, des plus théoriques aux plus attachés au droit positif. Mais, quel que soit le sujet, l'étudiant ne doit en aucun cas se borner à présenter l'état du droit positif, à l'instar d'un manuel. La bonne dissertation est celle qui consiste en une réflexion ou, mieux, en une démonstration. Et son rédacteur doit, notamment à travers le plan et les intitulés, exprimer une position personnelle, sans toutefois verser par trop dans les jugements de valeur ou, pis, dans les considérations politiques. Tout d'abord, il convient de prendre connaissance du sujet et, sur papier libre, de noter la définition de ses termes ainsi que toutes les idées (ou pistes d'idées) venant à l'esprit en séparant celles qui pourraient constituer des parties ou des sous-parties et celles qui pourraient seulement servir le propos au sein des sous-parties. Même si le sujet est court concernant les dissertations, il convient de le lire à plusieurs reprises et de s'assurer de la bonne compréhension de ses termes afin d'éviter le hors-sujet, lequel emporte toujours des conséquences très dommageables. Parfois, la ponctuation ou certains mots de liaison sont décisifs en ce qu'ils influencent le sens du sujet et donc la problématique et les réponses qu'il est possible d'en tirer. Une fois un premier point autour du sujet effectué, il s'agit de rechercher, en consultant manuels, ouvrages et revues juridiques, mais aussi toute source offerte par le Web (à condition que sa fiabilité soit avérée et de pouvoir ensuite la citer en note de bas de page), d'autres idées et informations, toujours en notant au brouillon les parties et sous-parties potentielles et les autres données non-exploitables en termes de plan. Une fois qu'il apparaît que les recherches autour du sujet ne peuvent plus être productives (ou du moins seulement marginalement), reste à reprendre toutes les notes du brouillon et à les ordonner sur un nouveau papier libre en séparant cette fois ce qui sera l'introduction, ce que seront le plan et les intitulés et ce que sera le propos tenu en chaque sous-partie. Éventuellement, mais non-nécessairement, quelques éléments peuvent être conservés en vue de la rédaction d'une conclusion. Il s'agit à cet instant de regrouper par affinités les idées et informations qui se complètent, qui s'opposent, également celles qui doivent finalement être exclues de la démonstration, afin de concevoir progressivement ce qui sera le plan (sans alors chercher à affiner les intitulés, ce qui est un exercice d'abord formel et intervenant en dernier lieu). Il importe de ne surtout pas s'engager trop vite dans la rédaction et dans la conception du plan. Tout cela ne vient qu'à la fin, validant le travail en quelque sorte. Le plan, notamment, est le fruit naturel des recherches et des réflexions ; il serait désastreux de vouloir ab initio concevoir un plan pour ensuite rechercher quelques éléments susceptibles de la garnir substantiellement. Deux éléments sont centraux dans la dissertation : son introduction (1) et son plan (2). Il n'est pas davantage à dire du contenu de chaque sous-partie. Simplement faut-il préciser que, systématiquement, des annonces de sous-plans (des chapeaux introductifs) doivent précéder et annoncer les A et B et des phrases de transition doivent permettre le passage de I à II et de A à B. Tant les chapeaux que les transitions permettent de renforcer et de traduire la logique du raisonnement. Quant au contenu, simplement faut-il inviter l'étudiant à ne pas se borner à exposer de manière excessivement descriptive les données et, sans néanmoins bannir toute description, à adopter également une approche critique, si ce n'est polémique à propos des éléments en cause.

El haouary ouadie

Michel Weber

« […] D’épreuve en épreuve, la philosophie affronterait des rivaux de plus en plus insolents, de plus en plus calamiteux, que Platon lui-même n’aurait pas imaginés dans ses moments les plus comiques. Enfin le fond de la honte fut atteint quand l’informatique, le marketing, le design, la publicité, toutes les disciplines de la communication s’emparèrent du mot concept lui-même, et dirent : c’est notre affaire, c’est nous les créatifs, nous sommes les concepteurs ! » L’épreuve dernière qu’évoquent Deleuze et Guattari a trouvé au XXe siècle un développement assez inattendu, en l’espèce de la transformation de ce qui n’était somme toute qu’une bataille d’arrière-garde — la dénonciation active du « fond de la honte » — en la guerre intestine qu’institue potentiellement le « conseil philosophique privé ». Il s’agit en effet ni plus ni moins de la réactualisation de la lutte que se livrèrent — selon Platon, il y a 2500 ans — Socrate et les sophistes . À nouveau, on marchande l’idéal philosophique.

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Digital Commons @ USF > College of Arts and Sciences > Philosophy > Theses and Dissertations

Philosophy Theses and Dissertations

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Weakness of Will: An Inquiry on Value , Michael Funke

Cogs in a Cosmic Machine: A Defense of Free Will Skepticism and its Ethical Implications , Sacha Greer

Thinking Nature, "Pierre Maupertuis and the Charge of Error Against Fermat and Leibniz" , Richard Samuel Lamborn

John Duns Scotus’s Metaphysics of Goodness: Adventures in 13th-Century Metaethics , Jeffrey W. Steele

A Gadamerian Analysis of Roman Catholic Hermeneutics: A Diachronic Analysis of Interpretations of Romans 1:17-2:17 , Steven Floyd Surrency

A Natural Case for Realism: Processes, Structures, and Laws , Andrew Michael Winters

Theses/Dissertations from 2014 2014

Leibniz's Theodicies , Joseph Michael Anderson

Aeschynē in Aristotle's Conception of Human Nature , Melissa Marie Coakley

Ressentiment, Violence, and Colonialism , Jose A. Haro

It's About Time: Dynamics of Inflationary Cosmology as the Source of the Asymmetry of Time , Emre Keskin

Time Wounds All Heels: Human Nature and the Rationality of Just Behavior , Timothy Glenn Slattery

Theses/Dissertations from 2013 2013

Nietzsche and Heidegger on the Cartesian Atomism of Thought , Steven Burgess

Embodying Social Practice: Dynamically Co-Constituting Social Agency , Brian W. Dunst

Subject of Conscience: On the Relation between Freedom and Discrimination in the Thought of Heidegger, Foucault, and Butler , Aret Karademir

Climate, Neo-Spinozism, and the Ecological Worldview , Nancy M. Kettle

Eschatology in a Secular Age: An Examination of the Use of Eschatology in the Philosophies of Heidegger, Berdyaev and Blumenberg , John R. Lup, Jr.

Navigation and Immersion of the American Identity in a Foreign Culture to Emergence as a Culturally Relative Ambassador , Lee H. Rosen

Theses/Dissertations from 2012 2012

A Philosophical Analysis of Intellectual Property: In Defense of Instrumentalism , Michael A. Kanning

A Commentary On Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Discourse on Metaphysics #19 , Richard Lamborn Samuel Lamborn

Sellars in Context: An Analysis of Wilfrid Sellars's Early Works , Peter Jackson Olen

The New Materialism: Althusser, Badiou, and Zizek , Geoffrey Dennis Pfeifer

Structure and Agency: An Analysis of the Impact of Structure on Group Agents , Elizabeth Kaye Victor

Moral Friction, Moral Phenomenology, and the Improviser , Benjamin Scott Young

Theses/Dissertations from 2011 2011

The Virtuoso Human: A Virtue Ethics Model Based on Care , Frederick Joseph Bennett

The Existential Compromise in the History of the Philosophy of Death , Adam Buben

Philosophical Precursors to the Radical Enlightenment: Vignettes on the Struggle Between Philosophy and Theology From the Greeks to Leibniz With Special Emphasis on Spinoza , Anthony John Desantis

The Problem of Evil in Augustine's Confessions , Edward Matusek

The Persistence of Casuistry: a Neo-premodernist Approach to Moral Reasoning , Richard Arthur Mercadante

Theses/Dissertations from 2010 2010

Dewey's Pragmatism and the Great Community , Philip Schuyler Bishop

Unamuno's Concept of the Tragic , Ernesto O. Hernandez

Rethinking Ethical Naturalism: The Implications of Developmental Systems Theory , Jared J.. Kinggard

From Husserl and the Neo-Kantians to Art: Heidegger's Realist Historicist Answer to the Problem of the Origin of Meaning , William H. Koch

Queering Cognition: Extended Minds and Sociotechnologically Hybridized Gender , Michele Merritt

Hydric Life: A Nietzschean Reading of Postcolonial Communication , Elena F. Ruiz-Aho

Descartes' Bête Machine, the Leibnizian Correction and Religious Influence , John Voelpel

Aretē and Physics: The Lesson of Plato's Timaeus , John R. Wolfe

Theses/Dissertations from 2009 2009

Praxis and Theōria : Heidegger’s “Violent” Interpretation , Megan E. Altman

On the Concept of Evil: An Analysis of Genocide and State Sovereignty , Jason J. Campbell

The Role of Trust in Judgment , Christophe Sage Hudspeth

Truth And Judgment , Jeremy J. Kelly

The concept of action and responsibility in Heidegger's early thought , Christian Hans Pedersen

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Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Dissertations.

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• Dissertation

The dissertation is expected to be a mature and competent piece of writing, embodying the results of significant original research. Physical requirements for preparing a dissertation (i.e., quality of paper, format, binding, etc.) are prescribed online in the Guide for the Electronic Submission of Theses and Dissertations ; a copy is also available in the Graduate School Office. For specific aspects of form and style, students are advised to use Kate L. Turabian's  A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations  (Eighth Edition, 2013). Special physical problems regarding preparation of dissertations should be taken up with the Assistant Dean for Student Programs.

Graduate students also have the option of submitting their dissertation electronically , to facilitate access to their work through online databases. Students must be registered at Duke during the semester in which they defend their dissertations and therefore must take their final dissertation examination while classes are in session. It is best to schedule a final examination (the so-called "thesis defense") early in the fall or spring semester. Examinations during the summer terms are almost impossible to arrange and should be avoided, if possible. Examinations between semesters are permitted only in exceptional cases.

Checklist for Doctoral Dissertation Defense

• Schedule exam during school semester. At the beginning of the semester be sure to register for continuation and to complete the Apply to Graduate process in DukeHub.
• Go to the Graduate School's Preparing to Graduate  to be sure your plans meet all graduation related deadlines.
• If your dissertation committee remains the same as your preliminary committee, send an email indicating there is no change to [email protected] & to DGSA. If there are changes, contact DGSA immediately.
• Clear date and time with all members of your committee. As soon as you do this , email [email protected] to reserve a room for your defense date (tell her if you have special AV needs, or will be skyping during the defense). When you get confirmation of the room, email it to the DGS and DGSA, and each committee member.
• Proofread your dissertation and have someone else do so.
• Provide committee with reading copies of your dissertation 3 weeks in advance.
• Format check a copy of your dissertation through the Graduate School Office several weeks in advance (following these procedures outlined ). Initial submission of dissertations into UMI/ProQuestmust take place at least two weeks prior to the defense date and no later than the established initial submission deadline for that graduation term.
• At least 2 weeks before defense date, ask Advisor to email Advisor Letter to [email protected] (with your name in the subject line) stating they have read your dissertation and it is ready to defend.
• Ask DGS to email Department Defense Announcement form  to the Graduate School at [email protected] at least 2 weeks ahead.
• Prior to defense date, pick up Exam Card from the Graduate School at your exam card appointment (you schedule this here after  you get email notification from the Graduate School). Bring exam card to the defense.
• On defense date, come to exam with enough sleep and earn a clear pass.
• Have committee sign Exam Card & the Title & Abstract Signature pages. Have Advisor sign the Duke Space licensing agreement.
• Return the original signed Exam Card, Title & Abstract Signature pages, and Duke Space licensing agreement to Graduate School, and bring a copy of these forms to DGSA's office.
• Make corrections and submit 3 dissertation copies and abstracts.
• Pay for microfilming, binding, & (optional) copyrighting.
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Department of Philosophy

General exam and dissertation, on this page.

• For Students in the Standard Program and Special Tracks

For Students in the Classical Philosophy Program

The qualifying exam.

• Choose a Reasonably Sized Project

Dissertations Consisting of Several Essays

General exam format, for students in the standard program, the logic & philosophy of science track, or the interdepartmental program in political philosophy.

October General Exam Schedule ( General Exam in October of the Third Year) :

• Provide the name of your General Exam adviser to the DGS  by March 15 th  of your second year of regular enrollment.  Once your General Exam adviser is approved, the DGS will set up your General Exam committee.
• Submit all papers, take all exams, complete all distribution requirements and units  by May 31 st  of your second year   of regular enrollment*. This includes your first and second oral units.
• At the latest, two weeks before the oral exam, students will have received the approval of two examiners for an examination proposal, which must include a description of the unit’s field of study, six to ten sample questions, and a bibliography. This document, after approval by the examiners, must be forwarded to the DGS. The written part of the unit can be a paper or a 48-hour take-home exam on questions formulated by the examiners. Both written and oral parts of the exam must combine a survey of the field with creative philosophical work.
• Your undergraduate lecture, observed and confirmed in writing by a Princeton PHI faculty member, must be completed  by May 31 st  of your second year of regular enrollment.
• Part 2 of the General Exam is the qualifying exam (the oral portion; preceded a few days before by submission of a draft chapter of your dissertation). This due date is based on the University academic calendar for October General Exams. (See below for a complete description of the qualifying exam.)
• Teaching in your second year at Princeton is optional.

January General Exam Schedule  (General Exam in January of the Third Year):

• Provide the name of your General Exam adviser to the DGS  by March 15 th  of your second year   of regular enrollment. Once your General Exam adviser is approved, the DGS will set up your General Exam committee.
• Submit all papers, take all exams, complete all distribution requirements and units (including your first oral unit)  by May 31 st  of your second year of regular enrollment*.
• Your undergraduate lecture, observed and confirmed in writing by a Princeton PHI faculty member, must be completed  by December 15 th  of your third year of regular enrollment.
• Part 2 of your General Exam is the qualifying exam (the oral portion; preceded a few days before by submission of a draft chapter of your dissertation). This due date is based on the University academic calendar for January General Exams. (See below for a complete description of the qualifying exam.)

*Failure to meet this deadline results in loss of entitlement to staying enrolled in the program and in the deferral of the department’s re-enrollment recommendation. In that case, a new timeline for completion of the ten units is agreed upon with the student by June 15, and continued enrollment is conditional on implementation of the new timeline.

If any of the above dates occur on a weekend or during recess, the due date will be on the following Monday.

• Provide the name of your General Exam adviser to the DGS  by March 15 th  of your second year of regular enrollment. Once your General Exam adviser is approved, the DGS will set up your General Exam committee.
• At the latest, two weeks before the oral exam, students will have received the approval of two examiners for an examination proposal, which must include a description of the unit’s field of study, six to ten sample questions, and a bibliography. The written part of the unit can be a paper or a 48-hour take-home exam on questions formulated by the examiners. Both written and oral parts of the exam must combine a survey of the field with creative philosophical work.
• Your undergraduate lecture, observed and confirmed in writing by a Princeton PHI faculty member, must be completed  anytime prior to your General Exam.
• Part 2 of your General Exam is the qualifying exam (the oral portion; preceded a few days before by submission of a draft chapter of your dissertation). This can be completed in October, January, or as late as May of your third year of regular enrollment,  following the schedule based on the University academic calendar. (See below for a complete description of the qualifying exam.)

Part 2 of the General Exam is the qualifying exam.  The written part of this exam is constituted by (1) a draft dissertation chapter of between 7500 – 8500 words, and (2) a dissertation prospectus of 2 – 4 pages. If you feel the need to exceed these limits (with quotations, for example), consult with the DGS. The oral part of the exam is conducted by the student’s General Exam committee, which is composed of four faculty members, under the direction of the exam committee chair. It is preferred that students enrolled in the regular program take this oral exam in the General Exam period in October of their third year of enrollment. However, students may also take the exam in the January exam period of their third year of enrollment. 

All students who are allowed to retake their General Examination after a failed attempt are required to do so by following the format of the qualifying exam (Part 2 of the new General Exam format).

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Qualifications to Write A Dissertation In A Given Area

If you can complete pre-Generals requirements and pass Generals, then we take it that you are able to write some dissertation or other, but not necessarily the dissertation of your choice. To do justice to some topics, you may need preparation and qualifications that go beyond those required of everyone as part of our pre-Generals requirements, and beyond what you could reasonably expect to pick up while working on the dissertation. You might need to know a considerable amount of logic, or linguistics, or physics, or history, or econometrics, or something else. In par­ticular, you might need a level of proficiency in some foreign language which is substantially higher than that needed to pass the language requirement. That might be because there are impor­tant untranslated scholarly works relevant to your topic. Or it might be because your topic requires you to figure out what someone meant by something written in a foreign language. Note the department's requirement that "if a student's dissertation is devoted to any considerable extent to an author, the student must be able to read the author's works in the original language." (But note also the delicate, yet real, distinction between writing about an author and writing about philo­sophical ideas that come from that author.) Don't take chances. The standards that apply are the generally accepted standards of sound scholarship, not the standards of doing the best you can with what preparation you have. If you can't do sound scholarship on a topic because you aren't good enough at a language (or something) that doesn't excuse or justify bad scholarship – it means that you should have chosen a different topic.

If in doubt about what qualifications are needed for a topic, and whether you have them, seek advice! Your adviser cannot determine by an exercise of authority what standards of scholarship will suffice – the adviser is only an adviser, there is no such authority – but the adviser can give you good advice on what will be needed to meet generally accepted standards of scholarship, and the adviser (with your help) can try to measure your level of proficiency. If you can't do a topic justice, you'd rather find out now than after you've submitted a dissertation.

Choose a Reasonably-Sized Project

In choosing a dissertation topic and General Examination field, beware of overambition. Students sometimes attempt enormous projects which later have to be abandoned, others are completed many years later. Either way is a disaster for the student's academic career. It is hard to write a dis­sertation while starting to teach, hard to remain employed without the Ph.D., hard to publish arti­cles that would support promotion to tenure while still struggling with the dissertation. It is extremely advantageous to finish the Ph.D. before leaving Princeton. Your dissertation does not need to be a magnum opus; it does not need to contain every thought you have about the topic; the end of the dissertation need not be the end of your research and writing on the topic. Choose a project you can soon finish!

Some dissertations consist of several significant philosophical essays on different topics. Each essay in such a dissertation must be a substantial full-length philosophical article, not just a dis­cussion note.

Your dissertation should have a useful title that gives some indication of the philosophical content of the dissertation. Specifically ruled out are titles like "Philosophical Essays" or "Three Philo­sophical Essays."

Although a good dissertation might be significantly shorter or longer, the department recom­mends a target length of 30,000-50,000 words. Besides this recommendation, we also have established a length limit. Dissertations will normally be limited to 100,000 words (about 400 standard pages); exceptions must be approved by the Graduate Committee.

The following links will provide information on preparing your dissertation for submission:

FPO Checklist

Mudd Library

Graduate School – Dissertation and FPO

Graduate School - Advanced Degree Application Process

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Apprendre la philosophie

Découvrir la philosophie pas à pas

Exemple de dissertation de philosophie rédigée

Bienvenue sur Apprendre la philosophie ! Si vous êtes nouveau ici, vous voudrez sans doute lire mon livre qui vous explique comment réussir votre épreuve de philosophie au bac : cliquez ici pour télécharger le livre gratuitement ! 🙂

Bienvenue sur Apprendre la philosophie ! Comme ça n'est pas la première fois que vous venez ici, vous voudrez sans doute lire mon livre qui vous explique comment réussir votre épreuve de philosophie au bac : cliquez ici pour télécharger le livre gratuitement ! 🙂

Afin que vous compreniez mieux ce que l’on attend de vous dans une dissertation, voici un exemple de dissertation de philosophie. A chaque fois, je précise entre parenthèses juste après à quelle étape de la méthodologie de la dissertation cela correspond. Si vous ne l’avez pas lu, je vous invite à lire d’abord cet article sur la manière de bien commencer sa dissertation de philosophie ou si vous préférez la vidéo c’es t ici.

Sujet : « L’homme est-il à part dans la nature ? » (Exemple de dissertation de philosophie)

Petit rappel de la structure de l’introduction. Pour un exemple d’introduction de dissertation en vidéo c’est ici .

Introduction

Vinciane Despret, philosophe et psychologue, remarque combien les hommes sont enclins à se considérer eux-mêmes comme exceptionnels. Mais, à ses yeux, c’est oublier que nous sommes aussi de grands destructeurs ou si l’on peut dire des êtres particulièrement nuisibles pour les autres, pour nous-mêmes et pour la nature. Ce faisant, elle considère bien les hommes comme « à part » dans la nature, du moins par nos capacités de destruction. Mais, est-il réellement justifié de dire que nous sommes à part dans la mesure où nous restons dépend d’une nature qui peut également nous détruire en tant qu’espèce ? (Accroche qui propose une première réponse au sujet et formule un début d’objection ) Alors, l’homme est-il réellement à part dans la nature ? (Rappel du sujet) A première vue , et si l’on se fie à la manière dont les hommes se considèrent eux-mêmes depuis des siècles, l’homme est bien à part dans la nature car il serait doté de facultés exceptionnelles telles la conscience, un langage riche et articulé, une raison ou encore des cultures variées et complexes qui l’éloignent toujours davantage de la vie animale. Mais, notre tendance à nous considérer comme supérieurs, ne nous fait-elle pas oublier que notre espèce comme toutes les autres est le produit de l’évolution des espèces ? Ainsi, on pourrait dire que l’homme n’est pas particulièrement à part. L’être humain reste une espèce qui, par le fait du hasard, a développé une raison, une conscience de soi, autant de facultés qui sont devenues la norme chez l’homme car elles lui procurent un avantage et lui permettent d’étendre son influence ou peut-être son territoire. Ce mécanisme est le même pour toutes les espèces, pourquoi alors considérer l’homme comme à part ? (Problématique constituée d’une première réponse au sujet « A première vue », puis d’une objection à cette première réponse « Mais »). Nous verrons d’abord que l’être humain peut effectivement être considéré comme à part dans la nature. Puis, nous nous demanderons si cette idée que nous serions une espèce à part n’est pas une pure illusion. Enfin, nous envisagerons bien une spécificité humaine, mais qui au lieu d’être un privilège est plutôt une immense responsabilité. (Annonce du plan en 3 parties) .

Développement

Avant de rédiger le développement de l’exemple de dissertation de philosophie, petit rappel de la structure globale que doit avoir votre devoir. Le nombre des sous-parties est indicatif. Il doit y avoir au moins deux sous-parties par partie et pas plus de trois.

Attention, ci-dessous, je vais mettre des titres Première grande partie / premier paragraphe. Vous ne devez pas les mettre dans vos copies. Je les mets seulement pour que vous compreniez bien la structure. Afin que votre copie soit bien lisible, vous devez passer des lignes entre les grandes parties et revenir à la ligne + alinéa quand vous changez de paragraphe (ou sous-partie).

Première grande partie : l’homme est bien à part dans la nature

Premier paragraphe :.

