Review: Guyer (ed.), _The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy_

Philosophy

Online version of this review can be found at: http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/25218-thecambridge-companion-to-kant-and-modern-philosophy/. The Cambridge Companion to Kant and Modern Philosophy, edited by Paul Guyer, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 722 pp. ISBN: 978-0-521-82303-6. This volume contains an impressive collection of essays on some of the most important aspects of Kant's philosophy. Contributors include both senior Kant scholars, as well as some of the ablest younger scholars in the field. The book is meant to "supplement, rather than supplant" the earlier Companion to Kant, published in 1992. The essays cover a wider range of material in Kant's philosophy than the earlier volume, offering a more extensive treatment of Kant's moral and political philosophy, as well as a more in-depth treatment of issues in Kant's theoretical philosophy. A specific aim of the collection is to situate Kant's thought in relation to that of his predecessors, as well as to briefly indicate the reception and effective history of his thought. This is done in relation to each of the topics covered. The historical contextualization of the problems Kant addressed does much to illuminate the critical philosophy in its own terms and to avoid anachronistic readings of Kant's project. The brief discussions of the reception of Kant's ideas at the end of each essay help the reader to understand ways in which Kant's thought impacted the history of philosophy. Substantive questions such as the tenability of Kant's doctrines given developments in science, logic, and mathematics are also often addressed, as are comparisons of Kant's ideas with important philosophers of the twentieth century such as Quine. The first nine chapters of the book are devoted to Kant's theoretical philosophy. In the first chapter, "A Priori," Philip Kitcher discusses Kant's understanding of the a priori, seeking to delineate "a conception of a priori knowledge that both emerges from Kants's official definition and relates to the issues of 'truths of reason' that occupied Kant's predecessors" (37). He critiques Kant's claim that the "marks" of the a priori are necessity and universality, and then compares Kant's understanding of the function of the a priori with Chomsky's "generative grammar." In the second chapter, "Kant on the perception of space and time," Gary Hatfield assesses the background to Kant's understanding of space and time by exploring the views of Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, and Crusius, follows the development of Kant's own views (including an exposition of Kant's arguments in the transcendental aesthetic), and surveys the reception of Kant's views during the nineteenth and twentieth century. Two of the most informative and illuminating essays in this section follow, namely Lisa Shabel's " Kant's philosophy of mathematics" and Beatrice Longuenesse's " Kant on a priori concepts." Both essays follow Kant's arguments closely and do an excellent job of demonstrating both the plausibility of Kant's views on the subject and how they relate to the rest of the critical philosophy. In her chapter on mathematics Shabel first compares Kant's philosophy of mathematics with that of his rationalist predecessors, who believed that the truth of mathematical propositions could be explained through conceptual analysis alone. For Kant, on the other hand, mathematical propositions are not analytic but are synthetic. Shabel links Kant's understanding of mathematical and geometrical judgments as synthetic with his claim that mathematical concepts must be constructed in pure intuition: for Kant "the key to mathematical demonstration is the mathematician's ability to produce figures via construction according to a priori concepts" (99). It is only through the actual act of constructing the figure in pure intuition that properties of the figure–not contained in its concept alone–are able to emerge; as such, the judgments of geometry are synthetic. Shabel proceeds to discuss how Kant envisions mathematical judgments to be a priori, having the marks of necessity and universality even though the figures constructed in pure intuition are singular. Given her exposition of Kant's analysis of mathematical judgments as synthetic a priori, she then discusses how Kant's philosophy of mathematics informs his transcendental idealism. The following chapter by Beatrice Longuenesse deals with Kant's too often neglected metaphysical deduction. This is a superb piece of work. In it Longuenesse briefly details the historical development of Kant's views on the relation between logic and ontology, from his early assumption that logical principles are also ontological to his later denial of this identity in his distinction between logical and real relations. It is this distinction that sets up the problem for the critical philosophy, namely, the question of how logic is capable of capturing fundamental features of the world. Longuenesse analyzes Kant's all-important distinction between general and transcendental logic, and how it redefines how we are to understand "the grip our intellect can have on the structural features of the world" (135). She argues that this new way of conceiving the relation between logic and ontology grounds Kant's metaphysical deduction of the categories. Important in this regard is the fact that Kant's distinction