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Peter Caws

The George Washington University, Department of Philosophy, Faculty Member

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Peter Caws was University Professor of Philosophy (Emeritus) at the George Washington University. His main interests were the philosophy of science (especially the relations between the natural and human sciences), ethics and political philosophy, and philosophical issues in psychoanalysis.
Supervisors: He was a doctoral student at Yale from 1953 to 1956. The sponsor of his dissertation was Henry Margenau.

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Gunnar Skirbekk

University of Bergen

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Università degli Studi di Firenze (University of Florence)

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Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul

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Papers by Peter Caws

The Structure of Self-Reference

Philosophes critiques d'eux-mêmes- Philosophers on Their Own Work- Philosophische Selbstbetrachtungen Philosophers on Their Own Work volume 2, 1976

WHAT HAPPENED IN PARIS

The Partisan Review, 1968

The annual parade is over, rather thinly covered on television because the journalists of the O.R... more The annual parade is over, rather thinly covered on television because the journalists of the O.R.T.F. have not yet returned to work. Their strike, the last remnant of the May revolution, ended a few days ago without the assurances of freedom in reporting for which they had held out. 1 After the final performance of a run of Beckett's Endgame at a Montmartre theater last night the principal actor held a collection box for the journalists. The sensation of an ending has been strong in Paris in the last weeks; as the police have occupied the few remaining buildings still held by students (or, in the language of the right, as the students have evacuated them) and the cleaning men with their grattoirs have taken down all the posters, only a few slogans in spray paint here and there, and some asphalt patches in the street around the Sorbonne where the pavés were torn up and used for ammunition, give outward evidence of anything's having happened at all. 2 For the crowd on the Champs Elysées this morning it was all finished; France was back to normal, and there as usual taking the salute was De Gaulle. "De Gaulle-mon Dieu, faites qu'il crève!" (De Gaulleoh God, make him drop dead!) This agonized appeal could be seen scrawled up at the Odéon, and it must have reflected the feelings of many participants in the demonstrations. For to the youth of France De Gaulle is what Johnson is (or was) to the youth of America, the infuriating symbol of a materialistic and chauvinistic society with enormous power but without a soul, a society so closed upon itself that only violence can hope to make any significant change in it. The remarkable thing about the May revolution is that it did in fact come within a hair's breadth of overthrowing the society. After De Gaulle's massive victory at the polls this is hard to remember, but it is by no means the most bizarre of the truths about this extraordinary episode. Two others, equally implausible on their face but equally borne out by the evidence, are that the whole thing was an indirect product of the war in Vietnam, and that France was saved for democracy at the very brink of collapse by the Communist Party. The conjunction of these last two points has a kind of sickening irony in the light of America's postwar foreign policy, but their lesson is too obvious for me to have to drive it home here. Having come so close to success, however, the revolutionary movement may have spoiled its chances of pulling off anything similar again for a long time. In a way its hand was forced; the student activists, who did not expect at this stage to have much impact outside the university, had intended to wait until the fall for their big manifestation. That events would grow to such proportions in May was unforeseen: so was the general strike. Some left-wing theorists, encouraged by the magnitude of the disturbance, are now developing a new theory of revolution for advanced industrial societies, societies in which classical revolutionary theory concluded that success was impossible (whence the preference of the Communists in France for parliamentary action). According to the new theory, the initiative will be taken by students, the one group not successfully integrated into the mechanism of society and not yet having a collective stake in it; their lead will be followed by the workers in a general strike; then, however, instead of sitting stubbornly in the factories, the workers will start the processes of production and distribution up again under the direction of their own revolutionary committees, with which the public will be forced to deal for the necessities of life; meanwhile the old government can do what it likes: it will eventually be seen to be a nonfunctioning appendage (the real business being conducted directly between the workers and the people) and will die a natural death. This theory is beautiful but absurd. It would not have been absurd if it had been

THE HUMANITIES IN A TECHNOLOGICAL AGE

Societal Issues, Scientific Viewpoints, 1987

I wish to dedicate these remarks to the memory of a man who lived at the Chinese Imperial Court e... more I wish to dedicate these remarks to the memory of a man who lived at the Chinese Imperial Court eighteen hundred and eighty years ago. His name was Ts'ai Lun. If it is not a familiar name, that may be explained in the words of d'Alembert, from the "Preliminary Discourse" to Diderot's Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades by a society of men of letters. D'Alembert says there: The contempt in which the mechanical arts are held seems to have affected to some degree even their inventors. The names of these benefactors of humankind are almost all unknown, whereas the history of its destroyers, that is to say, of the conquerors, is known to everyone.