L’être humain peut semble-t-il être considéré comme à part dans la nature car il est doté de facultés qui le rendent très différent des autres espèces. (Thèse générale du paragraphe qui répond au sujet) Certes, l’être humain appartient en un sens à la nature, car si l’on définit la nature comme l’ensemble de ce qui n’a pas été créé ou transformée par l’homme (définition de la nature) alors l’espèce humaine est bien naturelle. L’homme ne s’est pas créé lui-même, il est donc un être naturel au moins en partie. Mais, l’être humain à ceci de particulier que précisément il a cette capacité à transformer sa nature et à n’être pas totalement soumis à son instinct. Il peut se cultiver c’est-à-dire se transformer si bien qu’il peut devenir réellement très différent d’un autre être humain. (Argument formulé avec mes propres termes pour soutenir la thèse) Aux yeux de Rousseau, ce qui fait la spécificité de l’être humain par rapport aux autres espèces, c’est sa capacité à « se perfectionner ». (Utilisation d’une référence à Rousseau qui justifie la thèse, avec utilisation du vocabulaire de l’auteur). Il remarque ainsi qu’un être humain peut, par les choix qu’il fait, aussi bien devenir un très grand artiste, sportif ou savant, qu’un toxicomane. C’est d’ailleurs lui qui pose la question « Pourquoi l’homme, seul, est-il sujet à devenir imbécile ? » et il y répond que c’est parce qu’il est le seul à être libre, c’est-à-dire à pouvoir ne pas suivre un programme inscrit à l’avance dans ses gènes et qui décide de son mode de vie. Ce que l’on appelle communément un instinct. L’homme peut donc se perfectionner toute sa vie, là où l’animal va très rapidement cesser de changer dès lors qu’il est adulte. (Développement en utilisant les arguments que l’auteur utilise pour justifier sa thèse) Nous pouvons donc dire que l’homme est bien à part dans la nature, car il a cette capacité de se perfectionner que n’ont pas les autres espèces. (Retour au sujet : le but est de rappeler en quoi ce que l’on vient de dire répond au sujet)

(Suite à venir)

▶️ Je vous montre comment développer une sous-partie en vidéo ci-dessous :

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Doctoral Program

Stanford's Ph.D. program is among the world's best. Our graduate students receive their training in a lively community of philosophers engaged in a wide range of philosophical projects. Our Ph.D. program trains students in traditional core areas of philosophy and provides them with opportunities to explore many subfields such as the philosophy of literature, and nineteenth-century German philosophy.

Among other areas, we are exceptionally strong in Kant studies, the philosophy of action, ancient philosophy, logic, and the philosophy of science. We attract some of the best students from around the world and we turn them into accomplished philosophers ready to compete for the best jobs in a very tight job market.

The most up-to-date requirements are listed in   t he Bulletin .  

CHECK PHD REQUIREMENTS

From the 2020-2021 edition of Explore Degrees:

Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy

Prospective graduate students should see the  Office of Graduate Admissions  web site for information and application materials. 

The University's basic requirements for the Ph.D. degree including candidacy, residence, dissertation, and examination are discussed in the " Graduate Degrees " section of this bulletin. Graduate students are expected to meet standards of professional behavior, including: being present on campus to meet the academic and research expectations of the degree program; communicating in a timely, respectful and professional manner; complying with institutional policies and procedures; and participating appropriately in the program’s community. Graduate students are expected to familiarize themselves with applicable university policy and degree program requirements.’ ( https://gap.stanford.edu/handbooks/gap-handbook/chapter-5/subchapter-6/… )

University candidacy requirements, published in the " Candidacy " section of this bulletin, apply to all Ph.D. students. Admission to a doctoral degree program is preliminary to, and distinct from, admission to candidacy. Admission to candidacy for the doctoral degree is a judgment by the faculty in the department or school of the student's potential to successfully complete the requirements of the degree program. Students are expected to complete department qualifying procedures and apply for candidacy at the beginning of the seventh academic quarter, normally the Autumn Quarter of the student's third year.

Admission to candidacy for the doctoral degree is granted by the major department following a student's successful completion of qualifying procedures as determined by the department. Departmental policy determines procedures for subsequent attempts to become advanced to candidacy in the event that the student does not successfully complete the procedures. Failure to advance to candidacy results in the dismissal of the student from the doctoral program; see the " Guidelines for Dismissal of Graduate Students for Academic Reasons " section of this bulletin.

The requirements detailed here are department requirements. These requirements are meant to balance structure and flexibility in allowing students, in consultation with their  advisors , to take a path through the program that gives them a rigorous and broad philosophical education, with room to focus on areas of particular interest, and with an eye to completing the degree with an excellent dissertation and a solid preparation for a career in academic philosophy.

Normally, all courses used to satisfy the distribution requirements for the Philosophy Ph.D. are Stanford courses taken as part of a student's graduate program.  In special circumstances, a student may petition to use a very small number of graduate-level courses taken at other institutions to satisfy a distribution requirement.  To be approved for this purpose, the student’s work in such a graduate-level course would need to involve an appropriate subject matter and would need to be judged by the department to be at the level of an 'A' in a corresponding graduate-level course at Stanford.  

Courses used to satisfy any course requirement in Philosophy (except Teaching Methods and the summer Dissertation Development Seminar) must be passed with a letter grade of 'B-' or better (no satisfactory/no credit), except in the case of a course/seminar used to satisfy the third-year course/seminar requirement and taken for only 2 units. Such a reduced-unit third-year course/seminar must be taken credit/no credit. 

In the spring quarter of each year, the department reviews the progress of each first-year student to determine whether the student is making satisfactory progress. In the fall and the spring quarter of each year, the department reviews the progress of each student who is past the first year to determine whether the student is making satisfactory progress, and on that basis to make decisions about probationary status and termination from the program where appropriate.

Any student in one of the Ph.D. programs may apply for the M.A. when all University and department requirements have been met.

Proficiency Requirements

• First-year Ph.D. Proseminar : a one quarter, topically focused seminar offered in Autumn Quarter, and required of all first-year students.
• two courses in value theory including ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, social philosophy, philosophy of law. At least one of the courses satisfying this distribution requirement must be in ethics or political philosophy.
• Two courses in language, mind, and action. One course satisfying this requirement must be drawn from the language related courses, and one from mind and action related courses.
• two courses in metaphysics and epistemology (including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science). At least one of the courses satisfying this requirement must be drawn from either metaphysics or epistemology.
• Instructors indicate which courses may satisfy particular requirements. If a course potentially satisfies more than one requirement the student may use it for only one of those area requirements; no units may be double-counted. Students must develop broad competencies in all these areas. Those without strong backgrounds in these areas would normally satisfy these distribution requirements by taking more basic courses rather than highly specialized and focused courses. Students should consult with their advisor in making these course decisions, and be prepared to explain these decisions when reviewed for candidacy; see requirement 6 below.
• Logic requirement:  PHIL 150  Mathematical Logic or equivalent.
• History/logic requirement. One approved course each in ancient and modern philosophy, plus either another approved history of philosophy course or  PHIL 151  Metalogic.
• Students should normally take at least 64 graduate level units at Stanford during their first six quarters (in many cases students would take more units than that) and of those total units, at least 49 units of course work are to be in the Philosophy department. These courses must be numbered above 110, but not including Teaching Methods ( PHIL 239  Teaching Methods in Philosophy) or affiliated courses. Units of Individual Directed Reading are normally not to be counted toward this 49-unit requirement unless there is special permission from the student's advisor and the Director of Graduate Studies.
•  Prior to candidacy, at least 3 units of work must be taken with each of four Stanford faculty members.

Writing Requirement: Second Year Paper

The second year paper should demonstrate good scholarship and argumentative rigor, and be a polished piece of writing approximately 8000 words in length. The second year paper need not bear any specific relationship to the dissertation. It may be a version of a prospective dissertation chapter, but this is not required. The final version must be turned in on the last class of the Second Year Paper Development Seminar in Summer Quarter of the second year. Extensions of this deadline require the consent of the instructor of the Second Year Paper Development Seminar and the Director of Graduate Studies and are only granted in exceptional cases (e.g., documented illness, family crisis). The final paper is read by a committee of two faculty members and it is an important consideration in the department’s decision on the student’s candidacy. 

Teaching Assistancy

A minimum of five quarters of teaching assistancy are required for the Ph.D. Normally one of these quarters is as a teaching assistant for the Philosophy Department's Writing in the Major course,  PHIL 80  Mind, Matter, and Meaning. It is expected that students not teach in their first year and that they teach no more than two quarters in their second year. Students are required to take  PHIL 239  Teaching Methods in Philosophy during Spring Quarter of their first year and during Autumn Quarter of their second year. Teaching is an important part of students’ preparation to be professional philosophers.

Review at the End of the Second Year for Advancement to Candidacy

The faculty's review of each student includes a review of the student's record, an assessment of the second year paper, and an assessment of the student's preparation for work in her/his intended area of specialization, as well as recommendations of additional preparation, if necessary.

To continue in the Ph.D. program, each student must apply for candidacy at the beginning of the sixth academic quarter, normally the Spring Quarter of the student's second year. Students may be approved for or denied candidacy by the end of that quarter by the department. In some cases, where there are only one or two outstanding deficiencies, the department may defer the candidacy decision and require the student to re-apply for candidacy in a subsequent quarter. In such cases, definite conditions for the candidacy re-application must be specified, and the student must work with the advisor and the DGS to meet those conditions in a timely fashion. A failure to maintain timely progress in satisfying the specified conditions constitutes grounds for withholding travel and discretionary funds and for a denial of advancement to candidacy.

• Writing Seminar : In the Summer Quarter after the second year, students are required to attend the Second Year Paper Development Seminar. The seminar is intended to help students complete their second year papers. 
• Upon completion of the summer writing seminar, students must sign up for independent study credit,  PHIL 240  Individual Work for Graduate Students, with their respective advisors each quarter. A plan at the beginning, and a report at the end, of each quarter must be signed by both student and advisor and submitted to the graduate administrator for inclusion in the student's file. This is the process every quarter until the completion of the departmental oral.
• In Autumn and Winter quarters of the third year, students register in and satisfactorily complete  PHIL 301  Dissertation Development Proseminar. Students meet to present their work in progress and discuss their thesis project. Participation in these seminars is required.
• During the third and fourth years in the program, a student should complete at least three graduate-level courses/seminars, at least two of them in philosophy (a course outside philosophy can be approved by the advisor), and at least two of them in the third year. The three seminars can be taken credit/no-credit for reduced (2) units. Courses required for candidacy are not counted toward satisfaction of this requirement. This light load of courses allows students to deepen their philosophical training while keeping time free for thesis research.

Dissertation Work and Defense

The third and following years are devoted to dissertation work. The few requirements in this segment of the program are milestones to encourage students and advisors to ensure that the project is on track.

• Dissertation Proposal— By the end of Winter Quarter of the third year, students should have selected a dissertation topic and committee. A proposal sketching the topic, status, and plan for the thesis project, as well as an annotated bibliography or literature review indicating familiarity with the relevant literature, must be received by the committee one week before the meeting on graduate student progress late in Spring Quarter. The dissertation proposal and the reading committee's report on it will constitute a substantial portion of the third-year review.
• Departmental Oral— During Autumn Quarter of the fourth year, students take an oral examination based on at least 30 pages of written work, in addition to the proposal. The aim of the exam is to help the student arrive at an acceptable plan for the dissertation and to make sure that student, thesis topic, and advisors make a reasonable fit. It is an important chance for the student to clarify their goals and intentions with the entire committee present.
• Fourth-Year Colloquium— No later than Spring Quarter of the fourth year, students present a research paper in a 60-minute seminar open to the entire department. This paper should be on an aspect of the student's dissertation research. This is an opportunity for the student to make their work known to the wider department, and to explain their ideas to a general philosophical audience.
• University Oral Exam— Ph.D. students must submit a completed draft of the dissertation to the reading committee at least one month before the student expects to defend the thesis in the University oral exam. If the student is given consent to go forward, the University oral can take place approximately two weeks later. A portion of the exam consists of a student presentation based on the dissertation and is open to the public. A closed question period follows. If the draft is ready by Autumn Quarter of the fourth year, the student may request that the University oral count as the department oral.

Below are yearly lists of courses which the faculty have approved to fulfill distribution requirements in these areas: value theory (including ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, social philosophy, philosophy of law); language; mind and action; metaphysics and epistemology (including metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of science); logic; ancient philosophy; modern philosophy.

The most up-to-date requirements are listed in  t he Bulletin .  

Ph.D. Minor in Philosophy

To obtain a Ph.D. minor in Philosophy, students must follow these procedures:

• Consult with the Director of Graduate Study to establish eligibility, and select a suitable  advisor .
• 30 units of courses in the Department of Philosophy with a letter grade of 'B-' or better in each course. No more than 3 units of directed reading may be counted in the 30-unit requirement.
• Philosophy of science
• Ethics, value theory, and moral and political philosophy
• Metaphysics and epistemology
• Language, mind and action
• History of philosophy
• Two additional courses numbered over 199 to be taken in one of those (b) six areas.
• A faculty member from the Department of Philosophy (usually the student's advisor) serves on the student's doctoral oral examination committee and may request that up to one third of this examination be devoted to the minor subject.
• Paperwork for the minor must be submitted to the department office before beginning the program.

Interdisciplinary Study

The department supports interdisciplinary study. Courses in Stanford's other departments and programs may be counted towards the degree, and course requirements in Philosophy are designed to allow students considerable freedom in taking such courses. Dissertation committees may include members from other departments. Where special needs arise, the department is committed to making it possible for students to obtain a philosophical education and to meet their interdisciplinary goals. Students are advised to consult their advisors and the department's student services office for assistance.

Graduate Program in Cognitive Science

Philosophy participates with the departments of Computer Science, Linguistics, and Psychology in an interdisciplinary program in Cognitive Science. It is intended to provide an interdisciplinary education, as well as a deeper concentration in philosophy, and is open to doctoral students. Students who complete the requirements within Philosophy and the Cognitive Science requirements receive a special designation in Cognitive Science along with the Ph.D. in Philosophy. To receive this field designation, students must complete 30 units of approved courses, 18 of which must be taken in two disciplines outside of philosophy. The list of approved courses can be obtained from the Cognitive Science program located in the Department of Psychology.

Special Track in Philosophy and Symbolic Systems

Students interested in interdisciplinary work relating philosophy to artificial intelligence, cognitive science, computer science, linguistics, or logic may pursue a degree in this program.

Prerequisites—Admitted students should have covered the equivalent of the core of the undergraduate Symbolic Systems Program requirements as described in the " Symbolic Systems " section of the Stanford Bulletin, including courses in artificial intelligence (AI), cognitive science, linguistics, logic, and philosophy. The graduate program is designed with this background in mind. Students missing part of this background may need additional course work. In addition to the required course work listed in the bulletin, the Ph.D. requirements are the same as for the regular program, with the exception that one course in value theory and one course in history may be omitted.

Joint Program in Ancient Philosophy

This program is jointly administered by the Departments of Classics and Philosophy and is overseen by a joint committee composed of members of both departments:

•         Christopher Bobonich , Philosophy (Ancient Greek Philosophy, Ethics)
•         Alan Code , Philosophy, Philosophy (Ancient Greek Philosophy, Metaphysics)
•         Reviel Netz , Classics (History of Greek and Pre-Modern Mathematics)
•         Andrea Nightingale , Classics, (Greek and Roman Philosophy and Literature)
•        Josh Ober , Classics and Political Science (Greek Political Thought, Democratic Theory)

It provides students with the training, specialist skills, and knowledge needed for research and teaching in ancient philosophy while producing scholars who are fully trained as either philosophers with a strong specialization in ancient languages and philology, or classicists with a concentration in philosophy.

Students are admitted to the program by either department. Graduate students admitted by the Philosophy department receive their Ph.D. from the Philosophy department; those admitted by the Classics department receive their Ph.D. from the Classics department. For Philosophy graduate students, this program provides training in classical languages, literature, culture, and history. For Classics graduate students, this program provides training in the history of philosophy and in contemporary philosophy.

Each student in the program is advised by a committee consisting of one professor in each department.

Requirements for Philosophy Graduate Students: These are the same as the proficiency requirements for the Ph.D. in Philosophy.

One year of Greek is a requirement for admission to the program. If students have had a year of Latin, they are required to take 3 courses in second- or third-year Greek or Latin, at least one of which must be in Latin. If they have not had a year of Latin, they are then required to complete a year of Latin, and take two courses in second- or third-year Greek or Latin.

Students are also required to take at least three courses in ancient philosophy at the 200 level or above, one of which must be in the Classics department and two of which must be in the Philosophy department.

Ph.D. Subplan in History and Philosophy of Science

Graduate students in the Philosophy Ph.D. program may pursue a Ph.D. subplan in History and Philosophy of Science. The subplan is declared in Axess and subplan designations appear on the official transcript, but are not printed on the diploma.

1.  Attendance at the HPS colloquium series. 2.  Philosophy of Science courses.  Select one of the following:

• PHIL 263 Significant Figures in Philosophy of Science: Einstein
• PHIL 264: Central Topics in the Philosophy of Science: Theory and Evidence
• PHIL 264A: Central Topics in Philosophy of Science: Causation
• PHIL 265: Philosophy of Physics: Space and Time
• PHIL 265C: Philosophy of Physics: Probability and Relativity
• PHIL 266: Probability: Ten Great Ideas About Chance
• PHIL 267A:  Philosophy of Biology
• PHIL 267B: Philosophy, Biology, and Behavior

3.  One elective seminar in the history of science. 4.  One elective seminar (in addition to the course satisfying requirement 2) in philosophy of science.

The PhD program provide 5 years of  financial support . We also try to provide support for our sixth year students and beyond though we cannot guarantee such support. In addition to covering tuition, providing a stipend, and covering Stanford's health insurance, we provide additional funds for books, computer equipment, and conference travel expenses. Some of the financial support is provided through requiring you to teach; however, our teaching requirement is quite low and we believe that this is a significant advantage of our program.

Stanford Support Programs

Additional support, such as advances, medical and emergency grants for Grad Students are available through the Financial Aid Office. The University has created the following programs specifically for graduate students dealing with challenging financial situations.

Graduate Financial Aid  homepage :

https://financialaid.stanford.edu/grad/funding/

Cash Advance:  https://sfs.stanford.edu/gradcashadvance

Emergency grant-in-aid :  https://financialaid.stanford.edu/pdf/emergencygrant-in-aid.pdf, family grants:  https://financialaid.stanford.edu/pdf/gradfamilygrant2021.pdf, housing loans:  https://financialaid.stanford.edu/loans/other/gradhousing.html, program characteristics.

Our program is well known for its small size, streamlined teaching requirements, and low average time to degree.

The program regulations are designed to efficiently provide students with a broad base in their first two years. In the third year students transition to working on their dissertations. During the summer prior to the third year, students are required to attend a dissertation development seminar. This seminar introduces students to what is involved in writing a dissertation. During the third year the course load drops to just under one course per quarter.

The rest of the time is spent working closely with a faculty member, or a couple of faculty members, on the student's area of research interest. The goal of the third year is that this process of intensive research and one-on-one interaction will generate a topic and proposal for the dissertation. During the fourth and fifth year the student is not required to take any courses and he or she focusses exclusively on research and writing on the dissertation.

Stanford University

Being a part of  Stanford University  means that students have access to one of the premier education institutions in the world. Stanford is replete with top departments in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In addition, our professional schools, such as the  Stanford Law School , are among the best. The range of research in a variety of areas, many of which touch on or relate to philosophical issues, is simply astounding. Students have the freedom to take courses across the university. Graduate students also regularly earn joint degrees with other programs.

• La science - le cours

Plan de la fiche :

• La science mène-t-elle vraiment à la vérité ?
• Peut-on saisir la réalité à partir de l'expérience ? La question de l'exception.
• La science nous a-t-elle conduit à la catastrophe ?

Introduction

1. Délimitation de la notion

Le terme de science peut s'entendre en plusieurs sens. En premier lieu, il renvoie à l'idée de discipline. Il est possible ainsi de distinguer les sciences dures ou physiques, des sciences humaines. Aujourd'hui ces sciences forment des facultés au sein des universités et préparent à des métiers. La science c'est aussi l'épistémé en grec qui signifie le savoir. Le parler populaire français a repris une partie de cette signification. On dit d'une personne qu'elle a « de la science » ou « qu'elle n'a pas la science infuse » pour dire soit qu'elle est savante, soit qu'elle ne sait pas naturellement ce qui est. On oppose souvent la science à la religion. La science reposerait sur le savoir et la religion sur le croire. Mais ces distinctions sont discutées et discutables. La science est souvent associée à une démarche rigoureuse et à une méthodologie précise, faite de preuves et de dosages. Pour certaines personnes tout ce qui ne présente pas l'allure d'une forme scientifique est à rejeter. Pour d'autres au contraire, c'est l'approche scientifique qui pose problème. Cette démarche a été notamment théorisée par G Bachelard dans La formation de l'esprit scientifique. Celui-ci se caractériserait d'une part par le rejet des préjugés et d'autre part par un lien étroit entre l'hypothèse et l'expérience. Adopter la démarche scientifique pour Bachelard c'est faire une hypothèse que l'on confirme par des expériences. L'expérience au sens scientifique du terme c'est l'expérimentation. Expérimenter c'est tester.

Lire la suite de la fiche ci-dessous et la télécharger :

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Les autres fiches de révisions

Fiches méthodologie philosophie – terminale.

• La dissertation
• L'explication de texte
• Les compétences pour un devoir de philo
• Méthodologie de l'explication de texte en Philo
• Les compétences pour faire un bon devoir de philo
• Méthodologie de la dissertation en Philo

La conscience et l'inconscient

• La conscience et l'inconscient - le cours
• L'art - le cours

L'Etat

• L'Etat - le cours
• La justice - le cours
• La liberté - le cours
• La nature - le cours
• Le devoir - le cours
• Le langage - le cours
• Le temps - le cours

La religion

• La religion - le cours
• Le travail - le cours

La technique

• La technique - le cours

Raison et vérité

• Raison et vérité - le cours
• Le bonheur - le cours

Décrochez votre Bac 2025 avec Studyrama !

• Poursuivre ses études après le bac
• Fiches de révision du Bac 2024
• Bac 2024 : dates, épreuves, résultats
• Les sujets et corrigés du Bac 2024
• Que faire avec ou sans le bac...
• Résultats du Bac 2024 : dates, heures et résultats par académies

About the Program

The Graduate Program in Philosophy at Berkeley offers a first-rate faculty, a stimulating and friendly community of graduate students, and the resources of one of the world's finest research universities.

Two features distinguish our profile from that of other leading graduate programs in philosophy:

• The department has strengths in all the main areas of philosophy, including epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language, logic, ethics, the history of philosophy, and philosophy of science. We aim at diversity and breadth of coverage, rather than concentration on one or two areas of philosophical activity.
• Second, the program at Berkeley is structured to give students a high degree of independence in tailoring their studies to their interests.