between the two kinds of access that we have to reality–spontaneity and receptivity–lies at the bottom of Kant's separation of logic and ontology. Kant's initial distinctions thus set up the problem that he is to solve in both the metaphysical and transcendental deductions and the proofs of the principle of the pure understanding. This fundamental problem has to do with how the functions of judgment can be applicable to what is given through intuition. Longueness then gives an extended analysis of Kant's understanding of concepts as resting on functions ("the unity of the action of ordering different representations under a common one A 68/B93)," and how this view of concepts structures his understanding of judgment. The rest of the chapter strives to illuminate Kant's contention that "the same function that give unity to different representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of different representations in an intuition....(A 79/B104-5). Very briefly, Longuenesse argues that Kant's table of logical forms "can only have emerged from Kant's painstaking reflections about the relation between the forms according to which we relate concepts to other concepts, and thus to objects...and forms according to which we may combine manifolds in intuition so that they may fall under concepts...."(146). Longuenesse's discussion is compact, illuminating and to the point, a must-read for any one that hopes to understand the metaphysical deduction. In chapter five, "Kant's philosophy of the cognitive mind," Paticia Kitcher develops Kant's theory of the mind. She first provides a brief history of how the mind was conceived in the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz and Hume, discusses Hume's influence on Kant's theory of the mind, explores Kant's early understanding of the mind, and then reconstructs Kant's understanding of the mind through an analysis of his arguments in the transcendental deduction. Here she makes some very interesting suggestions concerning the question of personal identity in Kant. Arthur Melnick reconstructs Kant's analogies of experience in the sixth chapter, "Kant's proofs of substance and causation," and then proceeds to show how Kant's arguments can be used against Quine's doctrine of "ontological relativity." In chapter seven, "Kant and transcendental arguments," Ralph C. S. Walker discusses how Kant's arguments led to the development of "transcendental arguments," whose purpose is to answer the skeptical challenge. He provides an analysis of the nature of such arguments, and then concludes that Kant's own method of transcendental argument undermines his own idealism. The significance of Kant's transcendental dialectic is explored by Karl Ameriks in the eighth chapter, "The critique of metaphysics." In it Ameriks discusses Kant's critique of the older metaphysical systems that purported to give rationalist proofs for the existence and character of the soul, the world and God, exploring both the structure of the dialectic and the question of just how much metaphysics it annihilated. Two issues are addressed in this regard, idealism and the unconditioned. Ameriks stresses that Kant's idealism is merely of the "formal" variety, and provides a useful discussion of how Kant conceived of the relation between appearances and things in themselves. The fourth section of the chapter contains an illuminating analysis of Kant's understanding of the unconditioned and how it relates to the ideas of the older metaphysics. Ameriks argues that at the core of Kant's critique of the older metaphysics is his claim that "with all possible perceptions, you always remain caught up in conditions, whether in space or time, and you never get to the unconditioned" (A 483/ B511). The error of dogmatism is then that it tries to "determine the in itself by making spatio-temporal features ('forms of sensibility') into something unconditioned" (289). The charge is directly relevant to the philosophies Kant's predecessors, namely those of Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume. In the last part of the chapter, Ameriks summarizes five major reactions to Kant's notion of the unconditioned. The last chapter in this section is Michael Friedman's "Philosophy of natural science." There Friedman details Kant's engagement with the natural sciences during both the pre-critical and critical periods, with an eye to determining the centrality of Kant's commitment to Newtonian physical theory and Euclidian geometry to his critical enterprise as a whole. A major concern of the chapter is with Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Friedman contends that Kant is committed to both the synthetic a priori status of Euclidean Geometry and Newtonian physics, but the fact that both have been supplanted in contemporary science does not vitiate the lasting significance of the critical philosophy. Missing from this section on Kant's theoretical philosophy is a discussion of the structure of the transcendental deduction itself, as well as a discussion of Kant's refutation of idealism, two very important issues for a proper understanding of the first Critique. To be sure, the earlier Companion to Kant included a discussion of the transcendental deduction, but an updated article on the deduction showing how it works with the metaphysical deduction, as well as with the analogies of experience would have been helpful. On the whole, however, the section contains important material for a proper understanding of Kant's