Science as a Form of Life and Cross-disciplinarity: Mariano Artigas and Charles S. Peirce

According to Charles S. Peirce and to Mariano Artigas, science is the collective and cooperative activity of all those whose lives are animated by the desire to discover the truth. The particular sciences are branches of a common tree. The unity of science is not achieved by the reduction of the special sciences to more basic ones: the new name for the unity of the sciences is cross-disciplinarity. This is not a union of the sciences themselves, but rather the unity and dialogue of scientists, the real inquirers into the truth. In the light of Peirce’s and Artigas’s teachings, we can see that philosophers are in just the right place to call for this unity of sciences. This call should not be seen as promoting a return to the old scientism, but seeks a deep dialogue between the particular sciences and philosophy in order to deal with the presuppositions of the scientific enterprise. The key to the cross-disciplinarity of knowledge is not revolution, but rather shared efforts in a unique mixture of continuity and fallibilism, of affection and reason, of the attempt to understand others’ disciplines as well as our own

Usage of scientific and pedagogical I. Eremenko’s heritage in the preparation of contemporary correctional educators and psychologists

В статті розкривається внесок видатного вітчизняного вченого доктора педагогічних наук, професора І. Г. Єременка в розвиток спеціальної педагогіки і психології. Акцентується увага на ролі вченого в підготовку педагогів для спеціальних закладів освіти. Підкреслюється роль науково-педагогічного доробку вченого для сучасного етапу розвитку вищої спеціальної педагогічної освіти.The article deals with the contribution of the outstanding Russian scientist doctor of pedagogical sciences, Professor I. Eremenko to the development of special education and psychology. The attention is focused on the role of scientists in the preparation of teachers for special education institutions. The role of scientific and pedagogical heritage of the scientist to the modern stage of development of higher special teacher education is emphasized. In determining the nature of correctional pedagogy methodology as any other science, according to I.G. Eremenko is important to consider that the methodological basis of science contains three closely linked components. This is, firstly, the general philosophical framework that defines the fundamental approaches to the study of reality, general principles and methods to study and explanation of the phenomena studied. The second component of defectology as a science is a system of concepts, principles, norms of scientific activity, reflecting the patterns of the sphere of knowledge. This is a specific implementation of the general philosophical principles concerning the laws of science. The third component of the methodology of special education is a set of specific methods of research techniques and methods. All these components are inseparable unity in which the leading role played by the philosophical basis. As a conclusion, we can say that the modern school teachers of higher mental retardation have the unique opportunity to train correctional educators and psychologists in the best traditions of domestic and world of special education, which were laid by Ivan Gavrilovich Eremenko and other luminaries of psychological and educational thought

Should Explanations Omit the Details?

There is a widely shared belief that the higher level sciences can provide better explanations than lower level sciences. But there is little agreement about exactly why this is so. It is often suggested that higher level explanations are better because they omit details. I will argue instead that the preference for higher level explanations is just a special case of our general preference for informative, logically strong, beliefs. I argue that our preference for informative beliefs entirely accounts for why higher level explanations are sometimes better – and sometimes worse – than lower level explanations. The result is a step in the direction of the unity of science hypothesis

Do organisms have an ontological status?

The category of ‘organism’ has an ambiguous status: is it scientific or is it philosophical? Or, if one looks at it from within the relatively recent field or sub-field of philosophy of biology, is it a central, or at least legitimate category therein, or should it be dispensed with? In any case, it has long served as a kind of scientific “bolstering” for a philosophical train of argument which seeks to refute the “mechanistic” or “reductionist” trend, which has been perceived as dominant since the 17th century, whether in the case of Stahlian animism, Leibnizian monadology, the neo-vitalism of Hans Driesch, or, lastly, of the “phenomenology of organic life” in the 20th century, with authors such as Kurt Goldstein, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Georges Canguilhem. In this paper I try to reconstruct some of the main interpretive ‘stages’ or ‘layers’ of the concept of organism in order to critically evaluate it. How might ‘organism’ be a useful concept if one rules out the excesses of ‘organismic’ biology and metaphysics? Varieties of instrumentalism and what I call the ‘projective’ concept of organism are appealing, but perhaps ultimately unsatisfying

Reduction

Reduction and reductionism have been central philosophical topics in analytic philosophy of science for more than six decades. Together they encompass a diversity of issues from metaphysics and epistemology. This article provides an introduction to the topic that illuminates how contemporary epistemological discussions took their shape historically and limns the contours of concrete cases of reduction in specific natural sciences. The unity of science and the impulse to accomplish compositional reduction in accord with a layer-cake vision of the sciences, the seminal contributions of Ernest Nagel on theory reduction and how they strongly conditioned subsequent philosophical discussions, and the detailed issues pertaining to different accounts of reduction that arise in both physical and biological science (e.g., limit-case and part-whole reduction in physics, the difference-making principle in genetics, and mechanisms in molecular biology) are explored. The conclusion argues that the epistemological heterogeneity and patchwork organization of the natural sciences encourages a pluralist stance about reduction

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Mechanistic Levels, Reduction, and Emergence

We sketch the mechanistic approach to levels, contrast it with other senses of “level,” and explore some of its metaphysical implications. This perspective allows us to articulate what it means for things to be at different levels, to distinguish mechanistic levels from realization relations, and to describe the structure of multilevel explanations, the evidence by which they are evaluated, and the scientific unity that results from them. This approach is not intended to solve all metaphysical problems surrounding physicalism. Yet it provides a framework for thinking about how the macroscopic phenomena of our world are or might be related to its most fundamental entities and activities

The Ontological Backlash: why did mainstream analytic philosophy lose interest in the philosophy of history?

This paper seeks to explain why mainstream analytic philosophy lost interest in the philosophy of history. It suggests that the reasons why the philosophy of history no longer commands the attention of mainstream analytical philosophy may be explained by the success of an ontological backlash against the linguistic turn and a view of philosophy as a form of conceptual analysis. In brief I argue that in the 1950s and 1960s the philosophy of history attracted the interest of mainstream analytical philosophers because the defence of the autonomy of historical explanation championed by the likes of Collingwood, Dray, Melden, Winch, Von Wright and others was in tune with the predominant conception of philosophy as a conceptual enterprise concerned primarily with clarifying different explanatory practices. As this conception of philosophy as an essentially conceptual enterprise became recessive, the purely methodological non-reductivism advocated by defenders of the autonomy of history was accused of ontological escapism and the discussion concerning the autonomy of psychological explanations became the province of the philosophy of mind and action

Revisiting Galison’s ‘Aufbau/Bauhaus’ in light of Neurath’s philosophical projects

Historically, the Vienna Circle and the Dessau Bauhaus were related, with members of each group familiar with the ideas of the other. Peter Galison argues that their projects are related as well, through shared political views and methodological approach. The two main figures that connect the Vienna Circle to the Bauhaus—and the figures upon which Galison focuses—are Rudolf Carnap and Otto Neurath. Yet the connections that Galison develops do not properly capture the common themes between the Bauhaus and Neurath’s philosophical projects. We demonstrate this by considering Neurath’s philosophical commitments. We suggest different connections between Neurath’s projects and the Bauhaus, connections that are both substantive and philosophically interesting