THE DECLINE OF CONCEPTUAL THINKING

The Centennial Review, 1957

Sir William Hamilton once said, in an unusually pessimistic mood, "The word 'concept' used to be ... more Sir William Hamilton once said, in an unusually pessimistic mood, "The word 'concept' used to be common among the English philosophers, but as usual our lexicographers have ignored it," or words to that effect. His reflection would not be out of place today in a wider context. We are all familiar with the word, although in reputable philosophical circles it has a slightly old-fashioned ring, and a good definition is extremely hard to find. It is perhaps significant that the philosophers in whose recent work the idea is most fully dealt with have repute in other fields as well as in philosophy-Henry Margenau, for instance, is also an outstanding physicist, and F. S. C. Northrop an expert on law and international affairs. The handful of others who have paid serious attention to the matter include Herbert Dingle and Ernst Cassirer but hardly one of the growing school of logical empiricists.

A Quantum Theory of Causality

Synthese, 1963

The statement "x is the cause of y" is usually taken to mean one of two things-either, in common-... more The statement "x is the cause of y" is usually taken to mean one of two things-either, in common-sense contexts, that the occurrence of x is a "jointly-sufficient condition" 1 for the occurrence of y, where x and y are distinct events (e.g. the throwing of a stone and the breaking of a window), or, in scientific contexts, that x and y both belong to a "causal line" 2 and x is antecedent to y, where x and y are states of some system undergoing continuous variation (e.g. the position of the moon yesterday and its position today). There is, it is true, something odd about saying "the moon's being where it was yesterday is the cause of its being where it is today," but this way of putting it is generally avoided by saying instead that the moon obeys a "causal law." Discussions of the philosophy of physics tend to take the latter meaning as paradigmatic; after all, the form of expression of most physical laws is st = f(t) (1) where st is the state of some physical system at time t and f is a (preferably continuous) function of time. Time here is the independent variable, which means that its passage is taken as conceptually prior to the variations in state described by the law. This point of view, generalized to an St which represents the state of the universe at time t and an F which represents the totality of causal laws governing all physical processes whatever, leads to the "single formula" St = F(t) (2) referred to by Laplace in his classical statement of mechanistic determinism: "We must thus envisage the present state of the universe as the effect of its previous state, and as the cause of that which will follow. An intelligence that could know, at a given instant, all the forces governing the natural world, and the respective positions of the entities which compose it, if in addition it was great enough to analyze all this information, would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be directly present to its observation." 3 Whether or not one wishes to assert the possibility, in principle, of carrying out the determinist program, there remains something puzzling about the use of the word "cause" in this connection. Laplace's statement, in fact, seems to fall into two clearly separable parts-the first sentence, which is a comparatively modest remark about causality, and the rest, which is an extravagant dream about determinism, usually associated by us with the idea of "causal law". This latter part does not really have much to do with causality, although it does have something to do with law, and Russell's remark that "the whole conception of 'cause' is resolved into that of 'law'" 4 is, in these circumstances, very apt. I do not agree that the whole conception of "cause" can be resolved into that of "law," but at least this conception of it can. What Laplace's demon needs for his predictions is a set of lawlike statements about the way in which certain systems behave when they are left alone. It does not make much sense to ask whether or not this behaviour is "causal" as long as it is continuous, periodic, etc. It is clear that this is the sort of thing Laplace was thinking of because he goes on to say, immediately after the passage quoted above, "The human mind, in the perfection that it has been able to give to the science of

THE PARADOX OF INDUCTION AND THE INDUCTIVE WAGER

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1962

Conmemoracion de Whitehead

Actas del Segundo Congreso Extraordinario Interamericano de Filosofía, 1962

Es un gran honor el estar invitado para hablar en esta sesión del Congreso en que se celebra el c... more Es un gran honor el estar invitado para hablar en esta sesión del Congreso en que se celebra el centenario del nacimiento de Whitehead. Es claro que un filósofo, cuyo nacimiento sus colegas consideran digno de ser conmemorado, debe haber logrado algo de extraordinario; el problema es recordarles este logro de una manera adecuada. Pudiera aprovecharme de la ocasión para elogiar al hombre y a su obra, pero este no es mi propósito esta tarde. No es que Whitehead no merezca elogios-al contrario-sino que no puedo rendírselos. Salvo en un sentido ritual el honor no puede pasar del menor al mayor. En lugar de eso, después de recordarles el campo de acción y el fondo de la filosofía de Whitehead, desarrollaré un tema de esta filosofía a la luz de unas discusiones recientes en las ciencias físicas. No puedo, en esto, pretender continuar su trabajo, tal es una tarea de la cual solo él era capaz. Pero el emprender el estudio de problemas que él consideraba de importancia es, en el fondo, la mejor manera de tributar homenaje a su memoria. La vida activa de Alfred North Whitehead estuvo constituida por tres etapas distintas, asociadas con tres universidades famosas, la de Cambridge, la de Londres, y la de Harvard. Sus intereses originales estaban en las matemáticas y en la física matemática, y el primer período produjo sus grandes obras matemáticas,