theoretical philosophy and the watershed role it played in modern philosophy. The second section of the book explores Kant's practical and political philosophy, as well as his philosophy of religion. It begins with an essay by Allen Wood, "The Supreme Principle of Morality." In keeping with this chapter's title, Wood discusses the nature and function of Kant's supreme principle of morality and his formulation of it as a "categorical imperative." He argues convincingly that the principle's most developed and universal form is Kant's formula of the autonomy of the will (FA), and that only this formula unites Kant's two other formulations of the categorical imperative within itself. The latter part of the essay explores the claims made by Klaus Reich in his 1939 article in Mind concerning Kant's sources in Cicero and in the Stoic philosopher Panaetius of Rhodes. This is an enormously illuminating article. It is followed by another excellent piece (chapter 11) by Henry Allison, "Kant on freedom of the will." Allison notes the different conceptions of freedom to which Kant refers, focusing on "nature of and relation between freedom as spontaneity and as autonomy." Because both ways of understanding freedom involve independence from natural causality, Allison then also treats freedom in both senses in their relation to Kant's transcendental idealism. He provides a revealing analysis of Kant's theory in relation to his predecessors, Leibniz, Wolff, and–most interesting of all, Crusius, the foremost opponent of Woffianism in Germany–whose thought greatly influenced Kant. The later part of the chapter details the influence of Kant's thought on Fichte, Hegel and Schopenhauer. The next three essays deal with Kant's political philosophy. In his chapter "Mine and Thine," Robert Pippin examines how Kant ties the principle of right with his moral theory in his Doctrine of Right, arguing that Kant justifies the state's authority through his claim that only through such authority can property rights be established. The next chapter by Jane Kneller, "Kant on Sex and the Marriage Right," is an intelligent and sensitive exploration of Kant's position on marriage. Kneller offers a partial defense of Kant's claims regarding marriage from a feminist perspective, and contextualizes his views in terms of the historical and political realities of the time as well as their philosophical background. In chapter 14, "Kant's theory of peace," Pauline Kleingeld offers an analysis of Kant's normative theory of international relations. Does Kant believe a non-coercive league of states is the only feasible form of international cooperation, or does he advocate a much stronger international federation of states with the authority to coercively enforce a common law? Kleingeld provides strong arguments for her claim that Kant "advocates the establishment of a noncoercive league of states;" however, he does so because "he regards it as the only possible road to the ultimate ideal, a state of states" (483). This section provides excellent discussions of Kant's political philosophy in the context of the Enlightenment, and is a welcome corrective to treatments of Kant that ignore his engagement with important political issues. In Chapter 15 Lara Denis details Kant's understanding of virtue. She first gives a short exposition of how virtue has been understood in the history of philosophy and then situates Kant's views in relation to his predecessors. Denis lists six characteristics of Kant's understanding of virtue: (a) virtue is the disposition to act out of respect for the moral law; (b) it is moral self-constraint (c) requiring strength. This is because (d) we are finite rational agents having inclinations that do not necessarily coincide with the moral law, and as such (e) virtue is the moral disposition in conflict. Lastly, (f) Kant distinguishes between noumenal and phenomenal virtue. This chapter also includes an interesting analysis of the role emotions play in moral action; it is a useful exposition of the way that Kant understands virtue, although more could have been done in the way of analysis to answer Kant's critics. Paul Guyer provides an in-depth analysis of Kant's Critique of the Power of Judgment in chapter 16. He suggests that it can be illuminating to read the third critique in light of a protracted argument with Hume; in this light he analyzes three principal topics in the third Critique, namely: (a) Kant's suggestion that the systematicity of the empirical laws of nature can ground their necessity; (b) the problem of how to ground the universal validity of judgments of taste, and lastly (c) the moral significance of a teleological conception of nature. The first part of the chapter is devoted to an informative discussion of Hume on causal necessity, taste, and the arguments from design, and the second part examines what Kant has to say on each of these questions. One of the most thought-provoking parts of the essay is Guyer's discussion of Kant's take on the relation between the scientific goal of understanding the products of nature in mechanistic terms and judgments concerning the final, moral end of nature, especially in regard to Kant's "antinomy of teleological judgment." Regarding this antinomy, Guyer notes, "the real resolution of the antinomy seems to be the two-leveled, transcendental idealist solution that we must conceive of the designer of nature as existing outside of the appearances of nature and as accomplishing his purposes through the