Those wishing to pursue graduate studies in philosophy can choose among several routes to a PhD at Berkeley:

• The Philosophy Department's graduate program leads to a PhD in Philosophy.
• Students with strong interests in Ancient Philosophy may want to take advantage of a special ancient concentration within the philosophy program.
• Students with strong interests in the History and Philosophy of Science may want to explore the special HPS concentration within the philosophy program.
• Students with strong interests in formal logic may pursue them in the Philosophy Department, in the Mathematics Department , or in Berkeley's interdisciplinary program leading to a PhD in Logic and the Methodology of Science , to which the Philosophy Department has close ties.

Visit Department Website

Admission to the University

Applying for graduate admission.

Thank you for considering UC Berkeley for graduate study! UC Berkeley offers more than 120 graduate programs representing the breadth and depth of interdisciplinary scholarship. The Graduate Division hosts a complete list of graduate academic programs, departments, degrees offered, and application deadlines can be found on the Graduate Division website.

Prospective students must submit an online application to be considered for admission, in addition to any supplemental materials specific to the program for which they are applying. The online application and steps to take to apply can be found on the Graduate Division website .

Admission Requirements

The minimum graduate admission requirements are:

A bachelor’s degree or recognized equivalent from an accredited institution;

A satisfactory scholastic average, usually a minimum grade-point average (GPA) of 3.0 (B) on a 4.0 scale; and

Enough undergraduate training to do graduate work in your chosen field.

For a list of requirements to complete your graduate application, please see the Graduate Division’s Admissions Requirements page . It is also important to check with the program or department of interest, as they may have additional requirements specific to their program of study and degree. Department contact information can be found here .

Where to apply?

Visit the Berkeley Graduate Division application page .

Admission to the Program

In reviewing applications, the admissions and fellowships committee looks for evidence that applicants have the training and intellectual characteristics they will need for success in a rigorous graduate program such as ours. Candidates for admission are not required to have majored in philosophy, but applicants who have not taken a considerable number of courses in the subject are unlikely to be admitted. The intellectual characteristics that the committee looks for include the ability to write clear and well organized argumentative prose, the ability to discriminate between promising and unpromising lines of inquiry, the capacity to develop independent arguments and insights, and a nuanced appreciation of philosophical problems and issues.

A complete online application would contain the following:

• Transcripts for all your undergraduate and graduate study
• Three letters of recommendation from those familiar with your philosophical work
• A representative sample of your best written work in philosophy (no more than 20 pages)
• Your results from the Graduate Record Examination (The Advanced Philosophy test is not required)
• A personal history statement
• A statement of purpose (applicants who wish to be considered for the concentration in Ancient Philosophy or History and Philosophy of Science should indicate this in their statement of purpose)

Doctoral Degree Requirements

Normative time to advancement.

Total normative time to advancement is two to three years.

During the first stage of their graduate education, students meet the department's course distribution requirements and prepare to take the qualifying examination. This examination assesses the student's strengths in areas chosen by the student in consultation with supervising faculty. 

Total Normative Time

Total normative time is six years.

Philosophy General Concentration

During the first stage of the program, students are expected to acquire a broad background in philosophy and develop their philosophical abilities by fulfilling the following requirements:

Course Distribution Requirement

Before taking the qualifying exam the student must complete eight courses at the 100- or 200-level completed with a grade of A- or higher. At least four of the eight courses must be graduate seminars. The eight courses must satisfy the following distribution requirements:

Two of the eight courses must be in the history of philosophy: one in ancient philosophy and one in modern philosophy. The courses may be on any individual philosopher or group of philosophers drawn from the following lists:

• Ancient: Plato, Aristotle
• Modern: Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant

Four of the eight courses must be in the following areas, with at least one course from each area:

• Area 1: Philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mathematics
• Area 2: Metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action
• Area 3: Ethics, political, social and legal philosophy, and aesthetics

A seventh course may be any philosophy course in the 100 or 200 series except for 100, 195-199, 200, 250, 251 and 299.

An eighth course may be either any philosophy course as specified above or a course from another department that has been approved by the graduate adviser.

In exceptional cases, students may, at the discretion of the graduate adviser, meet one distribution requirement by presenting work done as a graduate student elsewhere: typically a graduate thesis or work done in a graduate-level course. Meeting a distribution requirement in this way will not count as meeting any part of the four-seminar requirement.

Ancient Philosophy, Joint Program

This program is offered jointly by the Departments of Philosophy and  Classics . It is administered by an interdepartmental committee. It is designed to produce scholars with a broad range of expertise both in philosophy and classics, with the intention of bridging the gap between the two subjects. It provides the training and specialist knowledge required for undertaking research in ancient philosophy, and at the same time equips students for scholarly work and teaching in either classics or philosophy. Those who complete the program will be fully qualified to work as a member of either one of these disciplines while having developed a broad competence in the other.

Students apply for admission to either of the participating departments in accordance with their qualifications and interests. They are treated accordingly as graduate students fully in either the Department of Classics or the Department of Philosophy. Graduate students in Philosophy are offered the opportunity to develop their knowledge of both classical languages, and to make a thorough study of Graeco-Roman culture. Students and faculty from the two departments meet each other frequently and regularly in seminars, reading groups and colloquia. Seminar offerings from the two departments are designed to give students, during their years in the program, the opportunity to study a wide variety of topics, including the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy and the philosophy of later antiquity.

Those entering the program as Philosophy students will take the broad range of philosophy courses and seminars standardly required for the PhD in Philosophy. This standard set of requirements is, however, modified in the following ways:

• At least three out of the eight required courses should be in ancient philosophy.
• Students should take at least one seminar in the Classics Department.
• Students in the program will have until the end of the fourth year to pass the PhD qualifying examination.
• Two of the three topics for the student's qualifying exam will concern topics in ancient philosophy.
• Students must demonstrate, before advancement to candidacy, proficiency in Greek and Latin. This can be done in either of two ways: (i) by passing a sight translation exam; (ii) by passing (with a grade of A- or A) an upper division undergraduate translation class taught in the Classics Department.
• In addition, students must pass a reading examination in either German, French, or Italian.
• Students should declare their interest in joining the program by the beginning of their fifth semester at Berkeley.

To enter the joint program as a graduate student in Philosophy, prospective graduates should apply to the PhD program in Philosophy and mention their interest in the joint program as part of their statement of purpose. For information about entering the joint program as a graduate student in Classics, please visit the  Department of Classics website .

Foreign Language

Before taking the Qualifying Examination, the candidate must pass a departmental examination in a foreign language requiring the translation of 300 words in 90 minutes with the use of a dictionary. The language can be any foreign language containing a significant philosophical literature, provided that a faculty member qualified to administer the examination is available. An examination in an approved language may be waived upon approval of the Graduate Division if native ability in the language can be demonstrated through secondary school or university transcripts.  A course sequence of four semesters (or six quarters), whether taken at UC or elsewhere, will be accepted in lieu of the language examination if the sequence was completed within four years of admission to Berkeley and the student earned an average grade of C or better.

Qualifying Exams

Students should aim to take the qualifying examination by the end of the fifth enrolled semester, and they must take it by the end of the sixth enrolled semester.

In order to take the examination, the student must have fulfilled the department's course requirements and must have passed the language requirement.

Prospectus Stage

In the semester after passing the qualifying examination the student must take two PHILOS 299  individual study courses of 4 units each with the two inside members of his or her dissertation committee for the purpose of preparing a dissertation prospectus.

The dissertation prospectus should be submitted both to the inside members of the committee and to the graduate advisor by the end of that semester. It should consist of about fifteen pages and outline plans for the dissertation. Alternatively, the prospectus may consist of parts of a possible chapter of the dissertation together with a short sketch of the dissertation project.

Following submission of the prospectus, the candidate will meet with the inside members of the committee for an informal discussion of the candidate's proposed research.

Additional Requirements

Each student pursuing the PhD degree is expected to serve as a graduate student instructor for at least two semesters. In the first semester as a GSI, students must complete either PHILOS 375  (Graduate Student Instructor Teaching Seminar) or a 300-level course with another department. Other requirements for first-year GSIs are available on the GSI Teaching & Resource Center . 

Dissertation Seminar

Students in the first two years after declaring candidacy must register for  PHILOS 295  (Dissertation Seminar) for at least one semester each year, during which they must present a piece of work in progress, and are expected to attend the seminar all year. The seminar meets every other week. All students working on dissertations are encouraged to attend the seminar.

PHILOS 200 First-Year Graduate Seminar 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2020 A combination seminar and tutorial, required of and limited to first year graduate students in philosophy. First-Year Graduate Seminar: Read More [+]

Rules & Requirements

Repeat rules: Course may be repeated for credit without restriction.

Hours & Format

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 2 hours of seminar per week

Additional Format: Two hours of Seminar per week for 15 weeks.

Additional Details

Subject/Course Level: Philosophy/Graduate

Grading: Offered for satisfactory/unsatisfactory grade only.

First-Year Graduate Seminar: Read Less [-]

PHILOS 290 Seminar 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 Advanced study in various fields of philosophy. Topics will vary from semester to semester. Seminar: Read More [+]

Grading: Letter grade.

Seminar: Read Less [-]

PHILOS 295 Dissertation Seminar 2 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 Presentations by graduate students of dissertation research in progress. Dissertation Seminar: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Restricted to graduate students who are writing dissertations in philosophy

Formerly known as: 109

Dissertation Seminar: Read Less [-]

PHILOS 299 Independent Study 1 - 12 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023 Independent Study: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Consent of instructor

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 1-12 hours of independent study per week

Summer: 3 weeks - 5-60 hours of independent study per week 6 weeks - 2.5-30 hours of independent study per week 8 weeks - 2-23 hours of independent study per week

Additional Format: One to twelve hours of independent study per week. Two to twenty three hours of independent study per week for 8 weeks. Two and one-half to thirty hours of independent study per week for 6 weeks. Five to sixty hours of independent study per week for three weeks.

Independent Study: Read Less [-]

PHILOS 301 Professional Preparation: The Teaching of Philosophy 2 - 6 Units

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Fall 2014, Spring 2014 Students will work as teachers under the guidance of a faculty member. They will attend lectures, guide classroom discussion, and participate in a workshop in teaching methods. Professional Preparation: The Teaching of Philosophy: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Appointment as a graduate student instructor

Credit Restrictions: Course does not satisfy unit or residence requirements for doctoral degree.

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 0-0 hours of independent study per week

Additional Format: Zero hour of independent study per week.

Subject/Course Level: Philosophy/Professional course for teachers or prospective teachers

Professional Preparation: The Teaching of Philosophy: Read Less [-]

PHILOS 375 Graduate Student Instructor Teaching Seminar 3 Units

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Fall 2023, Fall 2022 A hands-on training seminar for new philosophy GSIs that addresses both practical and theoretical issues. Graduate Student Instructor Teaching Seminar: Read More [+]

Prerequisites: Admission to Ph.D. program

Fall and/or spring: 15 weeks - 3 hours of seminar per week

Additional Format: One 1-hour seminar per week.

Formerly known as: Philosophy 302

Graduate Student Instructor Teaching Seminar: Read Less [-]

Contact Information

Department of philosophy.

314 Philosophy Hall

Phone: 510-642-2722

Fax: 510-642-4164

[email protected]

Department Chair

Alva Noë, PhD

232 Philosophy Hall

[email protected]

Head Graduate Advisor

John MacFarlane, PhD

230 Philosophy Hall

[email protected]

Graduate Student Affairs Officer

[email protected]

Undergraduate Student Affairs Officer

Janet Groome

[email protected]

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College of Arts & Sciences

Past Dissertations

Hyperlinked dissertations are available through  Proquest Digital Dissertations .

Department of History and Philosophy of Science

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Dissertations

Marina dimarco (2023).

• Washington University, St. Louis, tenure track
• Philosophy of Science
• ​Dissertation:  Explaining and Intervening in Biosocial Science   

Biosocial scientists claim to improve our understanding of health disparities by integrating social and biological causes of human health and behavior. While many philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science embrace the liberatory promise of biosocial science for the design of clinical interventions and public health policy, others are skeptical. As feminist science scholars Dorothy Roberts, Victoria Pitts-Taylor, and Sarah Richardson point out, the “new biosocial science” often reproduces biologically deterministic explanations of health and behavior that mark marginalized individuals as hard-wired or programmed for pathology. As a result, the subjects of explanation in new biosocial science are often targeted for individualistic interventions, and social determinants of health mysteriously disappear into the background. This project forensically analyzes the disappearance of social causes from biosocial explanations. To begin, I characterize and parse the heterogeneity of biosocial science to focus on a specific genre of these explanations: those which ask how social causes “get under the skin” to become embodied in molecular terms. In the rest of the dissertation, I interrogate the values in, and of, these questions and competing answers to them. My approach draws from feminist science studies, feminist philosophy of science, and work on science and values to embrace pragmatic, social, and political dimensions of explanatory success. This is only fitting for a science that is itself marked by, and conscious of, its own political implications, past and present.

Dasha Pruss (2023)

• George Mason University, tenure track
• ​Dissertation:  Carceral Machines: Algorithmic Risk Assessment and the Reshaping of Crime and Punishment   

Recidivism risk assessment instruments are used in high-stakes pre-trial, sentencing, or parole decisions in nearly every U.S. state. These algorithmic decision-making systems, which estimate a defendant's risk of rearrest or reconviction based on past data, are often presented as an 'evidence-based' strategy for criminal legal reform. In this dissertation, I critically examine how automated decision-making systems like these shape, and are shaped by, social values. I begin with an analysis of algorithmic bias and the limits of technical audits of algorithmic decision-making systems; the subsequent chapters invite readers to consider how social values can be expressed and reinforced by risk assessment instruments in ways that go beyond algorithmic bias. I present novel analyses of the impacts of the Sentence Risk Assessment Instrument in Pennsylvania and cybernetic models of crime in the 1960s Soviet Union. Drawing on methods from history and philosophy of science, sociology, and legal theory, I show not only how societal values about punishment and control shape (and are shaped by) the use of these algorithms – a phenomenon I term domain distortion – but also how the instruments interact with their users – judges – and existing institutional norms around measuring and sentencing crime. My empirical and theoretical findings illustrate the kinds of insidious algorithmic harms that rarely make headlines, and serve as a tonic for the exaggerated and speculative discourse around AI systems in the criminal legal system and beyond.

Dana Matthiessen (2023)

• University of Minnesota, 2-yr Postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  Empirical and Pragmatic Grounds of Scientific Representation   

The central thesis of this dissertation is that the ability to reason and learn about the natural world using models can be explained in terms of the practices that warrant researchers to integrate models with accounts of their data-gathering procedures and act on their behalf. I argue that a model only functions as a representation with respect to a target phenomenon when this phenomenon is a plausible member of its domain of application and when the model can be used to characterize this target from data. I argue that this requires, first, that the model can be compared to data and second, that the model be integrated with an account of the process by which this data was produced from the target phenomenon. I provide an account of the representational accuracy of models based on their integration with a theory of technique and subsequent comparison with data patterns. On the same basis, I provide an account of the pragmatic representational content of models in terms of the set of practical inferences they license as a supplement to the empirical programs within the model’s domain of application. Historically, one often sees a back-and-forth negotiation where a model-based target characterization and a data-gathering practice are iteratively tuned to one another. Models are routinely informed by empirical results in the process of their construction and adjusted in response to them. Conversely, models add depth to target characterizations and fill out theories of technique in ways that alter data-gathering procedures. From this perspective, we can understand how a model’s representational content might gradually accrue to it and allow for finer distinctions in data outcomes. I present an extended case that tracks the development of X-ray crystallography and its use for the characterization of the molecular structure of proteins. Ultimately, what is presented here is intended as a robustly pragmatist account of scientific representation. That is, one that does not only tie model use to purposes, but also to the realm of human action.

Jennifer Whyte (2023)

• Duke University, 2-yr Postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  A New Function for Thought Experiments in Science   

In this dissertation I propose and defend a new account of thought experiments in science and show that it solves an otherwise outstanding problem in the epistemology of models in science. In the first chapter, I argue that a handful of reasonable premises about the epistemic status of science and its models leads to a challenge: shifts in scientific concepts lead to shifts in scientific models that lead to potential non-empirical incompatibilities between them. The solution I propose is to construe the role of thought experiments in science as non-empirical operational tests of models in a hypothetical context of use – as model engineering, rather than a source of evidence. In the second chapter, I fully elaborate this account, demonstrate its features, and compare it to three of the most prominent alternative accounts of thought experiments within the literature. The final two chapters of this dissertation are case studies that use the model-engineering account of thought experiments to interpret thought experiments drawn from the history of physics. In the third chapter, I present the lottery thought experiment from Ludwig Boltzmann’s 1877 paper ‘On the Relationship Between the Second Fundamental Theorem of Heat and Probability Calculations Regarding the Conditions for Thermal Equilibrium’ and show that my account not only well-explains the case, but also explains the absence of this thought experiment from the many subsequent presentations of Boltzmann’s achievement in this paper. In the fourth chapter I present the Rota Aristotelica, a pseudo-Aristotelian mechanical paradox, and through it discuss the intersection of three topics: thought experiments, paradoxes, and historical variability. I show that my account of thought experiments allows that many paradoxes can be interpreted as thought experiments, and that this way of interpreting them can solve outstanding questions about what it means to be the solution of a paradox. My aim in this dissertation is to present a complete picture of an account of thought experiments in science, the way that account fits into contemporary discussions of the epistemology of models in science, and how the account can be used to bring light to historical case studies.

Tom Wysocki (2023)

• University of Heidelberg, 2-yr Postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  Underdeterministic Causation   

Metaphysicians and philosophers of science have recently been analyzing two species of causation: deterministic causes, which guarantee their effects (Hitchcock 2001, Halpern 2016, Weslake 2015, Woodward 2003), and probabilistic causes, which raise the probability of their effects (Fenton-Glynn 2017, Twardy & Korb 2011). Yet, consider: about to jump off the tower, Daedalus realizes he only may escape, but also that if he doesn’t try, he’ll stay imprisoned forever. He jumps and flees, and his jump is a cause of his escape. It’s not a deterministic cause, however, because a successful escape wasn’t guaranteed. It’s not a probabilistic cause either because there needn’t be a fact of the matter how probable his escape was given the jump (maybe the events involved are too unique to be assigned a probabilistic distribution). Rather, his jump is what I call an underdeterministic cause, which elevates the modal status of the effect: the cause made possible what was otherwise impossible. But for the jump, Daedalus wouldn’t have fled, even though the jump didn’t necessitate his escape. No one to date has offered a theory of underdeterministic causes, nor even identified them as a separate causal species. Yet, such causes are frequently studied by the humanistic, natural, and social sciences. If we want to understand what causal claims mean—not only in these disciplines, but in general—we need a theory of underdeterministic causation. My dissertation develops such a theory. Specifically, I build a framework for analyzing underdeterministic causal phenomena (ch. 1). Then, I use it to put forward a semantics of counterfactuals and an algebra of events (ch. 2), a theory of type underdeterministic causation (ch. 3), token causation (ch. 4), an account of the dynamic evolution of context (ch. 5), a superior alternative to the epistemic thesis (ch. 6), and an underdeterministic causal decision theory (ch. 7).

Nedah Nemati (2022)

• Columbia University, 3-yr postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  Lived Experience in the Behavioral Neuroscience of Sleep: Conceptual, Methodological, and Ethical Implications   

Neuroscience is widely thought to shed light on core questions about what it means to be human. The neuroscience literature is also animated by an urgency to render our behaviors knowable through the discipline’s tools and procedures. For example, by studying insect sleep, scientists seek to understand – and in some ways succeed in characterizing – a human process long deemed inaccessible and the opposite of consciousness. Meanwhile, key questions – What is sleep? Where is sleep? Why do humans do it? How can sleep be improved? – resist compact answers and demand novel philosophical insight to link neuroscientific facts to our behavioral experiences. This dissertation applies historical and philosophical approaches to the neuroscientific study of sleep to argue that explaining behavioral experiences relies on lived experience. Examining the study of insect sleep, the first half of the dissertation explores the necessity of these lived experiences in neurobiological studies today, as well as how they have taken shape in the past. The second half of the dissertation then investigates what is lost – philosophically, scientifically, and socially – when the role of lived experience is neglected in empirical investigations.

Katie Morrow (2022)

• University of Bielefeld, 2-yr postdoc

Kathleen Creel (2021)

• Northeastern University (tt)
• ​Dissertation:  Opening the Black Box: Explanation and Transparency in Machine Learning   

Machine learning algorithms remain highly predictively accurate and powerful yet opaque. They predict and classify without offering human-cognizable reasons for their evaluations. When confronted with the opacity of machine learning in science, what is our epistemic situation and what ought we to do to resolve it? In order to answer this question, I first outline a framework for increasing transparency in complex computational systems such as climate simulations and machine learning on big scientific data. I identify three different ways to attain knowledge about these opaque systems and argue that each fulfills a different explanatory purpose. Second, I argue that analogy with the renormalization group helps us choose the better of two philosophically suggestive explanatory strategies that rely on different diagnoses of the success of deep learning. The coarse-graining strategy suggests that highlighting the parts of the input which most contributed to the output will be misleading without two things: an explanation for why the irrelevant parts are themselves irrelevant, and an explanation for the stability of the output under minor perturbations of the input. Armed with a framework for understanding transparency and an analysis of explanatory strategies appropriate for deep learning, I turn to an application of these frameworks to automated science. Automated science is the use of machine learning to automate hypothesis generation, experimental design, performance of experiment, and evaluation of results. If automated science is to find patterns on its own, then it must be able to solve the Molyneux problem for science, namely to recognize identity across modalities or data streams of different types without the aid of causation or correlation.

Mahi Hardalupas (2021)

• Rotman Institute of Philosophy at Western University, 2-yr postdoc
• ​Dissertation:  How neural is a neural net? Bio-inspired computational models and their impact on the multiple realization debate   

My dissertation introduces a new account of multiple realization called ‘engineered multiple realization’ and applies it to cases of artificial intelligence research in computational neuroscience. Multiple realization has had an illustrious philosophical history, broadly used to describe when a higher-level (psychological) kind can be realized by several different lower-level (physical) kinds. In philosophy of mind, multiple realization is typically seen as arbitrating a debate between metaphysical accounts of the mind, namely functionalism and identity theory. Philosophers of science look to how multiple realization is connected to scientific practice, but many have questioned what it is useful for outside of philosophy of mind. I address this gap by drawing on cases from machine learning and computational neuroscience to show there is a useful form of multiple realization based on engineering practice. My account differs from previous discussions of multiple realization in three ways. First, it reintroduces the link between engineering and multiple realization, which has been mostly neglected in current debates. Second, it is explicitly perspectival, where what counts as multiple realization depends on your perspective. Third, it locates the utility of engineered multiple realization in its ability to support constraint-based reasoning in science. This account provides an answer to concerns about the utility of multiple realization in philosophy of science and explains one way biologically-inspired deep neural networks could provide understanding of the brain. The first half of this dissertation proposes my account of Engineered Multiple Realization and applies it to scientific cases. The second half considers further implications of my account for interpreting Deep Neural Networks as models of the brain, and for mechanistic explanation in computational neuroscience.