Evidence and Testimony: Philip Henry Gosse and the Omphalos Theory

Six Studies in Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, 1962

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amoun... more Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ch. III. I Eccentricity took many forms in Victorian England, but in keeping with the atmosphere of the times there were two especially noticeable varieties. There were religious eccentrics, like John Nelson Darby, a passionate nonconformist who solved the ancient problem as to the nature of the sin against the Holy Ghost by identifying it with the taking of Holy Orders; and there were scientific eccentrics, like Andrew Crosse, who in the course of electrical experiments at his country estate created a new species of beetle (Acarus crossii) and brought down on himself a torrent of totally undeserved abuse on the grounds that he was trying to be God. From time to time these tendencies were combined in a single individual, with invariably interesting results. Religion and science have never really been comfortable in one another's presence, and the antics to which men are driven who try to make them so have not ceased yet. Contemporary attempts, however, seem anaemic in comparison with the fierce controversies of the nineteenth century. What now is done weakly, even pathetically, was then a matter for "genius, mental vigour, and moral courage"; and while the result might have been to make a man look ridiculous, it never made him look puerile. The subject of this essay seems often comic, sometimes tragic, but always a man of strong character and firm will. Philip Henry Gosse is best known, if at all, as the overbearing Father in Edmund Gosse's autobiographical sketch Father and Son, although the sympathies of the reader of that book are likely to lie, as they were intended to lie, with the son. The story is the familiar one: a sickly child, brought up under the stern and repressive eye of a Victorian father, eventually throws off the burden and sets out to live his own life. He was, of course, quite right to do so, and I do not wish to suggest otherwise. My purpose is to draw attention to what Edmund Gosse himself calls "the unique and noble figure of the father" 1-a distinguished naturalist, author of one of the most brilliant failures in the history of scientific theories, and in his own right a more colorful figure than the son as whose father he himself suspected he would one day be known. He was born in 1810, the son of an itinerant miniature painter, and died in 1888 a Fellow of the Royal Society and the author of more than thirty books and of innumerable scientific papers. It is perhaps best to begin with an account of his scientific development. At first glance there is nothing eccentric in the professional life of Philip Gosse. Brought up in a small seaport town where the principal form of recreation was exploring the shore or the surrounding country, and spending a great part of his early life in comparatively remote and wild places-first Newfoundland, then Canada, and finally Alabamait was not surprising that his innate powers of keen observation should have led him into a career as a naturalist. In Newfoundland, where he was employed as a clerk in a whaling office at Carbonear, he bought Kanmacher's edition of Adams's Essays on the Microscope, an act which he regarded, in his characteristically self-critical way, as a formal dedication to a life of science. By the time he left Newfoundland for an abortive attempt at farming in Ontario he had already begun an extensive collection of insects which occupied the foreground of his attention; his last memento of Newfoundland was a rare cockroach, and the sole comment in his diary when he first reached Canada was the following: "July 15.-As I this day arrived in Quebec, I procured some lettuce for my caterpillars, which they ate greedily." 2 This single-mindedness in matters of biology remained with him for the rest of his life; the birth of his only child appears in the diary with the entry: "E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica." 3 Of course such things might be interpreted, not unjustly, as indicating a certain stolidity of character, and there is plenty of other evidence to show that Gosse, as a young man, took things very seriously indeed, himself most seriously of all. The Canadian venture proving a failure, Gosse traveled to Philadelphia (observing en route the rudeness of the