uniformly mechanistic laws of nature (572). The idea is fascinating, and Guyer's suggestion leaves the reader hoping for more of an in-depth development. However, Guyer then goes on suggest that "it is unlikely that many will be convinced that we must conceive of nature as morally purposive unless they are already starting from a theological point of view..." (577). Guyer's criticism overlooks the fact that Kant's argument is that it is the moral law within that compels us to hope that the world is ultimately ordered in such a way that it is hospitable to the human development of virtue. Kant's argument for why we must think of nature as morally purposive does not have a theological starting point, (although it may lead to some theological conclusions). Nevertheless, Guyer's discussion on this subject nicely compliments his introductory chapter drawing attention to the two core themes of Kant's philosophy, namely "the starry heavens above and the moral law within me," and highlights the importance of this largely undeveloped theme in Kant's philosophy. This issue is once again picked up in Fred Beiser's piece, "Moral faith and the highest good." The chapter explores aspects of Kant's philosophy of religion, focusing on Kant's doctrine of moral faith through a discussion of three interrelated themes: (a) the ideal of the highest good; (b) the postulates of God and immortality, and (c) the concept of rational faith. Beiser's intention is to defend the pivotal role moral faith plays in Kant's philosophy. To this end, he provides an in depth analysis of Kant's understanding of the highest good–the central and driving concept behind Kant's notion of moral faith– first situating Kant's take on the concept in relation to the development of the concept in the history of philosophy. Beiser notes Kant's rejection of the secular alternatives of the Aufklärung, namely Epicureanism and Stoicism, and Kant's reaffirmation of traditional Christian view. He provides an interesting discussion of Kant's understanding of the highest good in light of Augustine's City of God, and affirms that the precedent for Kant's argument can be found in both Augustine and Leibniz. Beiser defends the intelligibility of Kant's metaphysical commitments on practical rational grounds, stressing that Kant's doctrine of the highest good and his arguments regarding the conditions of its possibility arise from the "deeper problems he [Kant] is attempting to address, namely that these ideals [moral precepts] cannot have their binding force unless we make definitive constitutive assumptions about the moral structure of the world" (620). Beiser is certainly correct to stress that it is these questions regarding the character of the phenomenal nature in which we exist, and its relation to the imperatives of morality revealing our membership an intelligible world, that drive Kant's understanding of the highest good and the moral faith attendant upon it. He is less successful in providing a close analysis of the details of Kant's arguments concerning why the morally committed individual also needs to make certain assumptions about the ultimate structure of nature as a whole. Nevertheless, this chapter provides a valuable guide to Kant's understanding of moral faith, and it correctly outlines the structure of Kant's argument: it our commitment to the moral law that leads us to affirm that the natural world must have an ethico-teleological goal. The volume concludes, fittingly, with Manfred Kuehn's "Kant's critical philosophy and its reception–the first five years." In this chapter Kuehn provides an overview of the different responses to Kant's thought by his contemporaries, and shows how these responses influenced the direction of Kant's thought. Kuehn focuses specifically on the developments from 1781 to 1786, the period during which Kant's first Critique first appeared and then became increasingly popular. This is an informative essay in the early Wirkungsgeschichte of Kant's thought. The end of the volume contains a very useful selective bibliography focusing on recent books and collections of articles; it contains an inclusive list of books in English and the most important works in French and German. Overall this is an excellent volume, certainly one of the best, and fullest collections of essays on Kant in the English language, covering a wide range of issues in Kant scholarship. It will be helpful to both students and Kant scholars alike, both presenting issues in Kant's philosophy with clarity and rigor as well as showcasing ways of understanding Kant and his philosophical significance by the most prominent of his English speaking interpreters. Jacqueline Mariña Purdue University


Why AI will never rule the world (interview)

Philosophy

Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity â for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans.

          According to the theory, advances in AI â specifically of the machine learning type thatâs able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly â will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain. In this interpretation of events, every AI advance from Jeopardy-winning IBM machines to the massive AI language model GPT-3 is taking humanity one step closer to an existential threat. Weâre literally building our soon-to-be-sentient successors.

          Except that it will never happen. At least, according to the authors of the new book Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear.