Jacob Neal (2021)

• ​Dissertation:  Protein Structure, Dynamics, and Function: A Philosophical Account of Representation and Explanation in Structural Biology   

Most philosophical work in molecular biology has historically centered on DNA, genetics, and questions of reduction. My dissertation breaks from this tradition to make proteins the object of philosophical and historical analysis. The recent history of structural biology and protein science offers untapped potential for history and philosophy of science. My ultimate goal for this dissertation therefore is to identify and analyze some of the key historical and philosophical puzzles that arise in these fields. I focus primarily on the shift from the static to the dynamic view of proteins in the late twentieth century. The static view treated proteins as stable, rigid structures, whereas the dynamic view considers proteins to be dynamic molecules in constant motion. In the first half of the dissertation, I develop a historical account of the origins of the static view of proteins. I show how this view led molecular biologists to adopt mechanistic explanation as their preferred strategy for explaining protein function. I then develop an account of the emergence of the dynamic view of proteins, arguing that thermodynamic theory and the theoretical commitments of scientists played an important and often overlooked role in driving this change. In the second half of the dissertation, I analyze the epistemological relationship between the static and dynamic concepts of the protein and argue that conceptual replacement is occurring. I then develop an account of ensemble explanation, a new type of explanation introduced to highlight the role of dynamics in protein function. I show that these explanations fail to fit existing philosophical accounts of explanation, ultimately concluding that my account is required to capture their epistemic structure.

William Penn (2021)

• University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Lecturer
• ​Dissertation:  What's Really Going On: Process Realism in Science   

I argue for a novel form of scientific realism, called “pure process realism,” that rejects orthodox ontologies of static objects and structures. The continuity between an experimenter and experimental systems requires that the processes of intervention and observation are the same ontic type as the observed and inferred features of experimental systems, on pain of ontological incoherence. Therefore, only processes can be inferred to exist within experiments from the epistemology of experiments alone. Additionally, every argument for the existence of a static object or structure within an experiment either fails or fails to rule out that the argument actually supports inferences to a more fundamental process. Firstly, this is because such arguments are either fallacious or inconclusive. Secondly, the history of scientific research, in chemistry and physics in particular, reveals that for each static object or structure posited in the history of science, research eventually redescribes it as a system of processes. For example, the history of the candle flame, the molecule, and the nucleus are explicit evidence of this conclusion, and these examples generalize. By induction, all static objects and structures we could posit are no more than systems of processes. Taken together, these arguments show that pure process realism is superior in scope, strength, and epistemic modesty to orthodox forms of realism in the epistemology, ontology, and history of science.

Shahin Kaveh (2021)

• University of Pittsburgh, Visiting Scholar
• ​Dissertation:  A Prescriptivist Account of Physical Theories   

A question of central importance to any philosopher of science is: what is the essential content of a scientific theory? What does a given theory really tell us about the world? Philosophers of science have disagreed on many aspects of the answer to this question, for instance whether the essential content of theories concerns entities, properties, or structures, whether it should be cashed out in terms of sentences or models, and whether one should be a realist or an anti-realist about this content; but philosophers have near-universally agreed on one claim: that theories provide a description of the natural system to which they are applied. Call this the descriptive-ontological view. I argue against the descriptive-ontological view in physics and propose an alternative: the prescriptivedynamical view. According to the latter, the essential content of a physical theory is to provide prescriptions for interfacing with the natural system. More precisely, physical theories consist of a fixed part and an open-ended part, such that the fixed part is a prescription for constructing the open-ended part from local data, gathered through interaction with the system. The answer to the question of essential content directly determines or at least influences one's response to many other crucial questions such as theoretical equivalence (Chapter 2), theory-world relations (Chapter 3), and realism-antirealism (Chapter 4), which I will subsequently explore. Moreover, as I will argue (Chapter 5), the prescriptivedynamical account also sheds fresh light on the history of quantum mechanics. In particular, the prescriptive-dynamical account allows us to understand the history of Bohr and Heisenberg’s work in the 1920s as a painstaking realization that instead of telling us what there is, physical theories must tell us what to do.

Zina Ward (2020)

• Florida State University (tt)
• ​Dissertation:  Individual Differences in Cognitive Science: Conceptual and Methodological Issues   

A primary aim of cognitive science is the investigation of psychological and neuroscientific generalizations that hold across subjects. Individual differences between people’s minds and brains are pervasive, however, even among subjects considered neurotypical. In this dissertation, I argue that both scientific practice and our philosophical understanding of science must be updated to reflect the presence of such individual differences. The first half of the dissertation proposes and applies a philosophical account of what it takes to explain variation, while the second half identifies several methods in psychology and neuroscience that demand reform in light of existing individual differences.

Evan Pence (2020)

• ​Dissertation:  Four Paradigms in Comparative Psychology

This dissertation examines the development of comparative psychology and the evidence, arguments, and epistemological challenges that have characterized its approach to the question of animal rationality. I distinguish between four modes of research that come to prominence at different points in its history, the natural historical, strict behavioral, cognitive, and neurophysiological, analyzing each through a critical episode in its development and the set of claims associated with the approach. The first study concerns the field’s Darwinian origins and its early commitment to the fundamental similarity of human and animal minds. I argue from a close reading of Darwin’s notebooks that the critical break for the nascent field came not from an antecedent endorsement to evolutionary theory, as commonly supposed, but a set of political and philosophical commitments inherited from the Enlightenment. Next, I show how this approach proved vulnerable to attack from younger and more positivistic psychologists in the twentieth century. I analyze why the Darwinians were accused of employing less than scientific methods, explaining how this fact helped precipitate a shift toward more conservative standards of evidence and strictly lab-based research. From there, I consider how the behavioral tools of this era have left modern ‘cognitive’ research with nagging underdetermination issues. I argue that strictly behavioral methods cannot tell us what the nature of animal thought is but that other methods may. Finally, I consider the state of the rationality debate at present. Drawing on the most recent evidence from systems neuroscience, I argue that animals as distant as rats have the capacity to engage in basic forms of reasoning ventured by Darwin and suspected but never quite shown in the cognitive era.

Morgan Thompson (2020)

• University of Bielefeld, 4-year PD
• Dissertation:  Robustness in the Life Sciences: Issues in Modeling and Explanation

​My dissertation introduces two new accounts of how robustness can be used to identify epistemically trustworthy claims. Through an analysis of research practices in the life sciences, I focus on two main senses of robustness: robust reasoning in knowledge generating inferences and explanatory strategies for phenomena that are themselves robust. First, I provide a new account of robustness analysis (called ‘scope robustness analysis’), in which researchers use empirical knowledge to constrain their search for possible models of the system. Scope robustness analysis is useful for scientific discovery and pursuit whereas current accounts of robustness analysis are useful for confirmation. Second, I provide a new account of how researchers use different methods to produce the same result (a research strategy called ‘triangulation’). My account makes two contributions: I criticize a prominent account of the diversity criterion for methods because it analyzes an inferential strategy (i.e., eliminative inference) distinct from the inferential strategy underlying triangulation (i.e., common cause inductive inferences). My account also better explains how triangulation can fail in practice by assessing points of epistemic risk, which I demonstrate by applying it to implicit attitude research. Finally, I contribute to a debate about another sense of robustness: phenomena that occur regardless of changes in their component parts and activities. I argue that some robust phenomena in network neuroscience are not best explained mechanistically by citing their constituent parts (e.g. individual neurons) and their activities, but rather by appealing to features of the connectivity among brain areas.

Siska de Baerdemaeker (2020)

• Stockholm University, 2-year PD
• Dissertation: Cosmology: The Impossible Integration

​My dissertation introduces a new account of how empirical methods and lines of evidence can come to bear on cosmological model-building. Through a careful study of the recent history of cosmology and dark matter research, I explicate a new type of justification for experiments, a 'method-driven logic'. This structure of justification underlies terrestrial experiments researching dark matter and dark energy, but it is more generally prevalent in cases of an underdescribed target. Using a method-driven logic comes with a cost, however. Specifically, interpreting the empirical results of experiments justified through a method-driven logic is non-trivial: negative results warrant secure constraints on the space of possibilities for the target, whereas significant positive results remain ambivalent. While this ambivalence can be resolved through the amalgamation of multiple lines of evidence, this solution is sometimes faced with conflicts between those lines of evidence. I propose that, under specific circumstances, restricting the relevant empirical evidence can be warranted. Finally, I discuss the use of cosmological evidence as a constraint in other sub fields of physics. This brings me full-circle on the integration of disciplines in cosmology/an integration driven by experimental practice.

Trey Boone (2019, Dec)​

• Duke University, Visiting Fellow
• Dissertation:  Functional Robustness: A New Account of Multiple Realization and its Epistemic Consequences

In this dissertation, I provide a novel account of multiple realization. My account reframes the concept in terms of causal theories of explanation, in contrast to the original framing in terms of the deductive-nomological theory of explanation. I show that the phenomenon of functional robustness exemplifies multiple realization in this new framework. I then explore the epistemic consequences of functional robustness by examining a number of cases of robustness in neural systems. I argue that systems that exhibit robustness will tend to violate causal faithfulness, thus posing challenges to causal hypothesis testing and causal discovery. I then consider the proposal that robustness undermines modularity—i.e. the ability of causal relationships within a system to be independently disrupted. I argue that it does not and instead propose that robustness is often due to feedback control driving systems toward particular outcomes. As a result, robustness will attend failures of acyclicity, not failures of modularity. I conclude by contrasting these epistemic consequences of functional robustness with those traditionally associated with multiple realization.

Haixin Dang (2019)

• Leeds University, 4-year PD
• Dissertation: Epistemology of Scientific Collaborations

This dissertation primarily concerns how scientific collaborations function, how scientists know together, and how we ought to think about collective justification and collective responsibility in light of scientific practice. When a group of 5,000 physicists announces that “The mass of the Higgs boson is 126GeV,” who is responsible for this discovery? Who should be held accountable if the claim turns out to be false or otherwise faulty? My account of collective responsibility seeks to assign responsibility to individual agents, while recognizing that it is the relationships in which individuals stand to each other and to the group which make them the appropriate targets for judgments of responsibility. However, in order to have a decomposition of collective responsibility, we first need to clarify the notion of epistemic responsibility. Epistemic responsibility exists as a vague concept at the intersection between epistemology and ethics. I clarify this concept and show how it can and should work in practice. I argue that epistemic responsibility should be distributed among members of a group when epistemic labor is distributed. My account of epistemic responsibility extends recent work in metaethics on moral responsibility. I decompose the concept into three distinct senses: attributability, answerability, and accountability. An epistemic agent can be responsible in one, two, or all three senses of responsibility. My account recognizes that agents in a collaboration may not all be responsible in the same way or to the same degree. Agents are epistemically responsible depending on their degree of answerability and in virtue of their epistemic position within the group. An important implication of my analysis of collective responsibility is that collective justification does not depend on members always coming to consensus on the justifiers of a group’s conclusions. Existing accounts of collective justification take consensus as the ideal, such that disagreement or heterogeneity among individuals is taken as a negative feature which should be eliminated. I argue that not all disagreement is bad. If the disagreement is itself justified, then disagreement is actually of epistemic value and not a negative feature.

​ David Colaco (2019)

• Mississippi State University, PD
• Dissertation: An Investigation of Scientific Phenomena

To determine how things work, researchers must first determine what things occur. Such an idea seems simple, but it highlights a fundamental aspect of science: endeavors to theorize, explain, model, or control often result from first determining and adequately characterizing the targets of these practices. This dissertation is an investigation of how researchers determine one important kind of target: scientific phenomena. In doing so, I analyze how characterizations of these phenomena are formulated, defended, revised, and rejected in light of empirical research. I focus on three questions. First, what do characterizations of scientific phenomena represent? To answer this, I investigate what it means to characterize a phenomenon, as opposed to describing the results of individual studies. Second, how do researchers develop these characterizations? This question relates to the logic of discovery: I examine how researchers use existing theories and methods to explore systems, search for phenomena, and develop representations of them. Third, how do researchers evaluate these characterizations? This question relates to the logic of justification: I investigate how empirical findings serve as defeasible evidence for the characterizations of phenomena, and in light of what evidence we should accept, suspend judgment about, or reject them.

​ Jeff Sykora (2019)

• Pursuing Medical Training
• Dissertation: Fluid Mechanics, Models, and Realism: Philosophy at the Boundaries of Fluid Systems

Philosophy of science has long drawn conclusions about the relationships between laws, models, and theories from studies of physics. However, many canonical accounts of the epistemic roles of laws and the nature of theories derived their scientific content from either schematized or exotic physical theories. Neither Theory-T frameworks nor investigation on interpretations of quantum mechanics and relativity reflect a majority of physical theories in use. More recently, philosophers of physics have begun developing accounts based in versions of classical mechanics that are both homelier than the exotic physical theories and more mathematically rigorous than the Theory-T frameworks of the earlier canon. Some, including Morrison (1999, 2015), Rueger (2005), and Wilson (2017), have turned to the study of fluid flows as a way to unpack the complex relationships among laws, models, theories, and their implications for scientific realism. One important result of this work is a resurgence of interest in the relationship between the differential equations that express mechanical laws and the boundary conditions that constrain the solutions to those equations. However, many of these accounts miss a crucial set of distinctions between the roles of mathematical boundary conditions modeling physical systems, and the roles of physical conditions at the boundary of the modeled system. In light of this systematic oversight, in this dissertation I show that there is a difference between boundary conditions and conditions at the boundary. I use that distinction to investigate the roles of boundary conditions in the models of fluid mechanics. I argue that boundary conditions are in some cases more lawlike than previously supposed, and that they can play unique roles in scientific explanations. Further, I show that boundaries are inherently mesoscale features of physical systems, which provide explanations that cannot be inferred from microscale dynamics alone. Finally, I argue that an examination of the domain of application of boundary conditions supports a form of realism.

​ Nora Boyd (2018)

• Sienna College (tt)
• Dissertation: Scientific Progress at the Boundaries of Experience

My dissertation introduces a new empiricist philosophy of science built on a novel characterization of empirical evidence and an analysis of empirical adequacy appropriate to it. I analyze historical and contemporary cases primarily, though not exclusively, from the space sciences attending carefully to the intricate practices involved in data collection and processing. I argue that the epistemic utility of empirical results as constraints on theorizing depends on the conditions of their provenance and that therefore information about those conditions ought to be included in our conception of empirical evidence. I articulate the conditions requisite for adjudicating the empirical adequacy of a theory with respect to some evidence and argue that much more background information is required for this adjudication than has been widely appreciated. Although my account is strictly anti-realist, this project is a defense of a sense of epistemic progress in science. Empirical evidence, as I have defined it, genuinely accumulates over the history of human inquiry. We learn that whatever theoretical framework we propose for understanding what the world is like will have to be consistent with this growing evidential corpus.

Aaron Novick (2018)

• Purdue University (tt)
• Dissertation: The Prodigal Genetics Returns: Integrating Gene Regulatory Network Theory Into Evolutionary Theory

The aim of this dissertation is to show how gene regulatory network (GRN) theory can be integrated into evolutionary theory. GRN theory, which lies at the core of evolutionary-developmental biology (evo-devo), concerns the role of gene regulation in driving developmental processes, covering both how these networks function and how they evolve. Evolutionary and developmental biology, however, have long had an uneasy relationship. Developmental biology played little role in the establishment of a genetic theory evolution during the modern synthesis of the early to mid 20th century. As a result, the body of evolutionary theory that descends from the synthesis period largely lacks obvious loci for integrating the information provided by GRN theory. Indeed, the relationship between the two has commonly been perceived, by both scientists and philosophers, as one of conflict. By combining historical and philosophical analysis, I consider four sources of tension between evo-devo and synthesis-derived evolutionary theorizing in order to show how those tensions can be resolved. I present a picture of the conceptual foundations of evo-devo that reveals the potential for integrating it with existing evolutionary theorizing. In chapter one, I argue that a major historical source of tension between evolutionary and developmental biology was the debates, in the first half of the 20th century, about the possibility of explaining development in terms of gene action. I show that the successes of GRN theory put these worries to bed. In chapter two, I argue that, rather than conceive of evo-devo as typological, we should see it as resting on Cuvieran functionalism. I argue that Cuvieran functionalism complements the Darwinian functionalism of the modern synthesis. In chapter three, I present a picture of the fine structure of the concept ‘homology’. This picture shows how accounts of homology that have traditionally been taken to conflict are in fact compatible and complementary. In chapter four, I analyze the nature of structure/function disputes in terms of types of answers to contrastive why-questions. On the basis of this analysis, I show how the structure of evolutionary theory requires both structuralist and functionalist approaches.

Marina Baldissera Pacchetti (2018)

• University of Leeds (research fellow)
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Climate Science, Environmental Philosophy
• Dissertation: Spatiotemporal Scales in Scientific Modeling: Identifying Target Systems

Current debates about epistemic issues in modeling presuppose that a model in question uncontroversially represents a particular target system. A standard line of argument is that we can gain knowledge of a target system simply by noting what aspects of the target are veridically represented in the model. But this misses epistemically important aspects of modeling. I examine how scientists identify certain phenomena as target systems in their models. Building on the distinction between data and phenomena introduced by Bogen and Woodward, I analyze how scientists target systems from data and from basic theoretical principles. I show that there are two crucial empirical assumptions that are involved in identifying phenomena. These assumptions concern the conditions under which phenomena can be indexed to a particular length or time scale and the conditions under which one can treat phenomena occurring at different length or time scales as distinct. The role of these assumptions in modeling provides the basis for a new argument that shows how, in many cases, idealizations and abstractions in models are essential for providing knowledge about the world in so far as they isolate relevant components of a phenomenon from irrelevant ones. My analysis of the identification of phenomena also shows that structural uncertainty arises in models when the scale of a phenomenon of interest is not properly identified. This clarification promises to improve the communication of the limitation of current climate models to policy makers.

Michael Miller (2017)

• University of Toronto (tt)
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: The structure and interpretation of quantum field theory

Quantum field theory accurately describes the world on the finest scales to which we have empirical access. There has been significant disagreement, however, about which mathematical structures ought to be taken as constitutive of the theory, and thus over which structures should serve as the basis for its interpretation. Perturbative methods allow for successful empirical prediction but require mathematical manipulations that are at odds with the canonical approach to interpreting physical theories that has been passed down from the logical positivists. Axiomatic characterizations of the theory, on the other hand, have not been shown to admit empirically interesting models. This dissertation shows how to understand the empirical success of quantum field theory by reconsidering widely held commitments about how physical meaning accrues to mathematical structure.

Joseph B. McCaffrey (2016)

• Washington University in St. Louis (Postdoctoral Research Fellow) 
• Philosophy of Cognitive Science, General Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Mental function and cerebral cartography: Functional localization in fMRI research

My dissertation examines the relationship between human brain mapping and cognitive theorizing in neuroimaging (fMRI) research. Many researchers advocate using fMRI to test psychological hypotheses; others argue that brain scans cannot support or disconfirm cognitive theories. I argue that fMRI can inform psychology given assumptions about how brain structure relates to function. My diagnosis is that human brain mapping is radically changing due to new techniques (e.g., “resting state” fMRI) and theoretical approaches (e.g., network mapping). These shifts undermine the assumptions that traditionally make fMRI results speak to cognitive theories (e.g., “each region performs a unique function”). I conclude that fMRI research should focus its efforts on developing new bridging assumptions, rather than testing cognitive theories.

Lauren Ross (2016)

• UC Irvine (deferred for post-doc at the University of Calgary)
• Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Neuroscience, General Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Explanation in Contexts of Causal Complexity

My dissertation examines common types of causal complexity in the biological sciences, the challenges they pose for explanation, and how scientists overcome these challenges. I provide a novel distinction between two types of causal complexity and I analyze explanatory patterns that arise in these contexts. My analysis reveals how explanation in the biological sciences is more diverse than mainstream accounts suggest, which view most or all explanations in this domain as mechanistic. I examine explanations that appeal to causal pathways, dynamical models, and monocausal factors and I show how these explanations are guided by considerations that have been overlooked in the extant literature. My project explores connections between these explanatory patterns and other topics of interest in philosophy and general philosophy of science, including: reduction, multiple realizability, causal selection, and the role of pragmatics in explanation.

Elizabeth O'Neill (2015)

• Eindhoven University of Technology (Assistant Professor)
• Epistemology; Metaethics; Philosophy of Cognitive Science;Philosophy of Biology
• Dissertation: The Epistemological Implications of the Causes of Moral Beliefs

This dissertation investigates what the causes of moral beliefs indicate about the epistemic status of those beliefs. I argue that information about the causes of moral beliefs can tell us whether those beliefs track the truth, and that truth tracking is the primary epistemic property that should concern us in the moral domain. I formulate three novel debunking arguments that employ information about the causes of moral beliefs to support conclusions about truth tracking while minimizing normative assumptions. These arguments lead to the conclusion that harm-related moral beliefs that hinge on sympathy, moral beliefs influenced by disgust, certain political beliefs, and beliefs about punishment that are subject to the influence of extraneous emotions do not track moral truth. For each of these types of moral beliefs, information about the proximal causes of the moral belief supports epistemic conclusions. I compare the value of information about proximal and distal causes for assessing epistemic status: I argue that proximal causes are a superior source of information, but under certain conditions, we should take information about distal causes into account. In the case of beliefs about the fair distribution of resources, information about their proximal causes does not shed light on whether they track truth, but information about their distal, evolutionary origins tell us that such beliefs do not track the truth. Thus, using empirical information about the causes of moral beliefs, I offer selective debunking arguments for five types of moral beliefs.

Greg Gandenberger (2015)

• University of Bristol (Postdoctoral Fellow)
• Philosophy of Science, Epistemology, Philosophy of Physics
• Dissertation: Moving Beyond 'Theory T': The Case of Quantum Field Theory

A standard approach towards interpreting physical theories proceeds by first identifying the theory with a set of mathematical objects, where such objects are defined according to mathematicians' standards of rigor. In making this identification, philosophers rule out the relevance of many inferential methods that physicists use, as these often do not meet mathematicians' standards of rigor. Philosophers thus sanitize physical theories of all mathematically messy or ambiguous parts before interpreting them.

My dissertation argues against this sanitized approach towards interpreting theories using the example of quantum field theory (QFT). When we look at the details of QFT, we find that the mathematical objects it requires differ according to the specific systems the theory is being applied to in ways that advocates of the sanitized approach do not anticipate. Furthermore, the mathematical objects required for successful application are still being developed in some applicational contexts, so it would be unwise to determine in advance which objects constitute the theory. During this ongoing developmental process, physicists interpret the mathematics using strategies that violate the standards of pure mathematics. In contrast to the sanitized approach, these strategies are more sensitive to the ways in which the mathematics required for the relevant contexts is still under development. I argue that these strategies are not merely instrumental. They suggest alternative approaches to interpretation that philosophers should take into account.