LA INDUCCION: UNA PARADOJA Y UNA APUESTA

Revista de Filosofia de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1960

Los problemas filosóficos de los conceptos que se refieren a sí mismos han sido causa de muchas p... more Los problemas filosóficos de los conceptos que se refieren a sí mismos han sido causa de muchas paradojas que ya son clásicas. Este trabajo procura demostrar que las conclusiones paradójicas resultan cuando la inducción se refiere a sí misma. Las condiciones presentes en la génesis de una paradoja incluyen siempre una negación; por ejemplo, en la paradoja de las expresiones heterológicas, de Grelling, las dificultades no aparecen a menos que la expresión no se describa a sí misma. De igual manera, en este caso la paradoja depende de la suposición de que el principio de la inducción no ha sido comprobado con buen éxito. Se dice muchas veces que no podemos confiar en el principio de la inducción como prueba del principio de la inducción; pero si otras pruebas son satisfactorias, la confiabilidad de las inferencias inductivas sirve como una confirmación más del principio. Sin embargo, si otras pruebas no son satisfactorias, la confiabilidad de las inferencias inductivas nos coloca, de cierta manera, en un aprieto. A mi entender, este es el caso, y trataré, en primer lugar, de clarificar la causa del aprieto, y, en segundo lugar, de demostrar que, aunque muchos autores se han esmerado para no tener que reconocerse vencidos en el campo de la inducción, una capitulación no es tan deshonrosa como parece.

MATHEMATICS AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

Bulletin of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Mathematics, 1959

What Is Structuralism?

Partisan Review, 1968

Being Educated Any Time (but especially in 1984)

The Case of the Athenian Stranger

Teaching Philosophy, 1985

Coherence, System, and Structure

Idealistic Studies, 1974

Commentary on "Affect, Agency, and Engagement"

Philosophy Psychiatry Psychology, Mar 1994

Committees and Consensus: How Many Heads are Better Than One?

Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Jan 1, 1991

The first section of this paper asks why the notion of consensus has recently come to the fore in... more The first section of this paper asks why the notion of consensus has recently come to the fore in the medical humanities, and suggests that the answer is a function of growing technological and professional complexity. The next two sections examine the concept of consensus analytically, citing some of the recent philosophical literature. The fourth section looks at committee deliberations and their desirable outcomes, and questions the degree to which consensus serves those outcomes. In the fifth and last section it is suggested that if I am to subscribe to a consensual outcome responsibly I must be personally committed to it, and that this requires a form of knowledge I call 'fiduciary', in this case knowledge of the competence and trustworthiness of other participants in deliberation whose expertise may have influenced my agreement.

Communication Lag

Science Communication, Jan 1, 1998

Critical Innocence and Straight Reading

New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 1985

I use "innocence" here not (in the first instance) in the sense of not harming or not intending t... more

Current French Philosophy || Introduction

The Curve of the Epoch

Sartre Studies International, 1999

The Structure of Self-Reference

Philosophes critiques d'eux-mêmes- Philosophers on Their Own Work- Philosophische Selbstbetrachtungen Philosophers on Their Own Work volume 2, 1976

WHAT HAPPENED IN PARIS

The Partisan Review, 1968

The annual parade is over, rather thinly covered on television because the journalists of the O.R... more The annual parade is over, rather thinly covered on television because the journalists of the O.R.T.F. have not yet returned to work. Their strike, the last remnant of the May revolution, ended a few days ago without the assurances of freedom in reporting for which they had held out. 1 After the final performance of a run of Beckett's Endgame at a Montmartre theater last night the principal actor held a collection box for the journalists. The sensation of an ending has been strong in Paris in the last weeks; as the police have occupied the few remaining buildings still held by students (or, in the language of the right, as the students have evacuated them) and the cleaning men with their grattoirs have taken down all the posters, only a few slogans in spray paint here and there, and some asphalt patches in the street around the Sorbonne where the pavés were torn up and used for ammunition, give outward evidence of anything's having happened at all. 2 For the crowd on the Champs Elysées this morning it was all finished; France was back to normal, and there as usual taking the salute was De Gaulle. "De Gaulle-mon Dieu, faites qu'il crève!" (De Gaulleoh God, make him drop dead!) This agonized appeal could be seen scrawled up at the Odéon, and it must have reflected the feelings of many participants in the demonstrations. For to the youth of France De Gaulle is what Johnson is (or was) to the youth of America, the infuriating symbol of a materialistic and chauvinistic society with enormous power but without a soul, a society so closed upon itself that only violence can hope to make any significant change in it. The remarkable thing about the May revolution is that it did in fact come within a hair's breadth of overthrowing the society. After De Gaulle's massive victory at the polls this is hard to remember, but it is by no means the most bizarre of the truths about this extraordinary episode. Two others, equally implausible on their face but equally borne out by the evidence, are that the whole thing was an indirect product of the war in Vietnam, and that France was saved for democracy at the very brink of collapse by the Communist Party. The conjunction of these last two points has a kind of sickening irony in the light of America's postwar foreign policy, but their lesson is too obvious for me to have to drive it home here. Having come so close to success, however, the revolutionary movement may have spoiled its chances of pulling off anything similar again for a long time. In a way its hand was forced; the student activists, who did not expect at this stage to have much impact outside the university, had intended to wait until the fall for their big manifestation. That events would grow to such proportions in May was unforeseen: so was the general strike. Some left-wing theorists, encouraged by the magnitude of the disturbance, are now developing a new theory of revolution for advanced industrial societies, societies in which classical revolutionary theory concluded that success was impossible (whence the preference of the Communists in France for parliamentary action). According to the new theory, the initiative will be taken by students, the one group not successfully integrated into the mechanism of society and not yet having a collective stake in it; their lead will be followed by the workers in a general strike; then, however, instead of sitting stubbornly in the factories, the workers will start the processes of production and distribution up again under the direction of their own revolutionary committees, with which the public will be forced to deal for the necessities of life; meanwhile the old government can do what it likes: it will eventually be seen to be a nonfunctioning appendage (the real business being conducted directly between the workers and the people) and will die a natural death. This theory is beautiful but absurd. It would not have been absurd if it had been