Why AI will never rule the world By Luke Dormehl Digital Trends September 25, 2022 Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity - for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans. According to the theory, advances in AI - specifically of the machine learning type that's able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly - will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain. In this interpretation of events, every AI advance from Jeopardy-winning IBM machines to the massive AI language model GPT-3 is taking humanity one step closer to an existential threat. We're literally building our soon-to-be-sentient successors. Except that it will never happen. At least, according to the authors of the new book Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear. Co-authors University at Buffalo philosophy professor Barry Smith and Jobst Landgrebe, founder of German AI company Cognotekt argue that human intelligence won't be overtaken by "an immortal dictator" any time soon - or ever. They told Digital Trends their reasons why. Digital Trends (DT): How did this subject get on your radar? Jobst Landgrebe (JL): I'm a physician and biochemist by training. When I started my career, I did experiments that generated a lot of data. I started to study mathematics to be able to interpret these data, and saw how hard it is to model biological systems using mathematics. There was always this misfit between the mathematical methods and the biological data. In my mid-thirties, I left academia and became a business consultant and entrepreneur working in artificial intelligence software systems. I was trying to build AI systems to mimic what human beings can do. I realized that I was running into the same problem that I had years before in biology. Customers said to me, 'why don't you build chatbots?' I said, 'because they won't work; we cannot model this type of system properly.' That ultimately led to me writing this book. Professor Barry Smith (BS): I thought it was a very interesting problem. I had already inklings of similar problems with AI, but I had never thought them through. Initially, we wrote a paper called 'Making artificial intelligence meaningful again.' (This was in the Trump era.) It was about why neural networks fail for language modeling. Then we decided to expand the paper into a book exploring this subject more deeply. DT: Your book expresses skepticism about the way that neural networks, which are crucial to modern deep learning, emulate the human brain. They're approximations, rather than accurate models of how the biological brain works. But do you accept the core premise that it is possible that, were we to understand the brain in granular enough detail, it could be artificially replicated – and that this would give rise to intelligence or sentience? JL: The name 'neural network' is a complete misnomer. The neural networks that we have now, even the most sophisticated ones, have nothing to do with the way the brain works. The view that the brain is a set of interconnected nodes in the way that neural networks are built is completely naïve. If you look at the most primitive bacterial cell, we still don't understand even how it works. We understand some of its aspects, but we have no model of how it works – let alone a neuron, which is much more complicated, or billions of neurons interconnected. I believe it's scientifically impossible to understand how the brain works. We can only understand certain aspects and deal with these aspects. We don't have, and we will not get, a full If we had a perfect understanding of how each molecule of the brain works, then we could probably replicate it. That would mean putting everything into mathematical equations. Then you could replicate this using a computer. The problem is just that we are unable to write down and create those equations. BS: Many of the most interesting things in the world are happening at levels of granularity that we cannot approach. We just don't have the imaging equipment, and we probably never will have the imaging equipment, to capture most of what's going on at the very fine levels of the brain. This means that we don't know, for instance, what is responsible for consciousness. There are, in fact, a series of quite interesting philosophical problems, which, according to the method that we're following, will always be unsolvable – and so we should just ignore them. Another is the freedom of the will. We are very strongly in favor of the idea that human beings have a will; we can have intentions, goals, and so forth. But we don't know whether or not it's a free will. That is an issue that has to do with the physics of the brain. As far as the evidence available to us is concerned, computers can't have a will. DT: The subtitle of the book is 'artificial intelligence without fear.' What is the specific fear that you refer to? BS: That was provoked by the literature on the singularity, which I know you're familiar with. Nick Bostrom, David Chalmers, Elon Musk, and the like. When we talked with our colleagues in the real world, it became clear to us that there was indeed a certain fear among the populace that AI would eventually take over and change the world to the detriment of humans. We have quite a lot in the book about the Bostrum-type arguments. The core argument against them is that if the machine cannot have a will, then it also cannot have an evil will. Without an evil will, there's nothing to be afraid of. Now, of course, we can still be afraid of machines, just as we can be afraid of guns. But that's because the machines