“Only say how it essentially was.” (wie es eigentlich gewesen) –Leopold von Ranke
Philosophy of History Part VIII: Hegel’s Dialectic of History
“Pure Reason, incapable of any limitation, is the Deity itself.” –Hegel
Philosophy of History Part VII: The Politics of Modernization
“Reason obeys itself, and ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it.” –Thomas Paine
“Kings will be tyrants from policy, when subjects are rebels from principle.” –Edmund Burke
Philosophy of History Part VI: The French Revolution
“What is the Third Estate? Nothing. What does it want to be? Something.” –Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès
Philosophy of History, Part V: Condorcet
“The time will come when the sun will shine only upon free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and slaves, priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in works of history and on the stage; and when we shall think of them only to pity their victims and their dupes.” –Condorcet
Philosophy of History, Part IV: Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”
“I have recorded the triumph of barbarism and religion.” -Edward Gibbon
Philosophy of History, Part III: Voltaire and the Age of Reason
“History should be written as philosophy.” –Voltaire
Philosophy of History, Part II: Giambattista Vico, Philology, and the Origins of Historicism
“The true and the made are convertible.” (Verum Factum)
Philosophy of History Part I: The Enlightenment
” ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.” -Immanuel Kant
Science, Technology, and Society XIV: Ian Hacking
In “The Social Construction of What?” (1999), Ian Hacking argues that constructionist accounts of scientific theories tend to lose sight of a basic question: what, exactly, is it that’s supposed to be constructed?
Science, Technology, and Society XIII: The Sokal Hoax
In 1996, physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated a hoax by submitting a nonsense article to an academic journal of postmodern studies, and subsequently deriding the journal for publishing it. The hoax was, and remains, a significant salvo in the “Science Wars.”
Science, Technology, and Society XII: Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz (1926–2006) was probably the best known American anthropologist of his generation, famous for his literary approach to ethnography, culture, and religious studies, and his development of the concept of “thick description.”
Science, Technology, and Society XI: Constructive Empiricism
Because many, if not most, of the things with which science has to deal cannot be directly observed, the central question of science is not “What is the truth about nature?” but “what counts as an empirically adequate explanation?”
Science, Technology and Society X: Weimar Culture and Quantum Mechanics
Because German science held such a prominent place in culture before WWI, it could not escape the fallout when the war ended in disaster. German physicists needed a way to reestablish their prestige, and this meant repudiating their prewar past in order to make room for an up-to-date theory that would not be tarnished by earlier failures.A new mania for a romantic “life philosophy,” which rejected the mechanical and mechanistic attitudes of the British in favor of an experience-based, intuitive holism became fashionable. In physics, the new model incorporated the values of “life philosophy” by rejecting causality as the principle explanatory mechanism.
Science, Technology and Society IX: Malthus, Darwin, and “Social Darwinism”
In a series of essays written, Robert M. Young argued that scientific theories, like all other products of the human mind, arise out of a specific social context. Theories necessarily incorporate the values and concerns of the people who create them, which are themselves expressions of their specific historical context. Therefore, if we want to understand evolution, we need to understand the history of Victorian England.
Science, Technology and Society VIII: Leviathan and the Air Pump
According to Boyle, the best method in natural philosophy (and politics) was experiment and observation. Hobbes disagreed. He believed that observation could never displace deduction as a form of reasoning because observation always admitted of multiple explanations, and without rigorous definitions there was no way to decide between them. No number of experiments with air pumps could establish whether a vacuum was present or not unless Boyle could define what vacuum, air, etc., were.
Science, Technology and Society VII: On Gender and Science
Evelyn Fox Keller is a leader among a generation of feminist scholars interested in questions of gender and science. Although feminist philosophy of science is a complex and controversial field, and these scholars frequently disagree among themselves as to what changes are desirable or realistically attainable, they share a commitment to broadening the scope of science so that it does not devalue feminine perspectives as a kind of structural principle.
Science, Technology and Society VI: David Bloor and the Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge
Whereas Kuhn had suggested that science might not be an entirely rational activity, and Feyerabend had drawn certain philosophical and political conclusions from a rather more strident belief, David Bloor argued for an approach that ignores the truth status of scientific theories and instead concentrates on their social context of production. Needless to say, the idea that truth claims arising out of science can be ignored at all, let alone as a systematic methodological principle, was and is controversial.
Science, Technology and Society V: Imre Lakatos
Unlike Thomas Kuhn, who held that a single paradigm dominates all science at once, Lakatos argued that multiple programs compete within or across fields simultaneously.
Science, Technology and Society III: The Vienna Circle
According to the Vienna Circle, the proper domain of philosophy is logic and language as applied to observation and scientific theory. Philosophers should accept the reduction of their field to an auxiliary discipline of science.