A Postkuhnian Philosophy Of Science Michael Friedman by Michael Friedman 9789023253044, 9023253043 instant download after payment.

The two Spinoza Lectures presented here belong to Friedman’s ongoing project of articulating a ‘post-Kuhnian’ philosophy of science. Friedman's approach, like Kuhn’s, is essentially historical, and builds on a careful depiction of the development of the mathematical and physical sciences in the Western tradition. By embedding these developments within a wider narrative depicting their complex relations to a parallel set of developments in what he calls ‘scientific philosophy’, however, Friedman aims to provide a more adequate philosophical response to the conceptual incommensurability between succeeding Kuhnian paradigms that arises in the great scientific revolutions that have defined this tradition. Encouraged by Kuhn’s own description of his approach as ‘Kantianism with movable categories’, moreover, Friedman endeavors to develop a neo-Kantian approach to the problems concerning scientific rationality that have afflicted the history, philosophy, and sociology of science since Kuhn; in particular, by constructing a narrative depicting how our present situation results, among other things, from successive conceptual transformations of Kant’s original approach. In the course of these two lectures, Professor Friedman expands the scope of his original project by proceeding temporally backwards into the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that preceded Kant, and by proceeding culturally outwards so as to include social, institutional, and technological developments along with purely intellectual developments.