are being managed by people with evil ends. But then it's not AI that is evil; it's the people who build and program the AI DT: Why does this notion of the singularity or artificial general intelligence interest people so much? Whether they're scared by it or fascinated by it, there's something about this idea that resonates with people on a broad level. JL: There's this idea, started at the beginning of the 19th century and then declared by Nietzsche at the end of that century, that God is dead. Since the elites of our society are not Christians anymore, they needed a replacement. Max Stirner, who was, like Karl Marx, a pupil of Hegel, wrote a book about this, saying, 'I am my own god.' If you are God, you also want to be a creator. If you could create a superintelligence then you are like God. I think it has to do with the hypernarcissistic tendencies in our culture. We don't talk about this in the book, but that explains to me why this idea is so attractive in our times in which there is no transcendent entity anymore to turn to. DT: Interesting. So to follow that through, it's the idea that the creation of AI – or the aim to create AI – is a narcissistic act. In that case, the concept that these creations would somehow become more powerful than we are is a nightmarish twist on that. It's the child killing the parent. JL: A bit like that, yes. DT: What for you would be the ultimate outcome of your book if everyone was convinced by your arguments? What would that mean for the future of AI development? JL: It's a very good question. I can tell you exactly what I think would happen – and will happen. I think in the midterm people will accept our arguments, and this will create better applied mathematics. Something that all great mathematicians and physicists are completely aware of was the limitations of what they could achieve mathematically. Because they are aware of this, they focus only on certain problems. If you are well aware of the limitations, then you go through the world and look for these problems and solve them. That's how Einstein found the equations for Brownian motion; how he came up with his theories of radiation and thus initiated the quantum theory of matter. They had a good instinct for which problems are amenable to solutions with mathematics and which are not. If people learn the message of our book, they will, we believe, be able to engineer better systems, because they will concentrate on what is truly feasible – and stop wasting money and effort on something that can't be achieved. BS: I think that some of the message is already getting through, not because of what we say but because of the experiences people have when they give large amounts of money to AI projects, and then the AI projects fail. I guess you know about the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center. I can't remember the exact sum, but I think it was something like $10 billion, which they gave to a famous contractor. In the end, they got nothing out of it. They canceled the contract. (Editor's note: JAIC, a subdivision of the United States Armed Forces, was intended to accelerate the "delivery and adoption of AI to achieve mission impact at scale." It was folded into a larger unified organization, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, with two other offices in June this year. JAIC ceased to exist as its own entity.) DT: What do you think, in high-level terms, is the single most compelling argument that you make in the book? BS: Every AI system is mathematical in nature. Because we cannot model consciousness, will, or intelligence mathematically, these cannot be emulated using machines. Therefore, machines will not become intelligent, let alone superintelligent. JL: The structure of our brain only allows limited models of nature. In physics, we pick a subset of reality that fits to our mathematical modeling capabilities. That is how Newton, Maxwell, Einstein, or Schrödinger obtained their famous and beautiful models. But these can only describe or predict a small set of systems. Our best models are those which we use to engineer technology. We are unable to create a complete mathematical model of animate nature. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.


H. A. Wiltsche and P. Berghofer (eds.): _Phenomenological Approaches to Physics_

Philosophy

A book review of _Phenomenological Approaches to Physics_ (2020) edited by H. A. Wiltsche and P. Berghofer.

Book Review for Phenomenological Reviews: H. A. Wiltsche and P. Berghofer (eds.) Phenomenological Approaches to Physics, Springer (Synthese Library), 2020. Mahmoud Jalloh Phenomenological Approaches to Physics, is a welcome attempt to bridge the gap between two areas of philosophy not often mentioned in the same career, let alone the same breath. The collection provides fertile ground for further work on phenomenological approaches to physics-and science more generally -however, as much as the collection is promising it is also disappointing in the preparatory nature of much of the material. While this is a general vice of the phenomenological tradition-consider how many of Husserl's published works are introductions to phenomenology-in order to appeal to one of the primary audiences of the collection, phenomenology-curious philosophers of physics, further developments with clear consequences are needed. Many of the papers stop just as they've really started. This collection is of value for many purposes: as a general introduction to phenomenology, as a guide to the consequences of phenomenology for science and physics, as a pointer to areas of application