Julia Bursten (2015)

• University of Kentucky (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Chemistry, Philosophy of Physics
• Dissertation: Surfaces, Scales, and Synthesis: Scientific Reasoning at the Nanoscale

Philosophers interested in scientific methodology have focused largely on physics, biology, and cognitive science. They have paid considerably less attention to sciences such as chemistry and nanoscience, where not only are the subjects distinct, but the very aims differ: chemistry and nanoscience center around synthesis. Methods associated with synthesis do not fit well with description, explanation, and prediction that so dominate aims in philosophers' paradigm sciences. In order to synthesize a substance or material, scientists need different kinds of information than they need to predict, explain, or describe. Consequently, they need different kinds of models and theories.

Specifically, chemists need additional models of how reactions will proceed. In practice, this means chemists must model surface structure and behavior, because reactions occur on the surfaces of materials. Physics, and by extension much of philosophy of science, ignores the structure and behavior of surfaces, modeling surfaces only as “boundary conditions” with virtually no influence on material behavior. Such boundary conditions are not seen as part of the physical laws that govern material behavior, so little consideration has been given to their roles in improving scientists' understanding of materials and aiding synthesis. But especially for theories that are used in synthesis, such neglect can lead to catastrophic modeling failures. In fact, as one moves down toward the nanoscale, the very concept of a material surface changes, with the consequence that nanomaterials behave differently than macroscopic materials made up of the same elements. They conduct electricity differently, they appear differently colored, and they can play different roles in chemical reactions. This dissertation develops new philosophical tools to deal with these changes and give an account of theory and model use in the synthetic sciences. Particularly, it addresses the question of how models of materials at the nanoscale fit together with models of those very same materials at scales many orders of magnitude larger. To answer this and related questions, strict attention needs to be paid to the ways boundaries, surfaces, concepts, models, and even laws change as scales change.

Aleta Quinn (2015)

• Caltech (Postodctoral Instructor in Philosophy of Science)
• History and Philosophy of Biology, Values and Science
• Dissertation: Biological Systematics and Evolutionary Theory

In this dissertation I examine the role of evolutionary theory in systematics (the science of discovering and classifying biodiversity). Following Darwin's revolution, systematists have aimed to reconstruct the past. Understanding what it means that systematists reconstruct the past requires clarifying the history of systematics and of some important episodes in philosophy of science. My dissertation analyzes a common but inadequate view about what systematics qua historical science is up to by tracing the inadequate view to its origins in J.S. Mill. I show that critiques advanced by Mill's contemporary, William Whewell, identify problems that recurred in twentieth century philosophical work on the historical sciences. I develop an alternative and more complete account of systematics as relying on inference to the best explanation. My account answers two challenges that have been pressed against philosophical attempts to analyze scientific reasoning as inference to the best explanation.

First, I analyze the inadequate view: that scientists use causal theories to hypothesize what past chains of events must have been, and then form historical hypotheses which identify segments of a network of past events and causal transactions between events. This model assumes that scientists can identify events in the world by reference to neatly delineated properties, and that discovering causal laws is simply a matter of testing what regularities hold between events so delineated. Twentieth century philosophers of science tacitly adopted this assumption in otherwise distinct models of explanation. As Whewell had pointed out in his critique of Mill, the problem with this assumption is that the delineation of events via properties is itself the hard part of science. Whewell's philosophy of science captures the key point that different scientific theories identify different types of properties and events. Distinct scientific theories may not agree on how to individuate either properties or events. The case of systematics illustrates this dramatically.

Drawing on Whewell's philosophy of science, and my work as a member of a team of systematists revising the genus Bassaricyon, I show how historical scientists avoid the problems of the inadequate view. Whewell's analysis of consilience in the historical sciences and in biological classification provides a better foothold for understanding systematics. Whewell's consilience describes the fit between a single hypothesis and evidence drawn from distinct scientific theories that are organized under wholly different conceptual structures. This fit does not require agreement about causal ontology in the way required by the inadequate view that I have critiqued.

My analysis clarifies the significance of two revolutions in systematics. Whereas pre-Darwinian systematists used consilience as an evidentiary criterion without explicit justification, after Darwin's revolution consilience can be understood as a form of inference to the best explanation. I show that the adoption of Hennig's phylogenetic systematics, a twentieth century revolution in systematics, formalized methodological principles at the core of Whewell's philosophy of the historical sciences. Drawing on the philosophical and historical resources developed in the dissertation, I conclude by showing how two challenges that are frequently pressed against inference to the best explanation are met in the context of phylogenetic systematics.

Kathryn Tabb (2015)

• Coumbia University (Assistant Professor)
• Early Modern Philosophy, Philosophy of Psychiatry, Biomedical Ethics
• Dissertation: Mad Errors: Associated Ideas, Enthusiasm, and Personal Identity in Locke

Associationism — in its most basic formulation, the view that all cognition begins with the compounding of simple sensations into chains of ideas — is frequently held to have been introduced by John Locke in 1700, expanded on by David Hartley and David Hume, and come into its own the nineteenth century with psychologists like James Mill and Alexander Bain. The aim of this dissertation is to argue that Locke is not an associationist, and that he has been cast on the wrong side of a fundamental divide over the role of the understanding in the connection of ideas. I show that Locke coins the term “association of ideas” not to launch a new architectonic for psychology based on acquired habit, but to diagnose what he sees as the biggest obstacle to right understanding: madness. Hume's positive embrace of association has often been read back onto Locke, resulting in the easy conflation of the two thinkers under the banner of empiricism. In championing the powers of the active perception over the automaticity of association, however, Locke's psychology stands apart from later empiricist philosophies of mind.

Along with challenging Locke's traditional characterization as an associationist, my project explores the ramifications of Locke's concept of association for his broader commitments. Locke believes that natural philosophy is possible due to the ability of men and women to perceive the truth or falsity of propositions, or, failing this, to make probabilistic judgments about their truth-value. The capacities that allow for these mental acts, reason and judgment (respectively), are gifts from God that allow us to flourish in our environment, despite our mediocre mental endowments. I argue that associated ideas show that these capacities sometimes fail us, compromising Locke's intellectualist picture. False knowledge is possible in Locke's system, insofar as associated ideas generate propositions that are perceived to be true but which are in fact false. I call such propositions “mad errors,” and describe their profound ramifications for Locke's ethics of belief and his theory of personal identity.

Elay Shech (2015)

• Auburn University (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Ethics
• Dissertation: Assume a Spherical Cow: Studies on Representation and Idealizations

My dissertation concerns the philosophical underpinnings of representation and idealization in science. I begin by looking at the philosophical debate revolving around phase transitions and use it as a foil to bring out what I take to be most interesting about phase transitions, namely, the manner by which the illustrate the problem of essential idealizations.

I continue to solve the problem in several steps. First, I conduct an interdisciplinary comparative study of different types of representations (e.g., mental, linguistic, pictorial) and consequently promote a content-based account of scientific representation intended to accommodate the practice of idealization and misrepresentation. I then critically asses the literature on idealizations in science in order to identify the manner by which to justify appeals to idealizations in science, and implement such techniques in two case studies that merit special attention: the Aharonov-Bohm effect and the quantum Hall effects. I proceed to offer a characterization of essential idealizations meant to alleviate the woes associated with said problem, and argue that particular types of idealizations, dubbed pathological idealizations, ought to be dispensed with. My motto is that idealizations are essential to explanation and representation, as well as to methodology and pedagogy, but they essentially misrepresent. Implications for the debate on platonism about mathematical objects are outlined.

Karen Zwier (2014)

• Drake University (Adjunct Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, History and Philosophy of Physical Science, Science and Religion
• Dissertation: Interventionist Causation in Physical Science

The current consensus view of causation in physics, as commonly held by scientists and philosophers, has several serious problems. It fails to provide an epistemology for the causal knowledge that it claims physics to possess; it is inapplicable in a prominent area of physics (classical thermodynamics); and it is difficult to reconcile with our everyday use of causal concepts and claims.

In this dissertation, I use historical examples and philosophical arguments to show that the interventionist account of causation constitutes a promising alternative for a “physically respectable” account of causation. The interventionist account explicates important parts of the experimental practice of physics and important aspects of the ways in which physical theory is used and applied. Moreover, the interventionist account succeeds where the consensus view of causation in physics fails.

I argue that the interventionist account provides an epistemology of causal knowledge in physics that is rooted in experiment. On the interventionist view, there is a close link between experiment and the testing of causal claims. I give several examples of experiments from the early history of thermodynamics that scientists used in interventionist-type arguments. I also argue that interventionist claims made in the context of a physical theory can be epistemically justified by reference to the experimental interventions and observations that serve as evidence for the theory.

I then show that the interventionist account of causation is well-suited to the patterns of reasoning that are intrinsic to thermodynamic theory. I argue that interventionist reasoning constitutes the structural foundation of thermodynamic theory, and that thermodynamic theory can provide clear answers to meaningful questions about whether or not a certain variable is a cause of another in a given context.

Finally, I argue that the interventionist account offers the prospect of a unification of “physically respectable” causation and our everyday notion of causation. I conclude the dissertation by sketching an anti-foundationalist unification of causation, according to which causal reasoning occurs in the same manner in physics as it does in other branches of life and scientific research.

Eric Hatleback (2014)

• University of Pittsburgh (Research Associate Professor)
• Philosophy of Cosmology, Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Chimera of the Cosmos

Multiverse cosmology exhibits unique epistemic problems because it posits the existence of universes inaccessible from our own. Since empirical investigation is not possible, philosophical investigation takes a prominent role. The inaccessibility of the other universes causes argumentation for the multiverse hypothesis to be wholly dependent upon typicality assumptions that relate our observed universe to the unobserved universes. The necessary reliance on typicality assumptions results in the Multiverse Circularity Problem: the multiverse hypothesis is justified only through invoking typicality assumptions, but typicality assumptions are justified only through invoking the multiverse hypothesis. The unavoidability of the circularity is established through argumentation for each of the two conjuncts that comprise it.

Historical investigation proves the first conjunct of the Multiverse Circularity Problem. Detailed study of the now-neglected tradition of multiverse thought shows that philosophers and scientists have postulated the multiverse hypothesis with regularity, under different names, since antiquity. The corpus of argumentation for the existence of the multiverse breaks cleanly into three distinct argument schemas: implication from physics, induction, and explanation. Each of the three argument schemas is shown to be fully reliant upon unsupported typicality assumptions. This demonstrates that the multiverse hypothesis is justified only through invoking typicality assumptions.

Philosophical assessment of cosmological induction establishes the second conjunct of the Multiverse Circularity Problem. Independent justification for typicality assumptions is not forthcoming. The obvious candidate, enumerative induction, fails: Hume's attack against inference through time is extended to inference through space. This move undercuts external justification for typicality assumptions, such as the Cosmological Principle, which cosmologists implement to justify induction. Removing the legitimacy of enumerative induction shows that typicality assumptions are justified only through invoking the multiverse hypothesis, thereby establishing the Multiverse Circularity Problem.

Yoichi Ishida (2014)

• Ohio University (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology
• Dissertation: Models in Scientific Practice

This dissertation presents an account of the practice of modeling in science in which scientists' perceptual and bodily interactions with external representations take center stage. I argue that modeling is primarily a practice of constructing, manipulating, and analyzing external representations in service of cognitive and epistemic aims of research, and show that this account better captures important aspects of the practice of modeling than accounts currently popular in philosophy of science.

Philosophical accounts of the practice of modeling classify models according to the categories of abstract and concrete entities developed in metaphysics. I argue that this type of account obscures the practice of modeling. In particular, using the analysis of the Lotka-Volterra model as an example, I argue that understanding mathematical models as abstract entities---non-spatiotemporally located, imperceptible entities---obscures the fact that the analysis of the Lotka-Volterra model relies primarily on visual perception of external representations, especially hand- or computer-generated graphs. Instead, I suggest that we apply the concepts of internal and external representations, developed in cognitive science, to models, including mathematical models.

I then present two case studies that illustrate different aspects of modeling, understood as a practice of constructing, manipulating, and analyzing external representations. First, using Sewall Wright's long-term research on isolation by distance, I articulate the relationship between the uses of a model, the particular aims of research, and the criteria of success relevant to a given use of the model. I argue that uses of the same model can shift over the course of scientists' research in response to shifts in aim and that criteria of success for one use of a model can be different from those for another use of the same model. Second, I argue that in successful scientific research, a scientist uses a model according to the methodological principles of realism and instrumentalism despite the tension that they create among the scientist's uses of the model over time. This thesis is supported by a detailed analysis of successful scientific research done by Seymour Benzer in the 1950s and 60s.

Keith Bemer (2014)

• Winchester Thurston School (science teacher)
• Classics, Philosophy, and Ancient Science
• Ancient Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science, Early Modern Philosophy
• Dissertation: A Philosophical Examination of Aristotle's Historia Animalium

In this dissertation I address two related questions pertaining to Aristotle's philosophy of science and his biology and zoology. They are: (1) what are the goals of Aristotle's Historia Animalium (HA) and how does the treatise achieve these goals? And, more generally, (2) what is the role of a historia in Aristotle's philosophy of science?

Together these questions touch upon a long recognized problem in the interpretation of Aristotle's philosophical and scientific works related to the relationship between Aristotle's philosophy of science and his actual scientific practice. I pursue this broad question by focusing my attention on Aristotle's historia of animals and the related discussions of scientific investigation and demonstration, primarily in the Analytics . I argue that the term historia was used by Aristotle with a range of meanings that center around the notions of investigation and inquiry (or the reports thereof), and, in some instances, emphasize the early stages of inquiry, dedicated to establishing and organizing facts prior to causal explanation. I proceed by considering the theoretical background of a historia provided by the Analytics and Parts of Animals , before turning to a detailed analysis of select passages from the HA itself. I argue that the Analytics provides the framework for a method of correlating facts regarding a field of study that acts as a guide to further causal research, but that establishing the actual causal relations that hold within a field depends upon additional considerations that are largely domain-specific. I turn to the HA in order to illustrate this method of correlation, noting examples where the correlation of features appears to prefigure causal explanations. I conclude by considering the relationship between Aristotle's notions of historia and experience ( empeiria ), and argue that a historia provides the sort of comprehensive, factual knowledge of a domain of study that Aristotle often notes is necessary for coming to recognize causal relations, and thus coming to have scientific knowledge ( epistêmê ).

Marcus Adams (2014)

• University at Albany, SUNY (Assistant Professor)
• Early Modern Philosophy, History & Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Mechanical Epistemology and Mixed Mathematics: Descartes's Problems and Hobbes's Unity

My dissertation answers the following question: How is Hobbes's politics related to his physics and metaphysics? I argue that Hobbes does in fact provide a unified systematic philosophy, and I contrast this unity with problems in Descartes's epistemology and optics.

To make this argument, I carve a middle way between the two extremes in the literature by situating Hobbes within mechanical philosophy and 17th century mathematics. I use three concepts to clarify Hobbes's project: mechanical explanation, maker's knowledge, and mixed mathematical science. First, I show that for Hobbes a mechanical explanation involves tracing the motions of bodies at various levels of complexity, from simple points in geometry to human bodies in the state of nature and to commonwealth bodies. This view provides Hobbes with resources for a naturalized epistemology, which I show is the point at issue in Hobbes's Objections to Descartes's Meditations . Second, Hobbes says that we have "maker's knowledge" in geometry and politics. I show that "maker's knowledge" is Hobbes's empiricist answer to (1) how we have causal knowledge in politics and mathematics by constructing and (2) how mathematics is applicable to the world. Finally, I show that the mixed mathematical sciences, e.g., optics, were Hobbes's inspiration for a unified philosophical system. I argue that the physics in De corpore , the optics in De homine , and the politics in Leviathan are treated by Hobbes as mixed mathematical sciences, which provides a new way to see Hobbes as a consistent and non-reductive naturalist. Viewed in this light, the Leviathan turns out to have more methodological similarities to optics than to geometry.

Thomas Pashby (2014)

• University of Southern California (Postdoc)
• Dissertation: Time and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics

This dissertation aims at understanding, and challenging, the common view that "time is a parameter in quantum theory and not an observable." I argue that — like position in space — location in time of an event is an observable quantity.

The celebrated argument of Wolfgang Pauli against the inclusion of time as an observable of the theory ('Pauli's Theorem') has been seen as a demonstration that time may only enter quantum mechanics as a classical parameter. Against this orthodoxy I argue that there are good reasons to expect certain kinds of 'time observables' to find a representation within quantum theory, including clock operators (which provide the means to measure the passage of time) and event time operators, which provide predictions for the time at which a particular event occurs, such as the appearance of a dot on a luminescent screen. I contend that these time operators deserve full status as observables of the theory, and on reflection provide a uniquely compelling reason to expand the set of observables allowed by the standard formalism of quantum mechanics. In addition, I provide a novel association of event time operators with conditional probabilities, and propose a temporally extended form of quantum theory to better accommodate the time of an event as an observable quantity. This leads to a proposal to interpret quantum theory within an event ontology, inspired by Bertrand Russell's Analysis of Matter. On this basis I mount a defense of Russell's relational theory of time against a recent attack.

T homas V. Cunningham (2013)

• Medical Bioethics Director, Kaiser Permanente West Los Angeles
• Philosophy of Biology and Medicine, Applied Ethics, Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Socializing Medical Practice: A Normative Model of Medical Decision-Making

This dissertation is about the way people should and do make medical choices. It defends the claim that medical decisions should be made by groups of persons acting together, not by individuals acting alone.

I begin by arguing that prominent models of medical decision-making are problematic, because they fail to be both descriptively and normatively adequate , which I argue any account of choice in medicine should be. The remainder of the work articulates a model that meets these two criteria. First, I justify an account of the uniquely medical context my model is designed to apply to by distinguishing two basic aims of medicine : (i) to fully understand patients in personal and scientific terms; and, (ii) to intervene upon patients' health states in ways that are consistent with this understanding. Then, I take two chapters to develop a descriptive account of medical decision-making. In them, I introduce a close study of the case of hereditary breast and ovarian cancer decision-making, which I argue shows choices are made by groups of interacting persons over extended spatiotemporal and social dimensions. So, I appeal to the theory of distributed cognition to describe this collection of persons processing information together when making choices. Having defended a descriptive account of medical choice, I then take two more chapters to propose a normative account, based on a modified version of Rawlsian reflective equilibrium that I call medical reflective equilibrium . On my account, medical choices should be made by searching for, selecting, and integrating the right kind and amount of information, which requires considering sufficient information to meet the basic aims of medicine. Given that the basic aims are defined in terms of an epistemic distinction between subjective and objective knowledge , I argue that performing the medical reflective equilibrium procedure adequately requires multiple participants in decision-making. Consequently, I conclude that medical choices are and should be social.

Balázs Gyenis (2013)

• Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Research Fellow), London School of Economics (Research Fellow)
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Probabilistic Causality
• Dissertation: Well posedness and physical possibility

There is a sentiment shared among physicists that well posedness is a necessary condition for physical possibility. The arguments usually offered for well posedness have an epistemic flavor and thus they fall short of establishing the metaphysical claim that lack of well posedness implies physical impossibility. My dissertation analyzes the relationship of well posedness to prediction and confirmation as well as the notion of physical possibility and we devise three novel and independent argumentative strategies that may succeed where the usual epistemic arguments fail.

Peter Distelzweig (2013)

• University of St. Thomas, Minnesota (Assistant Professor)
• Early Modern Philosophy, Ancient Philosophy, History and Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Descartes' Teleomechanics in Medical Context: Approaches to Integrating Mechanism and Teleology in Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente, William Harvey and René Descartes

In this dissertation, I examine the relation between mechanism and teleology in Descartes's physiology, placing his views in the wider medical context.

There, as I show, we find a very different, Galeno-Aristotelian approach to integrating mechanics and teleology in the work of anatomists Hieronymus Fabricius ab Aquapendente and his more famous student, William Harvey. I provide an interpretation of teleology and mechanism in Descartes by exploring the historical and conceptual relationship between his approach and that exhibited by these anatomists. First, I show that Fabricius and Harvey develop creative, teleological, and non-reductive approaches to mechanizing the animal precisely by developing Arisotelian and Galenic resources. They propose that mathematical mechanics, understood as an Aristotelian subordinate science, should be employed to articulate the way the functions of the locomotive organs explain (as final causes) certain features of their anatomy, rendering them hypothetically necessary. They articulate these explanations using the Galenic concepts ofactio and usus . Employing the resources developed in my analysis of Fabricius and Harvey, I then provide a new interpretation of the relation of mechanism and teleology in Descartes and of its significance. Although he explicitly rejects final causes in natural philosophy, Descartes still appeals in physiology to apparently teleological concepts like function and usage. By focusing on the medical context of these concepts, I show that Descartes intends to and primarily does employ these terms in mechanical explanations meant to replace the metaphysically more extravagant but still material-efficient (not final causal) explanations present in the medical tradition. I argue, further, that Descartes at times does in fact employ final causal explanations like those in Fabricius's and Harvey's work and that he is hard-pressed to ground these explanations while still rejecting both divine purposes and non-mechanical principles in natural philosophy.

Catherine Stinson (2013)

• Western University (Postdoc)
• History & Philosophy of Neuroscience & Psychology
• Dissertation: Cognitive Mechanisms and Computational Models: Explanation in Cognitive Neuroscience

Cognitive Neuroscience seeks to integrate cognitive psychology and neuroscience. I critique existing analyses of this integration project, and offer my own account of how it ought to be understood given the practices of researchers in these fields.

A recent proposal suggests that integration between cognitive psychology and neuroscience can be achieved `seamlessly' via mechanistic explanation. Cognitive models are elliptical mechanism sketches, according to this proposal. This proposal glosses over several difficulties concerning the practice of cognitive psychology and the nature of cognitive models, however. Although psychology's information-processing models superficially resemble mechanism sketches, they in fact systematically include and exclude different kinds of information. I distinguish two kinds of information-processing model, neither of which specifies the entities and activities characteristic of mechanistic models, even sketchily. Furthermore, theory development in psychology does not involve the filling in of these missing details, but rather refinement of the sorts of models they start out as. I contrast the development of psychology's attention filter models with the development of neurobiology's models of sodium channel filtering. I argue that extending the account of mechanisms to include what I define as generic mechanisms provides a more promising route towards integration. Generic mechanisms are the in-the-world counterparts to abstract types. They thus have causal-explanatory powers which are shared by all the tokens that instantiate that type. This not only provides a way for generalizations to factor into mechanistic explanations, which allows for the `-looking' explanations needed for integrating cognitive models, but also solves some internal problems in the mechanism literature concerning schemas and explanatory relevance. I illustrate how generic mechanisms are discovered and used with examples from computational cognitive neuroscience. I argue that connectionist models can be understood as approximations to generic brain mechanisms, which resolves a longstanding philosophical puzzle as to their role. Furthermore, I argue that understanding scientific models in general in terms of generic mechanisms allows for a unified account of the types of inferences made in modeling and in experiment.