THE HUMANITIES IN A TECHNOLOGICAL AGE

Societal Issues, Scientific Viewpoints, 1987

I wish to dedicate these remarks to the memory of a man who lived at the Chinese Imperial Court e... more I wish to dedicate these remarks to the memory of a man who lived at the Chinese Imperial Court eighteen hundred and eighty years ago. His name was Ts'ai Lun. If it is not a familiar name, that may be explained in the words of d'Alembert, from the "Preliminary Discourse" to Diderot's Encyclopedia, or Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Trades by a society of men of letters. D'Alembert says there: The contempt in which the mechanical arts are held seems to have affected to some degree even their inventors. The names of these benefactors of humankind are almost all unknown, whereas the history of its destroyers, that is to say, of the conquerors, is known to everyone.

THE DECLINE OF CONCEPTUAL THINKING

The Centennial Review, 1957

Sir William Hamilton once said, in an unusually pessimistic mood, "The word 'concept' used to be ... more Sir William Hamilton once said, in an unusually pessimistic mood, "The word 'concept' used to be common among the English philosophers, but as usual our lexicographers have ignored it," or words to that effect. His reflection would not be out of place today in a wider context. We are all familiar with the word, although in reputable philosophical circles it has a slightly old-fashioned ring, and a good definition is extremely hard to find. It is perhaps significant that the philosophers in whose recent work the idea is most fully dealt with have repute in other fields as well as in philosophy-Henry Margenau, for instance, is also an outstanding physicist, and F. S. C. Northrop an expert on law and international affairs. The handful of others who have paid serious attention to the matter include Herbert Dingle and Ernst Cassirer but hardly one of the growing school of logical empiricists.

A Quantum Theory of Causality

Synthese, 1963

The statement "x is the cause of y" is usually taken to mean one of two things-either, in common-... more The statement "x is the cause of y" is usually taken to mean one of two things-either, in common-sense contexts, that the occurrence of x is a "jointly-sufficient condition" 1 for the occurrence of y, where x and y are distinct events (e.g. the throwing of a stone and the breaking of a window), or, in scientific contexts, that x and y both belong to a "causal line" 2 and x is antecedent to y, where x and y are states of some system undergoing continuous variation (e.g. the position of the moon yesterday and its position today). There is, it is true, something odd about saying "the moon's being where it was yesterday is the cause of its being where it is today," but this way of putting it is generally avoided by saying instead that the moon obeys a "causal law." Discussions of the philosophy of physics tend to take the latter meaning as paradigmatic; after all, the form of expression of most physical laws is st = f(t) (1) where st is the state of some physical system at time t and f is a (preferably continuous) function of time. Time here is the independent variable, which means that its passage is taken as conceptually prior to the variations in state described by the law. This point of view, generalized to an St which represents the state of the universe at time t and an F which represents the totality of causal laws governing all physical processes whatever, leads to the "single formula" St = F(t) (2) referred to by Laplace in his classical statement of mechanistic determinism: "We must thus envisage the present state of the universe as the effect of its previous state, and as the cause of that which will follow. An intelligence that could know, at a given instant, all the forces governing the natural world, and the respective positions of the entities which compose it, if in addition it was great enough to analyze all this information, would be able to embrace in a single formula the movements of the largest bodies in the universe and those of the lightest atom: nothing would be uncertain for it, and the future, like the past, would be directly present to its observation." 3 Whether or not one wishes to assert the possibility, in principle, of carrying out the determinist program, there remains something puzzling about the use of the word "cause" in this connection. Laplace's statement, in fact, seems to fall into two clearly separable parts-the first sentence, which is a comparatively modest remark about causality, and the rest, which is an extravagant dream about determinism, usually associated by us with the idea of "causal law". This latter part does not really have much to do with causality, although it does have something to do with law, and Russell's remark that "the whole conception of 'cause' is resolved into that of 'law'" 4 is, in these circumstances, very apt. I do not agree that the whole conception of "cause" can be resolved into that of "law," but at least this conception of it can. What Laplace's demon needs for his predictions is a set of lawlike statements about the way in which certain systems behave when they are left alone. It does not make much sense to ask whether or not this behaviour is "causal" as long as it is continuous, periodic, etc. It is clear that this is the sort of thing Laplace was thinking of because he goes on to say, immediately after the passage quoted above, "The human mind, in the perfection that it has been able to give to the science of