for the budding phenomenologist, but that it also provides some indications of particular lines of further development. The editor's introduction is relatively long, but deservedly so, as it does a lot, providing expositions of ten themes from Husserl's oeuvre: anti-psychologism, intentionality, descriptions and eidetics, the epistemic significance of experience, phenomenology as first philosophy, anti-naturalism, the life-world, historiticity and genetic phenomenology, embodiment and intersubjectivity, the epoche1 , transcendental reduction, and transcendental idealism. The sketch of Husserl produced is that of an epistemological internalist who develops a theory of the objective from fundamental subjectivity, who denies empiricism about logic and mathematics, and who holds that phenomenology is a first philosophy which comprises analyses of the essential structures of subjectivity, the ground of all knowledge, therefore legitimizing all other forms of knowledge, sciences. Any reader interested in a first pass at the role of these themes in Husserl's work could probably do so no more efficiently than looking through the first half of this introduction. A highlight of the introduction: a sketch of the relevance of other phenomenologists, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, to the philosophy of physics. The themes brought up in the introduction and elsewhere are suggestive: Heidegger's pluralism regarding scientific standards and the difference in the concepts of time in physics and history; his preemption of the theory-ladenness of observation; his praise of Weyl; his primacy of practical understanding over theoretical knowledge; Merleau-Ponty's participatory realism; his analysis of measurement and rejection of instrumentalism, realism, and idealism, in favor of structuralism. Part 1: On the Origins and Systematic Value of Phenomenological Approaches to Physics Robert Crease's "Explaining Phenomenology to Physicists" is a response to philosophy-phobic physicists, like Hawking, and aims to show how the projects of phenomenological philosophy and physics differ. This amounts to a sort of introduction to the Husserlian distinction between the natural, or naturalistic, attitude of the physicist in her workshop and the more skeptical attitude of the epoche1 adopted by the phenomenologist. Note that Crease makes the same point that Maudlin and other metaphysically oriented philosophers of physics often emphasize, that mathematical formulae do not comprise a theory but require an interpretation, an ontology (57). How this interpretation is established and justified is the common project of the phenomenologist and the analytic metaphysician. But herein lies a problem with the Crease essay, which is that it while it distinguishes analytic (narrowly focused on the logical analysts of science of the early 20th century), pragmatic, and phenomenological approaches to the sciences, Crease does not say enough to distinguish a defense of phenomenological approaches to physics from a defense of a philosophical approach to physics whatsoever. Now Crease may make the point that phenomenology preempted concerns with the metaphysics of physics or concerns regarding the applicability of mathematical idealization to nature that have more recently become central to the philosophy of physics. Further, it is not clear that this is a fair reading of the aims of the logical empiricists: What is the logical empiricist project of establishing how scientific, "theoretical" terms get their meaning if not a concern with the "framing" of scientific theories and "the reciprocal impact of that frame and what appears in it on their way of being" (55)? This is not to say there is no distinction to be drawn, but the discussion here is not fully convincing as an argument for the value of phenomenology in studies of physics in particular. Mirja Hartimo's contribution, "Husserl's Phenomenology of Scientific Practice," fills out Crease's sketch of the phenomenological approach and specifies how Husserl preempts the naturalistic, practice oriented turn in contemporary philosophy of science. This "naturalism" is to be opposed with ontological or methodological naturalism, both of which Husserl rejected. Hartimo recapitulates the difference between the natural and phenomenological attitudes and its production by the epoche1 , in which existence is "bracketed". The case is made that the phenomenological attitude is not inconsistent with the natural attitude (indeed Husserl had, for the most part, the same natural understanding of the sciences as did his contemporaries in Go> ttingen). The Go> ttingen view comprises a preestablished harmony between mathematics and physics, "the axiomatic ideal of mathematics served for Husserl, as well as for his colleagues, as an ideal of scientific rationality, as a device that was taken to guide empirical physical investigations 'regulatively'." (67) This influences the focus on Galileo in Crisis: physics is fundamentally mathematical in nature (68). Harmony amounts to an isomorphism of the axioms and the laws, with the axioms of physics being a formal ontology, a formal definite manifold (69). Husserl's two differences with the Go> ttingen consensus are: (1) scientists should also develop material ontologies, which provide specific normative ideals for the mathematization of nature and its connection to intuition; (2) the normativity of the exact sciences does not extend to all scientific domains, a normative pluralism. (2) is particularly important because phenomenology itself falls short of the axiomatic ideal, due to