Benjamin Goldberg (2012)

• University of South Florida (Permanent Instructor)
• Early Modern Philosophy, History of Science and Medicine
• Dissertation: William Harvey, Soul Searcher: Teleology and Philosophical Anatomy

The goal of this dissertation is to understand the ways in which teleology structures the natural philosophy of William Harvey (1578-1657), the physician and philosopher who discovered the circulation of the blood, announced in his De motu cordis (1628).

In particular, I hope to incorporate new archival research, as well as the study of a number of texts that have not yet received due attention, including the Prelectiones anatomie universalis (1616-1627) and the De generatione animalium (1651). The study is divided into three parts. The first two parts focus on the role of two sorts of teleology in defining Harvey's subject matter. I first discuss the teleology of being, which characterizes the functioning and material organization of the parts of the body, and which we would call today 'physiology and anatomy'. I then turn to examine the teleology of becoming, which characterizes the process of the generation of those parts, what we would call today 'embryological development'. Thus Harvey's subject matter must be understood as the study of, and search for, final causes. The third section shifts to examining Harvey's methods in light of this conception of the subject matter. I start by articulating how, in general, Harvey conceives of anatomy not as a body of pre-existing knowledge, but rather as an active ability, combining skills of hand, eye, and mind. I then turn to look in detail at Harvey's particular methods, such as vivisection and broad comparisons across animals. I argue that his methodology should be seen as an innovative reinterpretation and extension of the philosophies of Aristotle and Galen, mediated by certain Renaissance trends in medicine and natural philosophy. I focus specifically on how experience and experiment, observing and cutting, are used by Harvey to determine the final causes so central to his conception of his subject matter.

Bryan Roberts (2012)

• London School of Economics (Lecturer)
• History and philosophy of physics
• Dissertation: Time, Symmetry and Structure: Studies in the Foundations of Quantum Theory

This dissertation is about the meaning and distinction between the past and the future according to our fundamental physical laws.

I begin with an account of what it means for quantum theory to make such a distinction. I then show that if Galilei invariant quantum theory does distinguish a preferred direction in time, then this has consequences for the ontology of the theory. In particular, it requires matter to admit internal degrees of freedom. I proceed to show that this is not a purely quantum phenomenon, but can be expressed in classical mechanics as well. I then illustrate three routes for generating quantum systems that distinguish a preferred temporal direction in this way.

Jonathan Livengood (2011)

• University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Statistics
• Dissertation: On Causal Inferences in the Humanities and Social Sciences: Actual Causation

The last forty years have seen an explosion of research directed at causation and causal inference. Statisticians developed techniques for drawing inferences about the likely effects of proposed interventions: techniques that have been applied most noticeably in social and life sciences. Computer scientists, economists, and methodologists merged graph theory and structural equation modeling in order to develop a mathematical formalism that underwrites automated search for causal structure from data. Analytic metaphysicians and philosophers of science produced an array of theories about the nature of causation and its relationship to scientific theory and practice.

Jonah Schupbach (2011)

• University of Utah (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Science, Epistemology (including Formal Epistemology), Logic
• Dissertation: Studies in the Logic of Explanatory Power

Human reasoning often involves explanation. In everyday affairs, people reason to hypotheses based on the explanatory power these hypotheses afford; I might, for example, surmise that my toddler has been playing in my office because I judge that this hypothesis delivers a good explanation of the disarranged state of the books on my shelves. But such explanatory reasoning also has relevance far beyond the commonplace. Indeed, explanatory reasoning plays an important role in such varied fields as the sciences, philosophy, theology, medicine, forensics, and law.

Justin Sytsma (2010)

• Victoria University of Wellington (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Cognitive Science
• Dissertation: Phenomenal consciousness as scientific phenomenon? A Critical Investigation of the New Science of Consciousness

Phenomenal consciousness poses something of a puzzle for philosophy of science. This puzzle arises from two facts: It is common for philosophers (and some scientists) to take its existence to be phenomenologically obvious and yet modern science arguably has little (if anything) to tell us about it. And, this is despite over 20 years of work targeting phenomenal consciousness in what I call the new science of consciousness. What is it about this supposedly evident phenomenon that has kept it beyond the reach of our scientific understanding? I argue that phenomenal consciousness has resisted scientific explanation because there is no such phenomenon: What is in fact phenomenologically obvious has not resisted scientific explanation, exposing phenomenal consciousness as an unneeded and unwarranted theoretical construct that is not supported by the scientific evidence. I show this through an investigation of the new science. I detail how these researchers understand “phenomenal consciousness,” tie this understanding to the recent philosophical debates, and critically assess the reasons given for believing that such a scientific phenomenon exists.

Holly Andersen (2009)

• Simon Fraser University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected] Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology & Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology/Metaphysics-->
• Dissertation: The Causal Structure of Conscious Agency

I examine the way implicit causal assumptions about features of agency and action affect the philosophical conclusions we reach from neuroscientific results, as well as provide a positive account of how to incorporate scientific experiments on various features of agency into philosophical frameworks of volition, using tools from interventionist causal analysis and research on human automatism. I also provide new, general, arguments for the autonomy for any higher level causes, including but not limited to features of conscious agency.

Peter Gildenhuys (2009)

• Lafayette College (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Science, Biomedical Ethics, Virtue Ethics, Causal Reasoning, Philosophy of Language
• Dissertation: A Causal Interpretation of Selection Theory

My dissertation is an inferentialist account of classical population genetics. I present the theory as a definite body of interconnected inferential rules for generating mathematical models of population dynamics. To state those rules, I use the notion of causation as a primitive. First, I put forward a rule stating the circumstances of application of the theory, one that uses causal language to pick out the types of entities over which the theory may be deployed. Next, I offer a rule for grouping such entities into populations based on their competitive causal relationships. Then I offer a general algorithm for generating classical population genetics models suitable for such populations on the basis of information about what causal influences operate within them.

Julie Zahle (2009)

• University of Copenhagen (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Psychology & Cognitive Science, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology/Metaphysics
• Dissertation: Practices, Perception, and Normative States

Theories of practice are widespread within the humanities and the social sciences. They reflect the view that the study of, and theorizing about, social practices hold the key to a proper understanding of social life or aspects thereof. An important subset of theories of practice is ability theories of practice. These theories focus on the manner in which individuals draw on their abilities, skills, know-how, or practical knowledge when participating in social practices.

Zvi Biener (2007)

• University of Cincinnati (Assistant Professor)
• Metaphysics and Epistemology in the Early-Modern Period, History of Philosophy
• Dissertation: The Unity and Structure of Knowledge: Subalternation, Demonstration, and the Geometrical Manner in Scholastic-Aristotelianism and Descartes

The project of constructing a complete system of knowledge—a system capable of integrating all that is and could possibly be known—was common to many early-modern philosophers and was championed with particular alacrity by René Descartes. The inspiration for this project often came from mathematics in general and from geometry in particular: Just as propositions were ordered in a geometrical demonstration, the argument went, so should propositions be ordered in an overall system of knowledge. Science, it was thought, had to proceed more geometrico. In this dissertation, I offer a new interpretation of 'science more geometrico' based on an extended analysis of the explanatory and argumentative forms used in certain branches of geometry. These branches were optics, astronomy, and mechanics; the so-called subalternate, subordinate, or mixed-mathematical sciences. In Part I, I investigate the nature of the mixed-mathematical sciences according to Aristotle and early-modern scholastic-Aristotelians. In Part II, the heart of the work, I analyze the metaphysics and physics of Descartes' Principles of Philosophy (1644, 1647) in light of the findings of Part I and an example from Galileo. I conclude by arguing that we must broaden our understanding of the early-modern conception of 'science more geometrico' to include exemplars taken from the mixed-mathematical sciences. These render the concept more flexible than previously thought.

Brian Hepburn (2007)

• Wichita State University (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• History and Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Physics, History of Science
• Dissertation: Equilibrium and Explanation in 18th Century Mechanics

The received view of the Scientific Revolution is that it was completed with the publication of Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687. The century following was relegated to a working out the mathematical details of Newton's program, expression into analytic form. I show that the mechanics of Leonhard Euler (1707—1782) and Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736—1813) did not begin with Newton's Three Laws. They provided their own beginning principles and interpretations of the relation between mathematical description and nature. Functional relations among the quantified properties of bodies were interpreted as basic mechanical connections between those bodies. Equilibrium played an important role in explaining the behavior of physical systems understood mechanically. Some behavior was revealed to be an equilibrium condition; other behavior was understood as a variation from equilibrium. Implications for scientific explanation are then drawn from these historical considerations, specifically an alternative to reducing explanation to unification. Trying to cast mechanical explanations (of the kind considered here) as Kitcher-style argument schema fails to distinguish legitimate from spurious explanations. Consideration of the mechanical analogies lying behind the schema is required.

Jackie Sullivan (2007)

• University of Western Ontario (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Neuroscience, Philosophy of Mind
• Dissertation: Reliability and Validity of Experiment in the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory

The concept of reliability has been defined traditionally by philosophers of science as a feature that an experiment has when it can be used to arrive at true descriptive or explanatory claims about phenomena. In contrast, philosophers of science typically take the concept of validity to correspond roughly to that of generalizability, which is defined as a feature that a descriptive or explanatory claim has when it is based on laboratory data but is applicable to phenomena beyond those effects under study in the laboratory. Philosophical accounts of experiment typically treat of the reliability of scientific experiment and the validity of descriptive or explanatory claims independently. On my account of experiment, however, these two issues are intimately linked. I show by appeal to case studies from the contemporary neurobiology of learning and memory that measures taken to guarantee the reliability of experiment often result in a decrease in the validity of those scientific claims that are made on the basis of such experiments and, furthermore, that strategies employed to increase validity often decrease reliability. Yet, since reliability and validity are both desirable goals of scientific experiments, and, on my account, competing aims, a tension ensues. I focus on two types of neurobiological experiments as case studies to illustrate this tension: (1) organism-level learning experiments and (2) synaptic-level plasticity experiments. I argue that the express commitment to the reliability of experimental processes in neurobiology has resulted in the invalidity of mechanistic claims about learning and plasticity made on the basis of data obtained from such experiments. The positive component of the dissertation consists in specific proposals that I offer as guidelines for resolving this tension in the context of experimental design.

Jim Tabery (2007)

• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Biology, Bioethics, History of Biology
• Dissertation: Causation in the Nature-Nurture Debate: The Case of Genotype-Environment Interaction

In the dissertation I attempt to resolve an aspect of the perennial nature-nurture debate. Despite the widely endorsed “interactionist credo”, the nature-nurture debate remains a quagmire of epistemological and methodological disputes over causation, explanation, and the concepts employed therein. Consider a typical nature-nurture question: Why do some individuals develop a complex trait such as depression, while others do not? This question incorporates an etiological query about the causal mechanisms responsible for the individual development of depression; it also incorporates an etiological query about the causes of variation responsible for individual differences in the occurrence of depression. Scientists in the developmental research tradition of biology investigate the causal mechanisms responsible for the individual development of traits; scientists in the biometric research tradition of biology investigate the causes of variation responsible for individual differences in traits. So what is the relationship between causal mechanisms and causes of variation, between individual development and individual differences, and between the developmental and biometric traditions?

Ingo Brigandt (2006)

• University of Alberta (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Language
• Dissertation: A Theory of Conceptual Advance: Explaining Conceptual Change in Evolutionary, Molecular, and Evolutionary Developmental Biology

The theory of concepts advanced in the dissertation aims at accounting for a) how a concept makes successful practice possible, and b) how a scientific concept can be subject to rational change in the course of history. Traditional accounts in the philosophy of science have usually studied concepts in terms only of their reference; their concern is to establish a stability of reference in order to address the incommensurability problem. My discussion, in contrast, suggests that each scientific concept consists of three components of content: 1) reference, 2) inferential role, and 3) the epistemic goal pursued with a concept's use. I argue that in the course of history a concept can change in any of these three components, and that change in one component—including change of reference—can be accounted for as being rational relative to other components, in particular a concept's epistemic goal.

Francesca DiPoppa (2006)

• Texas Tech University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• History of Early Modern Philosophy
• Dissertation: "God acts through the laws of his nature alone": From the Nihil ex Nihilo axiom to causation as expression in Spinoza's metaphysics

One of the most important concepts in Spinoza's metaphysics is that of causation. Much of the expansive scholarship on Spinoza, however, either takes causation for granted, or ascribes to Spinoza a model of causation that, for one reason or another, fails to account for specific instances of causation-such as the concept of cause of itself (causa sui). This work will offer a new interpretation of Spinoza's concept of causation. Starting from the "nothing comes from nothing" axiom and its consequences, the containment principle and the similarity principle (basically, the idea that what is in the effect must have been contained in the cause, and that the cause and the effect must have something in common) I will argue that Spinoza adopts what I call the expression-containment model of causation, a model that describes all causal interactions at the vertical and horizontal level (including causa sui, or self-cause). The model adopts the core notion of Neoplatonic emanationism, i.e. the idea that the effect is a necessary outpouring of the cause; however, Spinoza famously rejects transcendence and the possibility of created substances. God, the First Cause, causes immanently: everything that is caused is caused in God, as a mode of God. Starting from a discussion of the problems that Spinoza found in Cartesian philosophy, and of the Scholastic and Jewish positions on horizontal and vertical causation, my dissertation will follow the development of Spinoza's model of causation from his earliest work to his more mature Ethics. My work will also examine the relationship between Spinoza's elaboration of monism, the development of his model of causation, and his novel concept of essence (which for Spinoza coincides with a thing's causal power).

Abel Franco (2006)

• California State University, Northridge (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Dissertation: Descartes' theory of passions

Descartes not only had a theory of passions, but one that deserves a place among contemporary debates on emotions. The structure of this dissertation attempts to make explicit the unity of that theory. The study of the passions by the physician (who not only studies matter and motion but also human nature) [Chapter 2] appears to be the “foundations” (as he tells Chanut) of morals [Chapters 1 and 4] insofar as their main function [Chapter 3] is to dispose us to act in ways which directly affect our natural happiness. In other words, Descartes is in the Passions of the Soul (1649) climbing the very tree of philosophy he presented two years earlier in the Preface to French Edition of the Principles of Philosophy: the trunk (in this case a section of it: our nature) leads us to the highest of the three branches (morals) when we study human passions.

Doreen Fraser (2006)

• University of Waterloo (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, History of Science
• Dissertation: Haag's theorem and the interpretation of quantum field theories with interactions

Quantum field theory (QFT) is the physical framework that integrates quantum mechanics and the special theory of relativity; it is the basis of many of our best physical theories. QFT's for interacting systems have yielded extraordinarily accurate predictions. Yet, in spite of unquestionable empirical success, the treatment of interactions in QFT raises serious issues for the foundations and interpretation of the theory. This dissertation takes Haag's theorem as a starting point for investigating these issues. It begins with a detailed exposition and analysis of different versions of Haag's theorem. The theorem is cast as a reductio ad absurdum of canonical QFT prior to renormalization. It is possible to adopt different strategies in response to this reductio: (1) renormalizing the canonical framework; (2) introducing a volume (i.e., long-distance) cutoff into the canonical framework; or (3) abandoning another assumption common to the canonical framework and Haag's theorem, which is the approach adopted by axiomatic and constructive field theorists. Haag's theorem does not entail that it is impossible to formulate a mathematically well-defined Hilbert space model for an interacting system on infinite, continuous space. Furthermore, Haag's theorem does not undermine the predictions of renormalized canonical QFT; canonical QFT with cutoffs and existing mathematically rigorous models for interactions are empirically equivalent to renormalized canonical QFT. The final two chapters explore the consequences of Haag's theorem for the interpretation of QFT with interactions. I argue that no mathematically rigorous model of QFT on infinite, continuous space admits an interpretation in terms of quanta (i.e., quantum particles). Furthermore, I contend that extant mathematically rigorous models for physically unrealistic interactions serve as a better guide to the ontology of QFT than either of the other two formulations of QFT. Consequently, according to QFT, quanta do not belong in our ontology of fundamental entities.

Greg Frost-Arnold (2006)

• Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• History of Analytic Philosophy, Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Carnap, Tarski, and Quine's Year Together: Logic, Science and Mathematics

During the academic year 1940-1941, several giants of analytic philosophy congregated at Harvard: Russell, Tarski, Carnap, Quine, Hempel, and Goodman were all in residence. This group held both regular public meetings as well as private conversations. Carnap took detailed diction notes that give us an extensive record of the discussions at Harvard that year. Surprisingly, the most prominent question in these discussions is: if the number of physical items in the universe is finite (or possibly finite), what form should the logic and mathematics in science take? This question is closely connected to an abiding philosophical problem, one that is of central philosophical importance to the logical empiricists: what is the relationship between the logico-mathematical realm and the natural, material realm? This problem continues to be central to analytic philosophy of logic, mathematics, and science. My dissertation focuses on three issues connected with this problem that dominate the Harvard discussions: nominalism, the unity of science, and analyticity. I both reconstruct the lines of argument represented in Harvard discussions and relate them to contemporary treatments of these issues.

Francis Longworth (2006)

• Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (Research Fellow)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics
• Dissertation: Causation, Counterfactual Dependence and Pluralism

The principal concern of this dissertation is whether or not a conceptual analysis of our ordinary concept of causation can be provided. In chapters two and three I show that two of the most promising univocal accounts (the counterfactual theories of Hitchcock and Yablo) are subject to numerous counterexamples. In chapter four, I show that Hall's pluralistic theory of causation, according to which there are two concepts of causation, also faces a number of counterexamples. In chapter five, I sketch an alternative, broadly pluralistic theory of token causation, according to which causation is a cluster concept with a prototypical structure. This theory is able to evade the counterexamples that beset other theories and, in addition, offers an explanation of interesting features of the concept such the existence of borderline cases, and the fact that some instances of causation seem to be better examples of the concept than others.

David Miller (2006)

• Iowa State University(Assistant Professor)
• [email protected]
• History of Early Modern Philosophy, History of Science
• Dissertation: Representations of Space in Seventeenth Century Physics

The changing understanding of the universe that characterized the birth of modern science included a fundamental shift in the prevailing representation of space—the presupposed conceptual structure that allows one to intelligibly describe the spatial properties of physical phenomena. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the prevailing representation of space was spherical. Natural philosophers first assumed a spatial center, then specified meanings with reference to that center. Directions, for example, were described in relation to the center, and locations were specified by distance from the center. Through a series of attempts to solve problems first raised by the work of Copernicus, this Aristotelian, spherical framework was replaced by a rectilinear representation of space. By the end of the seventeenth century, descriptions were understood by reference to linear orientations, as parallel or oblique to a presupposed line, and locations were identified without reference to a privileged central point. This move to rectilinear representations of space enabled Gilbert, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton to describe and explain the behavior of the physical world in the novel ways for which these men are justly famous, including their theories of gravitational attraction and inertia. In other words, the shift towards a rectilinear representation of space was essential to the fundamental reconception of the universe that gave rise to both modern physical theory and, at the same time, the linear way of experiencing the world essential to modern science.

Christian Wüthrich (2006)

• University of California, San Diego (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, Philosophy of Science, Metaphysics
• Dissertation: Approaching the Planck Scale from a Generally Relativistic Point of View: A Philosophical Appraisal of Loop Quantum Gravity

My dissertation studies the foundations of loop quantum gravity, a candidate for a quantum theory of gravity based on classical general relativity. After an evaluation of the motivations for seeking a quantum theory of gravity, I embark upon an investigation of how loop quantum gravity codifies general relativity's main innovation, the so-called background independence, in a formalism suitable for quantization. This codification pulls asunder what has been joined together in general relativity: space and time. It is thus a central issue whether or not general relativity's four-dimensional structure can be retrieved in the alternative formalism. I argue that the rightful four-dimensional spacetime structure can only be partially retrieved at the classical level, while its retrieval at the quantum level is an open question. Next, I scrutinize pronouncements claiming that the "big-bang" singularity of classical cosmological models vanishes in quantum cosmology based on loop quantum gravity and conclude that these claims must be severely qualified. Finally, a scheme is developed of how the re-emergence of the smooth spacetime from the underlying discrete quantum structure could be understood.

Erik Angner (2005)

• George Mason University (Associate Professor)
• History and Philosophy of Social Science, Social and Political Philosophy
• Dissertation: Subjective Measures of Well-Being: A philosophical examination

Over the last couple of decades, as part of the rise of positive psychology, psychologists have given increasing amounts of attention to so-called subjective measures of well-being. These measures, which are supposed to represent the well-being of individuals and groups, are often presented as alternatives to more traditional economic ones for purposes of the articulation, implementation and evaluation of public policy. Unlike economic measures, which are typically based on data about income, market transactions and the like, subjective measures are based on answers to questions like: "Taking things all together, how would you say things are these days would you say you're very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy these days?" The aim of this dissertation is to explore issues in the philosophical foundations of subjective measures of well-being, with special emphasis on the manner in which the philosophical foundations of subjective measures differ from those of traditional economic measures. Moreover, the goal is to examine some arguments for and against these measures, and, in particular, arguments that purport to demonstrate the superiority of economic measures for purposes of public policy. My main thesis is that the claim that subjective measures of well-being cannot be shown to be inferior to economic measures quite as easily as some have suggested, but that they nevertheless are associated with serious problems, and that questions about the relative advantage of subjective and economic measures for purposes of public policy will depend on some fundamentally philosophical judgments, e.g. about the nature of well-being and the legitimate goals for public policy.

Megan Delehanty (2005)

• University of Calgary (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Dissertation: Empiricism and the Epistemic Status of Imaging Technologies

The starting point for this project was the question of how to understand the epistemic status of mathematized imaging technologies such as positron emission tomography (PET) and confocal microscopy. These sorts of instruments play an increasingly important role in virtually all areas of biology and medicine. Some of these technologies have been widely celebrated as having revolutionized various fields of studies while others have been the target of substantial criticism. Thus, it is essential that we be able to assess these sorts of technologies as methods of producing evidence. They differ from one another in many respects, but one feature they all have in common is the use of multiple layers of statistical and mathematical processing that are essential to data production. This feature alone means that they do not fit neatly into any standard empiricist account of evidence. Yet this failure to be accommodated by philosophical accounts of good evidence does not indicate a general inadequacy on their part since, by many measures, they very often produce very high quality evidence. In order to understand how they can do so, we must look more closely at old philosophical questions concerning the role of experience and observation in acquiring knowledge about the external world. Doing so leads us to a new, grounded version of empiricism. After distinguishing between a weaker and a stronger, anthropocentric version of empiricism, I argue that most contemporary accounts of observation are what I call benchmark strategies that, implicitly or explicitly, rely on the stronger version according to which human sense experience holds a place of unique privilege. They attempt to extend the bounds of observation iii and the epistemic privilege accorded to it—by establishing some type of relevant similarity to the benchmark of human perception. These accounts fail because they are unable to establish an epistemically motivated account of what relevant similarity consists of. The last best chance for any benchmark approach, and, indeed, for anthropocentric empiricism, is to supplement a benchmark strategy with a grounding strategy. Toward this end, I examine the Grounded Benchmark Criterion which defines relevant similarity to human perception in terms of the reliability-making features of human perception. This account, too, must fail due to our inability to specify these features given the current state of understanding of the human visual system. However, this failure reveals that it is reliability alone that is epistemically relevant, not any other sort of similarity to human perception. Current accounts of reliability suffer from a number of difficulties, so I develop a novel account of reliability that is based on the concept of granularity. My account of reliability in terms of a granularity match both provides the means to refine the weaker version of empiricism and allows us to establish when and why imaging technologies are reliable. Finally, I use this account of granularity in examining the importance of the fact that the output of imaging technologies usually is images.

