Mediating between Past and Present:

Domski, Mary

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199857142.003.0014

Cited by 2 publications

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“…Historical scholarship can correct this misappropriation. Following Wilson as an explicit influence, Domski (2013) worries that appropriativists distort. Embracing the contextualist claim that philosophical practice is contextually defined, and the standards for doing philosophy are supplied by the historical situation, she argues that one role for the historian is to identify how past philosophy is different.…”

Section: A Selective Survey Of the Recent Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One goal for historical scholarship, then, is to gain an enhanced perspective on the questions and concerns that define contemporary philosophy. Domski's (2013, p. 284) aim is that “[b]y looking at Descartes's and Newton's competing arguments for why it is appropriate to mathematize nature in order to understand nature, [she hopes] to show that structural realists could benefit from addressing the extent to which the epistemic and the ontological determine the development of our physical theories.” Reflecting on her methodology of ‘contextualism’, approaching historical figures on their own terms, Domski (2013, pp. 299–300) writes that she is “not claiming that Descartes and Newton provide us the right (or only) answers to questions about what our mathematically formulated physical theories represent about nature.…”

Section: A Selective Survey Of the Recent Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But Domski recognizes the attenuated role of the history of philosophy on her view. Of this role, Domski (2013, pp. 299–300) writes:…”

Section: A Selective Survey Of the Recent Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Philosophy's past: Cognitive values and the history of philosophy

Corkum

2023

Philos Phenomenol Research

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Recent authors hold that the role of historical scholarship within contemporary philosophical practice is to question current assumptions, to expose vestiges or to calibrate intuitions. On these views, historical scholarship is dispensable, since these roles can be achieved by nonhistorical methods. And the value of historical scholarship is contingent, since the need for the role depends on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions. In this paper I draw an analogy between scientific and philosophical practice, in order to float one role for historical scholarship that is nonreplicable and noncontingent. It has long been acknowledged that cognitive values – features of theories that facilitate understanding, such as ontological parsimony, ideological simplicity, computational ease and fecundity – play a key role within science. The role of some of these values within philosophy also has received attention but left understudied are the values of novelty and conservativeness. These values influence theory choice, the selection of methodology, the setting of research agenda, and the presentation of results; and are best assessed with a historically informed evaluation. This role for historical scholarship is not replicable by nonhistorical methods, and is not contingent on the presence of questionable assumptions, vestiges or comparable intuitions.

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Section: A Selective Survey Of the Recent Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A Selective Survey Of the Recent Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Philosophy's past: Cognitive values and the history of philosophy

Corkum

2023

Philos Phenomenol Research

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From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence

Psillos¹

2021

Contemporary Scientific Realism

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This chapter looks into the transition from the Cartesian natural philosophy to the Newtonian one, and then to the Einsteinian science, making the following key point: though the shift from Descartes’s theory to Newton’s amounted to a wholesale rejection of Descartes’s theory, in the second shift, a great deal was retained; Newton’s theory of universal gravitation gave rise to a research program that informed and constrained Einstein’s theory. Newton’s theory was a lot more supported by the evidence than Descartes’s and this made it imperative for the successor theory to accommodate within it as much as possible of Newton’s theory: evidence for Newton’s theory became evidence for Einstein’s. This double case study motivates a rebranding of the “divide et impera” strategy against the pessimistic induction introduced in the book Scientific Realism, which shifts attention from the (crude) evidence of the history of science to the (refined) history of evidence for scientific theories.

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Mediating between Past and Present:

Cited by 2 publications

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Philosophy's past: Cognitive values and the history of philosophy

Philosophy's past: Cognitive values and the history of philosophy

From the Evidence of History to the History of Evidence

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