Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

A 20th and 21st century Canadian philosopher who has not made as large a dent in the fields of philosophy of science and, more generally, of epistemology as he may reasonably have hoped: Ian Hacking died a little more than a year ago, in May 2023, when his heart failed him at the age of 87 at a retirement home in Toronto.  Hacking is best remembered as the foremost advocate in the philosophy of science of the view known as "entity realism".  This is related to our discussion of the Vienna Circle in recent posts. Consider that in the philosophy of science, in the heyday of the VC and in our own time as well, one central question is "do we need to explain the predictive success of the best scientific theories? and, if we do, is their approximate truth an accurate non-circular explanation?"  Scientific realism says "yes we do and yes it is." A theory about electrons may be right because electrons are real, and it may be successfully predictive because it is ...

Edmonds repeatedly discusses the sometimes ambivalent relationship between the Vienna Circle in philosophy and Austro-Marxism in politics. You might call it ... some sort of waltz.  But let us begin with Mach.   Ernst Mach was a scientist and philosopher who flourished circa 1900. As a philosopher, he believed that sense perception is the paradigm of all knowledge and that scientific laws, mathematics, and the postulation of unseen entities like magnetic fields, are all simply ways of describing and predicting sense perception. This notion, which came to be called "empirio-criticism," would in time have a great influence on the Vienna Circle.   Aside from geography and chronology, Austro-Marxism would seem unrelated to empirio-criticism. The former was an ideology closely associated with Bruno Bauer, the head of Austria's Social Democratic Workers' Party from 1918 to 1934. In '34, as fascists tightened their control in Austria (though at this time they were fasc...

A participant in Yahoo!Answers recently asked this: In philosophy, how does an atheist idealist react to the criticisms faced, that Berkeley can only reply to using God? It is a provocative question, and even knowing that I was probably being too helpful regarding someone's homework assignment I couldn't refrain from a reply: I'll try to reconstruct what you mean here, then provide a three-point answer, Berkeley said material substance does not exist, matter is only the perception thereof in some mind. This raises the famous question about the tree in the Quad. Does it exist when no one is around? Berkeley says that it does still exist, and for this purpose he brings in the always-perceiving Mind of God. So what you mean to ask is: can an atheist coherently believe that Berkeley was right about the non-existence of material substance, and so the non-existence of unperceived matter, and what would THAT person have to say about the tree in the Quad? The firs...