Alan Love (2005)

• University of Minnesota (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Biology, Philosophy of Science, Biology
• Dissertation: Explaining Evolutionary Innovation and Novelty: A Historical and Philosophical Study of Biological Concepts

Explaining evolutionary novelties (such as feathers or neural crest cells) is a central item on the research agenda of evolutionary developmental biology (Evo-devo). Proponents of Evo-devo have claimed that the origin of innovation and novelty constitute a distinct research problem, ignored by evolutionary theory during the latter half of the 20th century, and that Evo-devo as a synthesis of biological disciplines is in a unique position to address this problem. In order to answer historical and philosophical questions attending these claims, two philosophical tools were developed. The first, conceptual clusters, captures the joint deployment of concepts in the offering of scientific explanations and allows for a novel definition of conceptual change. The second, problem agendas, captures the multifaceted nature of explanatory domains in biological science and their diachronic stability. The value of problem agendas as an analytical unit is illustrated through the examples of avian feather and flight origination. Historical research shows that explanations of innovation and novelty were not ignored. They were situated in disciplines such as comparative embryology, morphology, and paleontology (exemplified in the research of N.J. Berrill, D.D. Davis, and W.K. Gregory), which were overlooked because of a historiography emphasizing the relations between genetics and experimental embryology. This identified the origin of Evo-devo tools (developmental genetics) but missed the source of its problem agenda. The structure of developmental genetic explanations of innovations and novelties is compared and contrasted with those of other disciplinary approaches, past and present. Applying the tool of conceptual clusters to these explanations reveals a unique form of conceptual change over the past five decades: a change in the causal and evidential concepts appealed to in explanations. Specification of the criteria of explanatory adequacy for the problem agenda of innovation and novelty indicates that Evo-devo qua disciplinary synthesis requires more attention to the construction of integrated explanations from its constituent disciplines besides developmental genetics. A model for explanations integrating multiple disciplinary contributions is provided. The phylogenetic approach to philosophy of science utilized in this study is relevant to philosophical studies of other sciences and meets numerous criteria of adequacy for analyses of conceptual change.

Andrea Scarantino (2005)

• Georgia State University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Dissertation: Explicating Emotions

In the course of their long intellectual history, emotions have been identified with items as diverse as perceptions of bodily changes (feeling tradition), judgments (cognitivist tradition), behavioral predispositions (behaviorist tradition), biologically based solutions to fundamental life tasks (evolutionary tradition), and culturally specific social artifacts (social constructionist tradition). The first objective of my work is to put some order in the mare magnum of theories of emotions. I taxonomize them into families and explore the historical origin and current credentials of the arguments and intuitions supporting them. I then evaluate the methodology of past and present emotion theory, defending a bleak conclusion: a great many emotion theorists ask "What is an emotion?" without a clear understanding of what counts as getting the answer right. I argue that there are two ways of getting the answer right. One is to capture the conditions of application of the folk term "emotion" in ordinary language (Folk Emotion Project), and the other is to formulate a fruitful explication of it (Explicating Emotion Project). Once we get clear on the desiderata of these two projects, we realize that several long-running debates in emotion theory are motivated by methodological confusions. The constructive part of my work is devoted to formulating a new explication of emotion suitable for the theoretical purposes of scientific psychology. At the heart of the Urgency Management System (UMS) theory of emotions I propose is the idea that an "umotion" is a special type of superordinate system which instantiates and manages an urgent action tendency by coordinating the operation of a cluster of cognitive, perceptual and motoric subsystems. Crucially, such superordinate system has a proper function by virtue of which it acquires a special kind of intentionality I call pragmatic. I argue that "umotion" is sufficiently similar in use to "emotion" to count as explicating it, it has precise rules of application, and it accommodates a number of central and widely shared intuitions about the emotions. My hope is that future emotion research will demonstrate the heuristic fruitfulness of the "umotion" concept for the sciences of mind.

Armond Duwell (2004)

• University of Montana, Missoula (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, Information Theory
• Dissertation: Foundations of Quantum Information Theory and Quantum Computation Theory

Physicists and philosophers have expressed great hope that quantum information theory will revolutionize our understanding of quantum theory. The first part of my dissertation is devoted to clarifying and criticizing various notions of quantum information, particularly those attributable to Jozsa and also Deutsch and Hayden. My work suggests that no new concept of information is needed and the Shannon information theory works perfectly well for quantum mechanical systems.

Uljana Feest (2003)

• University of Hanover (Professor) -->
• Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences
• Dissertation: Operationism, Experimentation, and Concept Formation

I provide a historical and philosophical analysis of the doctrine of operationism, which emerged in American psychology in the 1930s. While operationism is frequently characterized as a semantic thesis (which demands that concepts be defined by means of measurement operations), I argue that it is better understood as a methodological strategy, which urges that experimental investigation. I present three historical case studies of the work of early proponents of operationism and show that all of them were impressed by behaviorist critiques of traditional mentalism and introspectivism, while still wanting to investigate some of the phenomena of traditional psychology (consciousness, purpose, motivation). I show that when these psychologists used “operational definitions”, they posited the existence of particular psychological phenomena and treated certain experimental data – by stipulation – as indicative of those phenomena. However, they viewed these stipulative empirical definitions as neither a priori true, nor as unrevisable. While such stipulative definitions have the function of getting empirical research about a phenomenon “off the ground”, they clearly don't provide sufficient evidence for the existence of the phenomenon. In the philosophical part of my dissertation, I raise the epistemological question of what it would take to provide such evidence, relating this question to recent debates in the philosophy of experimentation. I argue that evidence for the existence of a given phenomenon is produced as part of testing descriptive hypotheses about the phenomenon. Given how many background assumptions have to be made in order to test a hypothesis about a phenomenon, I raise the question of whether claims about the existence of psychological phenomena are underdetermined by data. I argue that they are not. Lastly, I present an analysis of the scientific notion of an experimental artifact, and introduce the notion of an “artifactual belief”, i.e. an experimentally well confirmed belief that later turns out to be false, when one or more of the background assumptions (relative to which the belief was confirmed) turn out to be false.

Gualtiero Piccinini (2003)

• University of Missouri - St. Louis (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Mind
• Dissertation: Computations and Computers in the Sciences of Mind and Brain

Computationalism says that brains are computing mechanisms, that is, mechanisms that perform computations. At present, there is no consensus on how to formulate computationalism precisely or adjudicate the dispute between computationalism and its foes, or between different versions of computationalism. An important reason for the current impasse is the lack of a satisfactory philosophical account of computing mechanisms. The main goal of this dissertation is to offer such an account. I also believe that the history of computationalism sheds light on the current debate. By tracing different versions of computationalism to their common historical origin, we can see how the current divisions originated and understand their motivation. Reconstructing debates over computationalism in the context of their own intellectual history can contribute to philosophical progress on the relation between brains and computing mechanisms and help determine how brains and computing mechanisms are alike, and how they differ. Accordingly, my dissertation is divided into a historical part, which traces the early history of computationalism up to 1946, and a philosophical part, which offers an account of computing mechanisms.

Wendy Parker (2003)

• University of Durham (Reader) [email protected] -->
• Modeling and Simulation, Science and Public Policy, Environmental Philosophy
• Dissertation: Computer Modeling in Climate Science: Experiment, Explanation, Pluralism

Computer simulation modeling is an important part of contemporary scientific practice but has not yet received much attention from philosophers. The present project helps to fill this lacuna in the philosophical literature by addressing three questions that arise in the context of computer simulation of Earth's climate. (1) Computer simulation experimentation commonly is viewed as a suspect methodology, in contrast to the trusted mainstay of material experimentation. Are the results of computer simulation experiments somehow deeply problematic in ways that the results of material experiments are not? I argue against categorical skepticism toward the results of computer simulation experiments by revealing important parallels in the epistemologies of material and computer simulation experimentation. (2) It has often been remarked that simple computer simulation models—but not complex ones—contribute substantially to our understanding of the atmosphere and climate system. Is this view of the relative contribution of simply and complex models tenable? Io show that both simple and complex climate models can promote scientific understanding and argue that the apparent contribution of simple models depends upon whether a causal or deductive account of scientific understanding is adopted. (3) When two incompatible scientific theories are under consideration, they typically are viewed as competitors, and we seek evidence that refutes at least one of the theories. In the study of climate change, however, logically incompatible computer simulation models are accepted as complementary resources for investigating future climate. How can we make sense of this use of incompatible models? I show that a collection of incompatible models climate models persists in part because of difficulties faced in evaluating and comparing climate models. I then discuss the rationale for using these incompatible models together and argue that this climate model pluralism has both competitive and integrative components.

Chris Smeenk (2002)

• University of Western Ontario (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, Early Modern Philosophy
• Dissertation: Approaching the Absolute Zero of Time: Theory Development in Early Universe Cosmology

This dissertation gives an original account of the historical development of modern cosmology along with a philosophical assessment of related methodological and foundational issues. After briefly reviewing the groundbreaking work by Einstein and others, I turn to the development of early universe cosmology following the discovery of the microwave background radiation in 1965. This discovery encouraged consolidation and refinement of the big bang model, but cosmologists also noted that cosmological models could accomodate observations only at the cost of several "unnatural" assumptions regarding the initial state. I describe various attempts to eliminate initial conditions in the late 60s and early 70s, leading up to the idea that came to dominate the field: inflationary cosmology. I discuss the pre-history of inflationary cosmology and the early development of the idea, including the account of structure formation and the introduction of the "inflaton" field. The second part of my thesis focuses on methodological issues in cosmology, opening with a discussion of three principles and their role in cosmology: the cosmological principle, indifference principle, and anthropic principle. I assess appeals to explanatory adequacy as grounds for theory choice in cosmology, and close with a discussion of confirmation theory and the issue of novelty in relation to cosmological theories.

Daniel Steel (2002)

• Michigan State University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Causality and Confirmation; Biological and Social Sciences
• Dissertation: Mechanisms and Interfering Factors: Dealing with Heterogeneity in the Biological and Social Sciences

The biological and social sciences both deal with populations that are heterogeneous with regard to important causes of interest, in the sense that the same cause often exerts very different effects upon distinct members of the population. For instance, welfare- to-work programs are likely to have different effects on the economic prospects of trainees depending on such variables as education, prior work experience, and so forth. Moreover, it is rarely the case in biology or social science that all such complicating variables are known and can be measured. In such circumstances, generalizations about the effect of a factor in a given population average over these differences, and hence take on a probabilistic character. Consequently, a causal generalization that holds with respect to a heterogeneous population as a whole may not hold for a given sub-population, a fact which raises a variety of difficulties for explanation and prediction. The overarching theme of the dissertation is that knowing how a cause produces its effect is the key to knowing when a particular causal relationship holds and when it does not. More specifically, the proposal is the following. Suppose that X is the cause of Y in the population P. Then there is a mechanism, or mechanisms, present among at least some of the members of P through which X influences Y. So if we know the mechanism and the kinds of things that can interfere with it, then we are in a much better position to say when the causal generalization will hold and when it will not. This intuitive idea has been endorsed by several philosophers; however, what has been lacking is a systematic exploration of the proposal and its consequences. That is what I aim to provide. The approach to the heterogeneity problem is developed in the context of an example drawn from biomedical science, namely, research into the causal mechanism by which HIV attacks the human immune system. Moreover, I argue that my approach to the problem of heterogeneity sheds new light on some familiar philosophical issues that are relevant to the biological and social sciences, namely, ceteris paribus laws and methodological holism versus methodological individualism.

Chris Martin (2001)

• Left the field
• Philosophy of Physics, Gauge Theories
• Dissertation: Gauging Gauge: Remarks on the Conceptual Foundations of Gauge Symmetry

Of all the concepts of modern physics, there are few that have the sort of powerful, sometimes mysterious, and often awe-inspiring rhetoric surrounding them as has the concept of local gauge symmetry. The common understanding today is that all fundamental interactions in nature are described by so-called gauge theories. These theories, far from being just any sort of physical theory are taken to result from the tsrict dictates of principles of local gauge symmetry—gauge symmetry principles. The success—experimental, theoretical and other wise—of theories based on local symmetry principles has given rise to the received view of local symmetry principles as deeply fundamental, as literally “dictating” or “necessitating” the very shape of fundamental physics. The current work seeks to make some headway towards elucidating this view by considering the general issue of the physical content of local symmetry principles in their historical and theoretical contexts. There are two parts to the dissertation: a historical part and a more “philosophical” part. In the first, historical part, I provide a brief genealogy of gauge theories, looking at some of the seminal works in the birth and development of gauge theories. My chief claim here is about what one does not find. Despite the modern rhetoric, the history of gauge field theories does not evidence loaded arguments from (a priori) local symmetry principles or even the need for ascriptions of any deep physical significance to these principles. The history evidences that the ascendancy of gauge field theories rests quite squarely on the heuristic value of local gauge symmetry principles. In the philosophical component of the dissertation I turn to an analysis of the gauge argument, the canonical means of cashing out the physical content of gauge symmetry principle. I warn against a (common) literal reading of the argument. As I discuss, the argument must be afforded a fairly heuristic (even if historically-based) reading. Claims to the effect that the argument reflects the “logic of nature” must, for many reasons that I discuss, be taken with a grain of salt. Finally, I highlight how the “received view” of gauge symmetry—which takes it that gauge symmetry transformations are merely non-physical, formal changes of description—gives rise to a tension between the “profundity of gauge symmetry” and “the redundancy of gauge symmetry”. I consider various ways one might address this tension. I conclude that one is hard pressed to do any better than a “minimalist view” which takes it that the physical import of gauge symmetry lies in its historically based heuristic utility. While there are less minimalist views of the physical content to be ascribed to gauge symmetry principles, it is clear that neither the history nor the physics obliges us to make such ascriptions.

Andrew Backe (2000)

• City University of Hong Kong (Visiting Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Mind, American Pragmatism
• Dissertation: The Divided Psychology of John Dewey

This dissertation examines the extent to which John Dewey's psychology was a form of behaviorism, and, in doing so, considers how metaphysical commitments influenced psychological theories at the turn of the century. In his 1916 Essays in Experimental Logic , Dewey described his psychology as a science not of states of consciousness, but of behavior. Specifically, Dewey argued that conscious states can be assimilated to modes of behavior that help the individual adapt to a situation of conflict. Hence, the role of psychology, Dewey argued, is to provide a natural history of the conditions under which a particular behavioral mode emerges. Based on an analysis of a number of Dewey's major works written during the period of 1884 to 1916, I claim that there is an underlying metaphysical intuition in Dewey's views that prevents a behavioristic interpretation of his psychology. This intuition, I argue, stems from Dewey's absolute idealist philosophy of the mid 1880s. The intuition raises the concern that, if psychologists permit a transition from one psychological state to another to be described in terms of a causal succession of discrete events, then there is no way that the transition can be held together in a relational complex. As applied to psychology by Dewey, the intuition rejected treating any psychological phenomenon as constituted of separate existences, regardless of whether the phenomenon is defined in terms of conscious or behavioral events. Instead, the intuition presupposed that psychological events are unified in a special kind of relation in which events merge and are, in a mystical sense, identical. I maintain that Dewey's intuition regarding psychological causation served as the basis for his concept of coordination, which Dewey set out in his criticism of the reflex arc concept in the context of the Baldwin-Titchener reaction-time controversy. According to my account, Dewey's coordination concept was at odds with the behaviorists' unit of analysis, which explicitly divided any psychological phenomenon into separate existences of stimulus and response. I consider the broader implications of Dewey's metaphysical intuition through a discussion of different types of causal explanation that emerged in psychology in the early 20th century.

Benoit Desjardins (1999)

• Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (Assistant Professor of Radiology)
• Causality, Statistical Algorithms
• Dissertation: On the Theoretical Limits to Reliable Causal Inference

One of the most central problems in scientific research is the search for explanations of some aspect of nature for which empirical data is available. One seeks to identify the causal processes explaining the data, in the form of a model of the aspect of nature under study. Although traditional statistical approaches are excellent for finding statistical dependencies in a body of empirical data, they prove inadequate at finding the causal structure in the data. New graphical algorithmic approaches have been proposed to automatically discover the causal structure in the data. Based on strong connections between graph theoretic properties and statistical aspects of causal influences, fundamental assumptions about the data can be used to infer a graphical structure, which is used to construct models describing the exact causal relations in the data. If the data contain correlated errors, latent variables must be introduced to explain the causal structure in the data. There is usually a large set of equivalent causal models with latent variables, representing competing alternatives, which entail similar statistical dependency relations. The central problem in this dissertation is the study of the theoretical limits to reliable causal inference. Given a body of statistical distribution information on a finite set of variables, we seek to characterize the set of all causal models satisfying this distribution. Current approaches only characterize the set of models which satisfy limited properties of this distribution, notably its relations of probabilistic conditional independence. Such models are semi-Markov equivalent. Some of these models might however not satisfy other properties of the distribution, which cannot be expressed as simple conditional independence relations on marginal distributions. We seek to go beyond semi-Markov equivalence. To do so, we first formally characterize the variation in graphical structure within a semi-Markov equivalence class of models. We then determine possible consequences of this variation as either experimentally testable features of models, or as testable features of marginal distributions.

Elizabeth Paris (1999)

• History of Particle Physics
• Dissertation: Ringing in the New Physics: The Politics and Technology of Electron Colliders in the United States, 1956-1972

The “November Revolution” of 1974 and the experiments that followed consolidated the place of the Standard Model in modern particle physics. Much of the evidence on which these conclusions depended was generated by a new type of tool: colliding beam storage rings, which had been considered physically unfeasible twenty years earlier. In 1956 a young experimentalist named Gerry O'Neill dedicated himself to demonstrating that such an apparatus could do useful physics. The storage ring movement encountered numerous obstacles before generating one of the standard machines for high energy research. In fact, it wasn't until 1970 that the U.S. finally broke ground on its first electron-positron collider. Drawing extensively on archival sources and supplementing them with the personal accounts of many of the individuals who took part, Ringing in the New Physics examines this instance of post-World War II techno-science and the new social, political and scientific tensions that characterize it. The motivations are twofold: first, that the chronicle of storage rings may take its place beside mathematical group theory, computer simulations, magnetic spark chambers, and the like as an important contributor to a view of matter and energy which has been the dominant model for the last twenty-five years. In addition, the account provides a case study for the integration of the personal, professional, institutional, and material worlds when examining an episode in the history or sociology of twentieth century science. The story behind the technological development of storage rings holds fascinating insights into the relationship between theory and experiment, collaboration and competition in the physics community, the way scientists obtain funding and their responsibilities to it, and the very nature of what constitutes successful science in the post-World War II era.

Tom Seppalainen (1999)

• Portland State University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Visual Perception and Cognition, Metaphysics
• Dissertation: The Problematic Nature of Experiments in Color Science

The so-called opponent process theory of color vision has played a prominent role in recent philosophical debates on color. Several philosophers have argued that this theory can be used to reduce color experiences to properties of neural cells. I will refute this argument by displaying some of the problematic features of the experimental inference present in color science. Along the way I will explicate some of the methodological strategies employed by vision scientists to accomplish integration across the mind-body boundary. At worst, the integration follows the looks-like methodology where effects resemble their causes. The modern textbook model for human color vision consists of three hypothetical color channels, red-green, blue-yellow, and white-black. These are assumed to be directly responsible for their respective color sensations. The hue channels are opponent in that light stimulation can cause only one of the respective hue sensations. The channels are also seen as consisting of opponent neural cells. The cells and the channels are claimed to have similar response properties. In my work, I reconstruct some of the critical experiments underwriting the textbook model. The centerpiece is an analysis of Hurvich and Jameson's color cancellation experiment. I demonstrate that the experiment cannot rule out the contradictory alternative hypothesis for opponent channels without making question-begging assumptions. In order to accomplish this, I clarify the theorizing of Hurvich and Jameson's predecessor, Ewald Hering, as well as the classic trichromatic theory. I demonstrate that currently no converging evidence from neurophysiology exists for the opponent process theory. I show that the results from De Valois' studies of single cells are theory-laden. The classification into cell types assumes the textbook model. Since the textbook model is an artifact of experimental pseudo-convergence both claims for a reductive and a causal explanation of color experiences are premature.

Jonathan Bain (1998)

• Polytechnic Institute of NYU (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Spacetime, Scientific Realism, Philosophy of Quantum Field Theory
• Dissertation: Representations of Spacetime: Formalism and Ontological Commitment

This dissertation consists of two parts. The first is on the relation between formalism and ontological commitment in the context of theories of spacetime, and the second is on scientific realism. The first part begins with a look at how the substantivalist/ relationist debate over the ontological status of spacetime has been influenced by a particular mathematical formalism, that of tensor analysis on differential manifolds (TADM). This formalism has motivated the substantivalist position known as manifold substantivalism. Chapter 1 focuses on the hole argument which maintains that manifold substantivalism is incompatible with determinism. I claim that the realist motivations underlying manifold substantivalism can be upheld, and the hole argument avoided, by adopting structural realism with respect to spacetime. In this context, this is the claim that it is the structure that spacetime points enter into that warrants belief and not the points themselves. In Chapter 2, an elimination principle is defined by means of which a distinction can be made between surplus structure and essential structure with respect to formulations of a theory in two distinct mathematical formulations and some prior ontological commitments. This principle is then used to demonstrate that manifold points may be considered surplus structure in the formulation of field theories. This suggests that, if we are disposed to read field theories literally, then, at most, it should be the essential structure common to all alternative formulations of such theories that should be taken literally. I also investigate how the adoption of alternative formalisms informs other issues in the philosophy of spacetime. Chapter 3 offers a realist position which takes a semantic moral from the preceding investigation and an epistemic moral from work done on reliability. The semantic moral advises us to read only the essential structure of our theories literally. The epistemic moral shows us that such structure is robust under theory change, given an adequate reliabilist notion of epistemic warrant. I call the realist position that subscribes to these morals structural realism and attempt to demonstrate that it is immune to the semantic and epistemic versions of the underdetermination argument posed by the anti-realist.