THE PARADOX OF INDUCTION AND THE INDUCTIVE WAGER

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1962

Conmemoracion de Whitehead

Actas del Segundo Congreso Extraordinario Interamericano de Filosofía, 1962

Es un gran honor el estar invitado para hablar en esta sesión del Congreso en que se celebra el c... more Es un gran honor el estar invitado para hablar en esta sesión del Congreso en que se celebra el centenario del nacimiento de Whitehead. Es claro que un filósofo, cuyo nacimiento sus colegas consideran digno de ser conmemorado, debe haber logrado algo de extraordinario; el problema es recordarles este logro de una manera adecuada. Pudiera aprovecharme de la ocasión para elogiar al hombre y a su obra, pero este no es mi propósito esta tarde. No es que Whitehead no merezca elogios-al contrario-sino que no puedo rendírselos. Salvo en un sentido ritual el honor no puede pasar del menor al mayor. En lugar de eso, después de recordarles el campo de acción y el fondo de la filosofía de Whitehead, desarrollaré un tema de esta filosofía a la luz de unas discusiones recientes en las ciencias físicas. No puedo, en esto, pretender continuar su trabajo, tal es una tarea de la cual solo él era capaz. Pero el emprender el estudio de problemas que él consideraba de importancia es, en el fondo, la mejor manera de tributar homenaje a su memoria. La vida activa de Alfred North Whitehead estuvo constituida por tres etapas distintas, asociadas con tres universidades famosas, la de Cambridge, la de Londres, y la de Harvard. Sus intereses originales estaban en las matemáticas y en la física matemática, y el primer período produjo sus grandes obras matemáticas,

Evidence and Testimony: Philip Henry Gosse and the Omphalos Theory

Six Studies in Nineteenth-Century English Literature and Thought, 1962

Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amoun... more Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage it contained. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ch. III. I Eccentricity took many forms in Victorian England, but in keeping with the atmosphere of the times there were two especially noticeable varieties. There were religious eccentrics, like John Nelson Darby, a passionate nonconformist who solved the ancient problem as to the nature of the sin against the Holy Ghost by identifying it with the taking of Holy Orders; and there were scientific eccentrics, like Andrew Crosse, who in the course of electrical experiments at his country estate created a new species of beetle (Acarus crossii) and brought down on himself a torrent of totally undeserved abuse on the grounds that he was trying to be God. From time to time these tendencies were combined in a single individual, with invariably interesting results. Religion and science have never really been comfortable in one another's presence, and the antics to which men are driven who try to make them so have not ceased yet. Contemporary attempts, however, seem anaemic in comparison with the fierce controversies of the nineteenth century. What now is done weakly, even pathetically, was then a matter for "genius, mental vigour, and moral courage"; and while the result might have been to make a man look ridiculous, it never made him look puerile. The subject of this essay seems often comic, sometimes tragic, but always a man of strong character and firm will. Philip Henry Gosse is best known, if at all, as the overbearing Father in Edmund Gosse's autobiographical sketch Father and Son, although the sympathies of the reader of that book are likely to lie, as they were intended to lie, with the son. The story is the familiar one: a sickly child, brought up under the stern and repressive eye of a Victorian father, eventually throws off the burden and sets out to live his own life. He was, of course, quite right to do so, and I do not wish to suggest otherwise. My purpose is to draw attention to what Edmund Gosse himself calls "the unique and noble figure of the father" 1-a distinguished naturalist, author of one of the most brilliant failures in the history of scientific theories, and in his own right a more colorful figure than the son as whose father he himself suspected he would one day be known. He was born in 1810, the son of an itinerant miniature painter, and died in 1888 a Fellow of the Royal Society and the author of more than thirty books and of innumerable scientific papers. It is perhaps best to begin with an account of his scientific development. At first glance there is nothing eccentric in the professional life of Philip Gosse. Brought up in a small seaport town where the principal form of recreation was exploring the shore or the surrounding country, and spending a great part of his early life in comparatively remote and wild places-first Newfoundland, then Canada, and finally Alabamait was not surprising that his innate powers of keen observation should have led him into a career as a naturalist. In Newfoundland, where he was employed as a clerk in a whaling office at Carbonear, he bought Kanmacher's edition of Adams's Essays on the Microscope, an act which he regarded, in his characteristically self-critical way, as a formal dedication to a life of science. By the time he left Newfoundland for an abortive attempt at farming in Ontario he had already begun an extensive collection of insects which occupied the foreground of his attention; his last memento of Newfoundland was a rare cockroach, and the sole comment in his diary when he first reached Canada was the following: "July 15.-As I this day arrived in Quebec, I procured some lettuce for my caterpillars, which they ate greedily." 2 This single-mindedness in matters of biology remained with him for the rest of his life; the birth of his only child appears in the diary with the entry: "E. delivered of a son. Received green swallow from Jamaica." 3 Of course such things might be interpreted, not unjustly, as indicating a certain stolidity of character, and there is plenty of other evidence to show that Gosse, as a young man, took things very seriously indeed, himself most seriously of all. The Canadian venture proving a failure, Gosse traveled to Philadelphia (observing en route the rudeness of the

