Historical Pragmatics Philosophical Essays
For 35 years, the critical and creative writings of Robert E. Butts have been a notable and welcome part of European and North American philosophy. A few years ago, James Robert Brown and Jiirgen Mittelstrass feted Professor Butts with a volume entitled A
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BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editor ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
Editorial Advisory Board THOMAS F. GLICK, Boston University ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh SAHOTRA SARKAR, Dibner Institute, M.l. T SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University MARX W. W ARTOFSKY, Baruch College of
the City University of New York
VOLUME 155
ROBERT E. BUTTS Department of Philosophy, The University of Western Ontario
HISTORICAL PRAGMATICS Philosophical Essays
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-4329-0 ISBN 978-94-015-8188-2 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8188-2
Ali Rights Reserved © 1993 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1993 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1993 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
PREFACE For 35 years, the critical and creative writings of Robert E. Butts have been a notable and welcome part of European and North American philosophy. A few years ago, James Robert Brown and Jiirgen Mittelstrass feted Professor Butts with a volume entitled An Intimate Relation (Boston Studies vol. 116, 1989), essays by twenty-six philosophers and historians of the sciences. And that joining of philosophers and historians was impressive evidence of the 'intimate relation' between historical illumination and philosophical understanding which is characteristic of Butts throughout his work. Not alone, Butts has been, and is, one of this generation's most incisive thinkers, devoted to responsible textual scholarship and equally responsible imaginative interpretation. Brown and Mittelstrass said that "throughout his writings, science, its philosophy, and its history have been treated as a seamless web", and I would add only that philosophy per se is a part of the web too. Here in this book before us are the results, a lovely collection from the work of Robert Butts, who is for so many of his colleagues, students and readers, Mr. HPS, the model philosophical historian and historical philosopher of the sciences. July 1993
Robert S. Cohen Center for Philosophy and History of Science, Boston University
TABLE OF CONTENTS BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
IX
INTRODUCTION
Xl
PART I EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
1
1. Some tactics in Galileo's propaganda for the mathematization of scientific experience
3
2. Leibniz on choosing between rival scientific hypotheses
33
PRAGMATIC EPISODE 1
53
3. Philosophers as professional relativists
55
PART II KANT'S PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
65
4. Kant's schemata as semantical rules
67
5. The methodological structure of Kant's metaphysics of science
79
6. Teleology and scientific method in Kant's Critique of Judgment