Carl Craver (1998)

• Washington University in St. Louis (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Dissertation: Neural Mechanisms: On the Structure, Function, and Development of Theories in Neurobiology

Reference to mechanisms is virtually ubiquitous in science and its philosophy. Yet, the concept of a mechanism remains largely unanalyzed; So too for its possible applications in thinking about scientific explanation, experimental practice, and theory structure. This dissertation investigates these issues in the context of contemporary neurobiology. The theories of neurobiology are hierarchically organized descriptions of mechanisms that explain functions. Mechanisms are the coordinated activities of entities by virtue of which that function is performed. Since the activities composing mechanisms are often susceptible to mechanical redescription themselves, theories in neurobiology have a characteristic hierarchical structure. The activities of entities at one level are the sub-activities of those at a higher level. This hierarchy reveals a fundamental symmetry of functional and mechanical descriptions. Functions are privileged activities of entities; they are privileged because they constitute a stage in some higher-level (+1) mechanism. The privileged activities of entities, in turn, are explained by detailing the stages of activity in the lower-level ($-$1) mechanism. Functional and mechanical descriptions are different tools for situating activities, properties, and entities into a hierarchy of activities. They are not competing kinds of description. Experimental techniques for testing such descriptions reflect this symmetry. Philosophical discussions of inter-level explanatory relationships have traditionally been framed by reference to inter-theoretic reduction models. The representational strictures of first order predicate calculus and the epistemological strictures logical empiricism combine in this reduction model to focus attention upon issues of identity and deriveability; these are entirely peripheral to the explanatory aims of mechanical ($-$1) explanation. Mechanical explanation is causal. Derivational models of explanation do not adequately reflect the importance of activities in rendering phenomena intelligible. Activities are kinds of change. 'Bonding,' 'diffusing,' 'transcribing,' 'opening,' and 'attracting' all describe different kinds of transformation. Salmon's modified process theory (1998) is helpful in understanding the role of entities and properties in causal interactions; but it ultimately makes no room for kinds of change in the explanatory cupboard. We make change intelligible by identifying and characterizing its different kinds and relating these to activities that are taken to be fundamental for a science at a time.

Heather Douglas (1998)

• Philosophy of Science, Environmental Philosophy, Science and Public Policy
• Dissertation: The Use of Science in Policy-Making: A Study of Values in Dioxin Science

The risk regulation process has been traditionally conceived as having two components: a consultation of the experts concerning the magnitude of risk (risk assessment) and a negotiated decision on whether and how to reduce that risk (risk management). The first component is generally thought to be free of the contentious value judgments that often characterize the second component. In examining the recent controversy over dioxin regulation, I argue that the first component is not value-free. I review three areas of science important to dioxin regulation: epidemiological studies, laboratory animal studies, and biochemical studies. I show how problems of interpretation arise for each area of science that prevent a clear-cut answer to the question: what dose of dioxins is safe for humans? Because of significant uncertainties in how to interpret these studies, there is significant risk that one will err in the interpretation. In order to judge what risk of error to accept, one needs to consider and weigh the consequences of one's judgments, whether epistemic or non-epistemic. Weighing non-epistemic consequences requires the use of non-epistemic values. Thus, non-epistemic values, or the kind that are important in risk management, have an important and legitimate role to play in the judgments required to perform and interpret the dioxin studies. The risk assessment component of the risk regulation process (or any similar consultation of the scientific experts) cannot be claimed to be value-free and the process must be altered to accommodate a value-laden science.

Mark Holowchak (1998)

• Rider University (Adjunct Assistant Professor)
• Ancient Philosophy, Philosophy of Sport
• Dissertation: The Problem of Differentiation and the Science of Dreams in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

Dreams played a vital role in Graeco-Roman antiquity at all levels of society. Interpreters of prophetic dreams thrived at marketplaces and at religious festivals. Physicians used dreams to facilitate diagnosis. Philosophers talked of dreams revealing ne's moral character and emotional dispositions. Many who studied dreams developed rich and elaborate accounts of the various sorts of dreams and their formation. All of this bespeaks a science of dreams in antiquity. Did these ancients, by a thorough examination of the content of dreams and their attendant circumstances, develop criteria for distinguishing the kinds or functions of dreams and, if so, were these criteria empirically reliable? I attempt to answer these questions chiefly through an evaluation of ancient Graeco-Roman 'oneirology' (the science of dreams) in the works of eight different Graeco-Roman oneirologists, especially philosophers and natural scientists, from Homer to Synesius. First, I argue that Homer's famous reference to two gates of dreams led subsequent thinkers to believe in prophetic and nonprophetic dreams. Additionally, the two gates engendered a practical approach to dreams that had a lasting impact on Graeco-Roman antiquity, especially through interpreters of prophetic dreams. Yet, as interpreters of dreams prospered, critics challenged the validity of their art. Ultimately, I argue that the interpreters' responses to their critics were unavailing. Moreover, the emergence of the belief in an agentive soul around the fifth century B.C. paved the way for psychophysiological accounts of dreams. Philosophers and physicians thereafter begin to explore nonprophetic meanings of dreams--like moral, psychological, or somatic meanings. Some philosophers rejected the notion of prophecy through dreams altogether, while many essayed to ground prophetic dreams by giving them psychophysiological explanations like other dreams. In general, those oneirologists who tried to give all dreams a psychophysiological explanation bypassed the problem of differentiating dreams by positing, strictly speaking, only one kind of dream—though committing themselves to a plurality of functions for them. In summary, I argue that the ancient Graeco-Roman oneirology—as a thorough admixture of the practical, Homeric approach to dreams and the psychogenetic approach—was an inseparable blend of literary fancy and respectable science.

David Sandborg (1998)

• Philosophy of Mathematics, Explanation
• Dissertation: Explanation in Mathematical Practice

Philosophers have paid little attention to mathematical explanations (Mark Steiner and Philip Kitcher are notable exceptions). I present a variety of examples of mathematical explanation and examine two cases in detail. I argue that mathematical explanations have important implications for the philosophy of mathematics and of science. The first case study compares many proofs of Pick's theorem, a simple geometrical result. Though a simple proof surfaces to establish the result, some of the proofs explain the result better than others. The second case study comes from George Polya's Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning . He gives a proof that, while entirely satisfactory in establishing its conclusion, is insufficiently explanatory. To provide a better explanation, he supplements the proof with additional exposition. These case studies illustrate at least two distinct explanatory virtues, and suggest there may be more. First, an explanatory improvement occurs when a sense of 'arbitrariness' is reduced in the proofs. Proofs more explanatory in this way place greater restrictions on the steps that can be used to reach the conclusion. Second, explanatoriness is judged by directness of representation. More explanatory proofs allow one to ascribe geometric meaning to the terms of Pick's formula as they arise. I trace the lack of attention to mathematical explanations to an implicit assumption, justificationism, that only justificational aspects of mathematical reasoning are epistemically important. I propose an anti-justificationist epistemic position, the epistemic virtues view, which holds that justificational virtues, while important, are not the only ones of philosophical interest in mathematics. Indeed, explanatory benefits are rarely justificational. I show how the epistemic virtues view and the recognition of mathematical explanation can shed new light on philosophical debates. Mathematical explanations have consequences for philosophy of science as well. I show that mathematical explanations provide serious challenges to any theory, such as Bas van Fraassen's, that considers explanations to be fundamentally answers to why-questions. I urge a closer interaction between philosophy of mathematics and philosophy of science; both will be needed for a fuller understanding of mathematical explanation.

Marta Spranzi-Zuber (1998)

• Université de Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines
• Ancient and Early Modern Philosophy
• Dissertation: The tradition of Aristotle's Topics and Galileo's Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems : Dialectic, dialogue, and the demonstration of the Earth's motion

In this work I show that Galileo Galilei provided a "dialectical demonstration" of the Earth's motion in the Dialogue concerning the two chief world systems, in the sense outlined in Aristotle's Topics . In order to understand what this demonstration consists of, I reconstructed the tradition of dialectic from Aristotle to the Renaissance, analyzing its developments with Cicero, Boethius, the Middle Ages up to the 16th century. As far as Renaissance developments are concerned, I singled out three domains where the tradition of Aristotle's Topics was particularly important: "pure" Aristotelianism, the creation of a new dialectic modelled on rhetoric, and finally the theories of the dialogue form. In each case I focused on a particular work which is not only interesting in its own right, but also represents well one of these developments: Agostino Nifo's commentary to Aristotle's Topics , Rudolph Agricola's De inventione dialectica , and Carlo Sigonio's De dialogo liber , respectively. As far as Galileo is concerned, I focused on the first Day of the Dialogue where Galileo proves that the Earth is a planet, as an example of dialectical strategy embodied in a literary dialogue. Galileo's dialectical demonstration of the Earth's motion can be identified neither with rhetorical persuasion nor with scientific (empirical) demonstration. Rather, it is a strategy of inquiry and proof which is crucially dependent on an exchange between two disputants through a question and answer format. A dialectical demonstration does not create consensus on a given thesis, nor does it demonstrate it conclusively, but yields corroborated and justified knowledge, albeit provisional and contextual, namely open to revision, and dependent upon the reasoned assent of a qualified opponent.

Andrea Woody (1998)

• University of Washington (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Science, History of Science, and Feminist Perspectives within Philosophy
• Dissertation: Early twentieth century theories of chemical bonding: Explanation, representation, and theory development

This dissertation examines how we may meaningfully attribute explanatoriness to theoretical structures and in turn, how such attributions can, and should, influence theory assessment generally. In this context, I argue against 'inference to the best explanation' accounts of explanatory power as well as the deflationary 'answers to why questions' proposal of van Fraassen. Though my analysis emphases the role of unification in explanation, I demonstrate ways in which Kitcher's particular account is insufficient. The suggested alternative takes explanatory power to be a measure of theory intelligibility; thus, its value resides in making theories easy to probe, communicate, and ultimately modify. An underlying goal of the discussion is to demonstrate, even for a small set of examples, that not all components of rational assessment distill down, in one way or another, to evaluations of a theory's empirical adequacy. Instead, the merits of explanatory structures are argued to be forward-looking, meaning that they hold the potential to contribute significantly to theory development either by providing directives for theoretical modification, perhaps indirectly by guiding empirical investigation, or by facilitating various means of inferential error control. The dissertation's central case study concerns the development of twentieth century quantum mechanical theories of the chemical bond, provocative territory because of the diversity of models and representations developed for incorporating a computationally challenging, and potentially intractable, fundamental theory into pre-existing chemical theory and practice. Explicit mathematical techniques as well as various graphical, schematic, and diagrammatic models are examined in some detail. Ultimately these theoretical structures serve as the landscape for exploring, in a preliminary fashion, the influence of representational format on inferential capacities generally. Although the connection between representation and explanation is seldom emphasized, this dissertation offers evidence of the high cost of such neglect.

Rachel Ankeny (1997)

• The University of Adelaide (Associate Dean(Research) and Deputy Executive Dean, Faculty of Arts)
• [email protected]
• History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences; Bioethics
• Dissertation: The conqueror worm: An historical and philosophical examination of the use of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans as a model organism

This study focuses on the concept of a "model organism" in the biomedical sciences through an historical and philosophical exploration of research with the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans . I examine the conceptualization of a model organism in the case of the choice and early use of C. elegans in 1960s, showing that a rich context existed within which the organism was selected as the focus for a fledging research program in molecular biology. I argue that the choice of C. elegans was obvious rather than highly inventive within this context, and that the success of the "worm project" depends not only on organismal choice but on the conceptual and institutional frameworks within which the project was pursued.

Jonathan Simon (1997)

• Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1
• History of Chemistry
• Dissertation: The alchemy of identity: Pharmacy and the chemical revolution, 1777-1809

This dissertation reassesses the chemical revolution that occurred in eighteenth-century France from the pharmacists' perspective. I use French pharmacy to place the event in historical context, understanding this revolution as constituted by more than simply a change in theory. The consolidation of a new scientific community of chemists, professing an importantly changed science of chemistry, is elucidated by examining the changing relationship between the communities of pharmacists and chemists across the eighteenth century. This entails an understanding of the chemical revolution that takes into account social and institutional transformations as well as theoretical change, and hence incorporates the reforms brought about during and after the French Revolution. First, I examine the social rise of philosophical chemistry as a scientific pursuit increasingly independent of its practical applications, including pharmacy, and then relate this to the theoretical change brought about by Lavoisier and his oxygenic system of chemistry. Then, I consider the institutional reforms that placed Lavoisier's chemistry in French higher education. During the 17th century, chemistry was intimately entwined with pharmacy, and chemical manipulations were primarily intended to enhance the medicinal properties of a substance. An independent philosophical chemistry gained ground during the 18th century, and this development culminated in the work of Lavoisier who cast pharmacy out of his chemistry altogether. Fourcroy, one of Lavoisier's disciples, brought the new chemistry to the pharmacists in both his textbooks and his legislation. Under Napoleon, Fourcroy instituted a new system of education for pharmacists that placed a premium on formal scientific education. Fourcroy's successors, Vauquelin and Bouillon-Lagrange, taught the new chemistry to the elite pharmacists in the School of Pharmacy in Paris. These pharmacists also developed new analytical techniques that combined the aims of the new chemistry with traditional pharmaceutical extractive practices. The scientific pharmacist (for example, Pelletier and Caventou) was created, who, although a respected member of the community of pharmacists, helped to define the new chemistry precisely by not being a true chemist.

Aristidis Arageorgis (1996)

• National Technical University of Athens (Assistant Professor)
• Philosophy of Quantum Field Theory
• Dissertation: Fields, Particles, and Curvature: Foundation and Philosophical Aspects of Quantum Field Theory in Curved Spacetime

The physical, mathematical, and philosophical foundations of the quantum theory of free Bose fields in fixed general relativistic spacetimes are examined. It is argued that the theory is logically and mathematically consistent whereas semiclassical prescriptions for incorporating the back-reaction of the quantum field on the geometry lead to inconsistencies. Still, the relations and heuristic value of the semiclassical approach to canonical and covariant schemes of quantum gravity-plus-matter are assessed. Both conventional and rigorous formulations of the theory and of its principal predictions, cosmological particle creation and horizon radiation, are expounded and compared. Special attention is devoted to spacetime properties needed for the existence or uniqueness of the relevant theoretical elements (algebra of observables, Hilbert space representation(s), renormalization of the stress tensor). The emergence of unitarily inequivalent representations in a single dynamical context is used as motivation for the introduction of the abstract $/rm C/sp[/*]$-algebraic axiomatic formalism. The operationalist and conventionalist claims of the original abstract algebraic program are criticized in favor of its tempered outgrowth, local quantum physics. The interpretation of the theory as a wave mechanics of classical field configurations, deriving from the Schrodinger representations of the abstract algebra, is discussed and is found superior, at least on the level of analogy, to particle or harmonic oscillator interpretations. Further, it is argued that the various detector results and the Fulling nonuniqueness problem do not undermine the particle concept in the ways commonly claimed. In particular, arguments are offered against the attribution of particle status to the Rindler quanta, against the physical realizability of the Rindler vacuum, and against the more general notion of observer-dependence as to the definition of 'particle' or 'vacuum'. However, the question of the ontological status of particles is raised in terms of the consistency of quantum field theory with non-reductive realism about particles, the latter being conceived as entities exhibiting attributes of discreteness and localizability. Two arguments against non-reductive realism about particles, one from axiomatic algebraic local quantum theory in Minkowski spacetime and one from quantum field theory in curved spacetime, are developed.

Keith Parsons (1996)

• University of Houston, Clear Lake (Professor)
• Paleontology, Realism-Constructivism
• Dissertation: Wrongheaded science? Rationality, constructivism, and dinosaurs

Constructivism is the claim that the "facts" of science are "constructs" created by scientific communities in accordance with the linguistic and social practices of that community. In other words, constructivists argue that scientific truth is nothing more than what scientific communities agree upon. Further, they hold that such agreement is reached through a process of negotiation in which "nonscientific" factors, e.g. appeals to vested social interests, intimidation, etc., play a more important role than traditionally "rationa"' or "scientific" considerations. This dissertation examines and evaluates the arguments of three major constructivists: Bruno Latour, Steve Woolgar, and Harry Collins. The first three chapters are extended case studies of episodes in the history of dinosaur paleontology. The first episodes examined are two controversies that arose over the early reconstructions of sauropods. The more important dispute involved the decision by the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to mount a head on their Apatosaurus specimen which, after 45 years, it came to regard as the wrong head. The second case study involves the controversy over Robert Bakker's dinosaur endothermy hypothesis. Finally, I examine David Raup's role in the debate over the Cretaceous/Tertiary extinctions. In particular, I evaluate certain Kuhnian themes about theory choice by examining Raup's 'conversion' to a new hypothesis. In the last three chapters I critically examine constructivist claims in the light of the case studies. The thesis of Latour and Woolgar's Laboratory Life is clarified; I argue that each author has a somewhat different interpretation of that thesis. Both interpretations are criticized. The constructivist arguments of Harry Collins' Changing Order are also examined and rejected. I conclude that a constructivist view of science is not preferable to a more traditionally rationalist account. A concluding meditation reflects on the role of the history of science in motivating constructivist positions.

Ofer Gal (1996)

• University of Sydney (Associate Professor)
• Early Modern History and Philosophy of Science
• Dissertation: Producing knowledge: Robert Hooke

This work is an argument for the notion of knowledge production. It is an attempt at an epistemological and historiographic position which treats all facets and modes of knowledge as products of human practices, a position developed and demonstrated through a reconstruction of two defining episodes in the scientific career of Robert Hooke (1635-1703): the composition of his Programme for explaining planetary orbits as inertial motion bent by centripetal force, and his development of the spring law in relation to his invention of the spring watch. The revival of interest in the history of experimental and technological knowledge has accorded Hooke much more attention than before. However, dependent on the conception of knowledge as a representation of reality, this scholarship is bound to the categories of influence and competition, and concentrates mainly on Hooke's numerous passionate exchanges with Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens. I favourably explore the neo-pragmatist criticism of representation epistemology in the writing of Richard Rorty and Ian Hacking. This criticism exposes the conventional portrayal of Hooke as 'a mechanic of genius, rather than a scientist' (Hall) as a reification of the social hierarchy between Hooke's Royal Society employers and his artisan-experimenters employees. However, Rorty and Hacking's efforts to do away with the image of the human knower as an enclosed realm of 'ideas' have not been completed. Undertaking this unfinished philosophical task, my main strategy is to erase the false gap between knowledge which is clearly produced—practical, technological and experimental, 'know how', and knowledge which we still think of as representation—theoretical 'knowing that'. I present Hooke, Newton and Huygens as craftsmen, who, employing various resources, labor to manufacture material and theoretical artifacts. Eschewing the category of independent facts awaiting discovery, I attempt to compare practices and techniques rather than to adjudicate priority claims, replacing ideas which 'develop', 'inspire', and 'influence', with tools and skills which are borrowed, appropriated and modified for new uses. This approach enables tracing Hooke's creation of his Programme from his microscopy, and reconstructing his use of springs to structure a theory of matter. With his unique combination of technical and speculative talents Hooke comes to personify the relations between the theoretical-linguistic and the experimental-technological in their full complexity.

David Rudge (1996)

• Western Michigan University (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• The Role of History and Philosophy of Science for the Teaching and Learning of Science
• Dissertation: A philosophical analysis of the role of selection experiments in evolutionary biology

My dissertation philosophically analyzes experiments in evolutionary biology, an area of science where experimental approaches have tended to supplement, rather than supercede more traditional approaches, such as field observations. I conduct the analysis on the basis of three case studies of famous episodes in the history of selection experiments: H. B. D. Kettlewell's investigations of industrial melanism in the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia; two of Th. Dobzhansky's studies of adaptive radiation in the fruit fly, Drosophila pseudoobscura ; and M. Wade's studies of group selection in the flour beetle, Tribolium castaneum . The case studies analyze the arguments and evidence these investigators used to identify the respective roles of experiments and other forms of inquiry in their investigations. I discuss three philosophical issues. First, the analysis considers whether these selection experiments fit models of experimentation developed in the context of micro-and high energy physics by Allan Franklin (1986, 1990) and Peter Galison (1987). My analysis documents that the methods used in the case studies can be accommodated on both Franklin and Galison's views. I conclude the case studies do not support claims regarding the relative autonomy of biology. Second, the analysis documents a number of important roles for life history data acquired by strictly observational means in the process of experimentation, from identification of research problems and development of experimental designs to interpretation of results. Divorced from this context experiments in biology make no sense. Thus, in principle, experimental approaches cannot replace more traditional methods. Third, the analysis examines a superficial tension between the use of experiments, which I characterize by the presence of artificial intervention, and the stated goal of most investigations in evolutionary biology, that of understanding how systems behave in the absence of intervention. Experiments involve trade-offs between the control one has over the circumstances of the study and how informative the study is with regard to questions of interest to biologists regarding specific, actual systems in nature. Experimental simulations of natural phenomena in other historical sciences (e.g. meteorology) involve similar trade-offs, but there are reasons for believing this tension is more prominent in biology.

Madeline Muntersbjorn (1996)

• University of Toledo (Associate Professor)
• [email protected]
• History and Philosophy of Mathematics, Calculus in the Seventeenth Century
• Dissertation: Algebraic Reasoning and Representation in Seventeenth Century Mathematics: Fermat and the Treatise on Quadrature C. 1657

Contemporary philosophers of mathematics commonly assume that mathematical reasoning is representation neutral, or that changes from one notational system to another do not reflect corresponding changes in mathematical reasoning. Historians of mathematics commonly hypothesize that the incorporation of algebraic representations into geometrical pursuits contributed to the problem-solving generality of seventeenth-century mathematical techniques and to the invention of the infinitesimal calculus. In order to critically evaluate the relative merits of these positions, the dissertation analyzes representational techniques employed by Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665) in the development of seventeenth-century quadrature methods. The detailed case study of Fermat's Treatise on Quadrature c. 1657 illustrates the manner in which his representational strategy contributes to the generality of his quadrature methods. The dissertation concludes that, although 17th-century mathematicians' use of algebraic representations cannot simpliciter explain the generality of mathematical techniques developed during that time, Fermat's use of a variety of representational means—figures, discursive text, equations, and so on—can explain the generality of his methods. Thus, the dissertation lays the foundation for a larger argument against the common philosophical assumption of representation neutrality and for the thesis that developing a good representational strategy is a philosophically significant feature of mathematical reasoning.

Michel Janssen (1995)

• [email protected]
• Philosophy of Physics, History of Relativity Theory
• Dissertation: A comparison between Lorentz's ether theory and special relativity in the light of the experiments of Trouton and Noble

In Part One of this dissertation, I analyze various accounts of two etherdrift experiments, the Trouton-Noble experiment and an earlier experiment by Trouton. Both aimed at detecting etherdrift with the help of a condenser in a torsion balance. I argue that the difficulties ether-theorists Lorentz and Larmor had in accounting for the negative results of these experiments stem from the fact that they did not (properly) take into account that, if we charge a moving condenser, we not only change its energy, but also its momentum and its mass. I establish two additional results. (1) The Trouton experiment can be seen as a physical realization of a thought experiment used by Einstein to argue for the inertia of energy. (2) Closely following Rohrlich, I develop an alternative to Laue's canonical relativistic account of the Trouton-Noble experiment to show that the turning couple Trouton and Noble were looking for is a purely kinematical effect in special relativity. I call this effect the Laue effect.