LA INDUCCION: UNA PARADOJA Y UNA APUESTA

Revista de Filosofia de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 1960

Los problemas filosóficos de los conceptos que se refieren a sí mismos han sido causa de muchas p... more Los problemas filosóficos de los conceptos que se refieren a sí mismos han sido causa de muchas paradojas que ya son clásicas. Este trabajo procura demostrar que las conclusiones paradójicas resultan cuando la inducción se refiere a sí misma. Las condiciones presentes en la génesis de una paradoja incluyen siempre una negación; por ejemplo, en la paradoja de las expresiones heterológicas, de Grelling, las dificultades no aparecen a menos que la expresión no se describa a sí misma. De igual manera, en este caso la paradoja depende de la suposición de que el principio de la inducción no ha sido comprobado con buen éxito. Se dice muchas veces que no podemos confiar en el principio de la inducción como prueba del principio de la inducción; pero si otras pruebas son satisfactorias, la confiabilidad de las inferencias inductivas sirve como una confirmación más del principio. Sin embargo, si otras pruebas no son satisfactorias, la confiabilidad de las inferencias inductivas nos coloca, de cierta manera, en un aprieto. A mi entender, este es el caso, y trataré, en primer lugar, de clarificar la causa del aprieto, y, en segundo lugar, de demostrar que, aunque muchos autores se han esmerado para no tener que reconocerse vencidos en el campo de la inducción, una capitulación no es tan deshonrosa como parece.

MATHEMATICS AND THE LAWS OF NATURE

Bulletin of the Kansas Association of Teachers of Mathematics, 1959

What Is Structuralism?

Partisan Review, 1968

Being Educated Any Time (but especially in 1984)

The Case of the Athenian Stranger

Teaching Philosophy, 1985

Coherence, System, and Structure

Idealistic Studies, 1974

Commentary on "Affect, Agency, and Engagement"

Philosophy Psychiatry Psychology, Mar 1994

Committees and Consensus: How Many Heads are Better Than One?

Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, Jan 1, 1991

The first section of this paper asks why the notion of consensus has recently come to the fore in... more The first section of this paper asks why the notion of consensus has recently come to the fore in the medical humanities, and suggests that the answer is a function of growing technological and professional complexity. The next two sections examine the concept of consensus analytically, citing some of the recent philosophical literature. The fourth section looks at committee deliberations and their desirable outcomes, and questions the degree to which consensus serves those outcomes. In the fifth and last section it is suggested that if I am to subscribe to a consensual outcome responsibly I must be personally committed to it, and that this requires a form of knowledge I call 'fiduciary', in this case knowledge of the competence and trustworthiness of other participants in deliberation whose expertise may have influenced my agreement.

Communication Lag

Science Communication, Jan 1, 1998

Critical Innocence and Straight Reading

New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation, 1985

I use "innocence" here not (in the first instance) in the sense of not harming or not intending t... more

Current French Philosophy || Introduction

The Curve of the Epoch

Sartre Studies International, 1999

The Fear of God: A Philosophical and Theological Meditation

Aspects of Hempel's Philosophy of Science

The Law of Quality and Quantity, or What Numbers Can and Can't Describe

The Qualitative-Quantitative Distinction in …, Jan 1, 1989

Before there was writing, any culture carried by language had to be transmitted orally. People me... more Before there was writing, any culture carried by language had to be transmitted orally. People memorized poems that incorporated the knowledge that was to be passed on to future generations. A poem is something made (poiein is ‘to make’), something made with words and remembered, not just words uttered for an occasion and forgotten. Now, we are accustomed to think, things have changed: there are texts and chronicles, and the art of memorization has gone almost entirely out of use. We don’t need it for the storage or transmission of knowledge, and the old chore of learning poems by heart in school has been almost entirely dispensed with. Feats of memory, outside some technical contexts (in the theater or in medicine, for example) have become curiosities, useful to intellectuals who are unexpectedly imprisoned and need something to keep them sane, but otherwise merely freakish or decorative.

On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time

The Paradox of Induction and the Inductive Wager

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Jan 1, 1962

Problems of self-reference in philosophy have been at the bottom of many of the now classical par... more Problems of self-reference in philosophy have been at the bottom of many of the now classical paradoxes, and this paper will attempt to show that paradoxical conclusions follow from an analysis of the self-reference of induction. The conditions necessary for the generation of paradoxes always include a negation; for example, in Grelling's paradox of heterological terms, it is only when a term is not descriptive of itself that difficulties arise. Similarly, in this case the paradox rests on the assumption that the principle of induction has not been successfully proven. It has often been remarked that induction cannot be relied upon for a proof of itself; but if other proofs had been successful, the continued reliability of inductive inferences would only serve to confirm the principle more fully. If other proofs are not successful, the continued reliability of inductive inferences is, in a sense, an embarrassment. I shall assume that the latter is the case, and shall try first to formulate the source of embarrassment and second to show that, although some authors have gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid a confession of defeat with respect to induction, capitulation is not as dishonorable as it might seem.

Praxis and techne

Yorick's World: Science and the Knowing Subject, 1993

A Quantum Theory of Causality

Synthese, 1963

The Statement &quot;x is the cause of y&quot; is usually taken to mean one of two things ... more The Statement &quot;x is the cause of y&quot; is usually taken to mean one of two things - either, in common-sense contexts, that the occurrence of x is a &quot;jointly-sutticient condition&quot; 1 for the occurrence of y, where x and y are distinct events (eg the throwing of a stone and the breaking of a ...

Science and system: On the unity and diversity of scientific theory

General Systems, Jan 1, 1968

Science, Computers, and the Complexity of Nature

Philosophy of Science, 1963

The relations between simplicity and economy, and between simplicity and complexity, are briefly ... more

The Capital Connection: Business, Science, and Government

The text, edited and supplemented, of the first Philip Morris Lectures in Business and Society

Ethics from experience

Ethics from Experience is an original inquiry into morality and how we come to know what is right... more Ethics from Experience is an original inquiry into morality and how we come to know what is right. It argues that each person is capable of arriving at tested moral conclusions on the basis of experience.
The development of moral theory is conducted here in unusually revealing ways in conjunction with an account of scientific theory and method. Moral agency operates in a world whose structure and behavior must be known if action is to be responsible. Traditional ways of teaching ethics pay little attention to the hard facts in the environment of action.
While not a survey but an original argument, the book introduces and comments upon most of the traditional moral problems and major moral philosophers. In presenting the case for moral consequentialism, it treats morality not as an academic exercise but as a live problem of urgent importance.

The Causes of Quarrel: Essays on Peace, War, and Thomas Hobbes

The Philosophy of Science: A Systematic Account

Backed with degrees in physics and philosophy, my early work lay naturally in the philosophy of s... more

In the series "The Arguments of the Philosophers," this book is a reading of Sartre's philosophic... more

Science and the Theory of Value

This book represents the beginning of a long interest in the scientific status of theories beyond... more

This book was the fruit of a ten-year detour into the status of theory in the humanities and soci... more

Two centuries of philosophy in America

Yorick's world: Science and the Knowing Subject

A collection of my papers in the philosophy of science since the publication of my first book.

Book Review:Modern Science and Zeno's Paradoxes Adolf Grunbaum

Philosophy of Science, 1969

Richard Harland , Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism . Reviewed by

Philosophy in Review, 1989

... Richard Harland, Superstructuralism: The Philosophy of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism R... more

Book Review:Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser Mark Poster

The Journal of Modern History, 1978

Why Should There Be Only Something -- Why Not Much Rather Everything?

Hunter College Colloquium 3/15/1976