the inexactness of the relevant essences. Pablo Palmieri's contribution, "Physics as a Form of Life," is an odd fish. It presents itself not as a presentation of Husserl's account of the lifeworld and its relevance to physics but rather as focusing on a foundational question raised by Husserl: "why is it that the axioms of mathematical physics are not selfevident despite the evidence and clarity that is gained through the deductive processes that flow from them?" (80) To answer this question Palmieri embarks on an analysis of physics as a form of "Life" in the sense some historical development. The three epochs of physics which characterize its form of life: (1) the youth of Galileo's axiomatic physics, (2) the senescence of Helmholtz's work on the anharmonic oscillator and the combination of tones, (3) the "posthumous maturity" of physics following quantum physics. These historical studies are interesting and valuable in themselves, especially the Galileo study, particularly regarding the influence of Galileo's aesthethics on his mathematization of nature (84). Unfortunately, how these studies relate to the overall aim of the essay is unclear and is shrouded by the sort of allegorical and flowery prose that turns away many from "continental" approaches more generally. Palmieri's description of the third stage of physics Life as "posthumous maturity" describes a "disarticulation" in physics that comes to a head for Palmieri in Heisenberg's use of (an)harmonic oscillator framework for quantum mechanics. The result of such a "translation" is not a direct analog to the classical treatment of spectra, due to the lack of rules for "composition of the multiplicity into the unity of an individual, by the interpretation of which we might generate the individual utterance that once performed will elicit in our consciousness a corresponding perception in any of the sensory modalities whatever" (100). The obscurity of such bridge principles to observation is again, exactly the crisis of which Husserl was concerned. The upshot seems not to be, as it was for Husserl, a call to action for phenomenological analysis, but rather the essential mystery of nature as "[i]t is nature herself that precludes herself from knowing reflexively her own totality of laws" (83). While this is supposed to have the status of an explanation it is only buttressed with metaphor: "This being hidden of nature as a totality, or her desire or necessity to hide herself from further scrutiny, which I would be tempted to qualify as nature's vow of virginity, explains why the axioms of mathematical physics must appear to our intuitions as obscure" (84). This pessimistic conclusion conflicts with phenomenology's self conception as a progressive research programme, leaving Palmieri own position mysterious, and one suspects that is how he wants it. Norman Sieroka's "Unities of Knowledge and Being-Weyl's Late "Existentialism" and Heideggerian Phenomenology" is a fascinating exposition of Weyl's latter existentialist turn and his engagement with Heidegger's work. Weyl claims that physics is dominated by "symbolic construction", of which axiomatic mathematics stands as paradigm, which are empirically evaluated holistically. Weyl's account of symbolic construction is dependent on the understanding that these symbolic systems are constructed out of particular concrete tokens. Similarly it is essential to the symbolic construction that it is intersubjective and the practitioners of a symbolic system are peers embedded in a wider public. The core of mathematics and the sciences is not logic, but rule-bound "practical management" of symbols (109). This practical level must be fundamental or else we fall into a circle of physical reduction and symbolic representation. Weyl's 1949 paper "Science as Symbolic Construction of Man," explicitly invokes Heidegger's concept of the existential basicness of being-in-the-world as a point of agreement. Weyl does not, however, accept Heidegger's anti-scientific attitude that concludes from this, that science is "inauthentic". Weyl held that scientific practice and philosophical reflection were mutually enriching - particularly moral reflection in the shadow of the bomb. Heidegger's rejection of science is due to symbols being merely present-at-hand, they do not figure in the "care-taking encounter of daily life" (114). The weight of evidence and experience clearly sides with Weyl here, Sieroka raises examples of bridge-building and experimental physics, more simply even the manipulation of symbols in themselves is care-taking in that they are to be interpreted and not only by oneself, in a dubious "private language", but by some community. Here is a missed opportunity to engage with Heidegger's later work, though it cannot be said to have influenced Weyl. Something like "The Question Concerning Technology" shows that Heidegger did not think that modern science and technology were independent of daily life, but rather have a radical and destabilizing effect that inhibits Dasein from encountering its own essence. Though, it is not clear how much this is a rejection of the verdicts of Being and Time, or should correct Sieroka and Weyl's intepretations. The extension of the critique by way of Fritz Medicus, Weyl's colleague, to a critique of "thrownness" and the general receptivity or passivity of Dasein to Being seems besides the point and reliant on a misunderstanding of Heidegger. Medicus' "piglets" complaint about the thrownness of Dasein, can only rest on a misunderstanding of the role of histroicity in Dasein's being (see Division 2, Chapter 5). Intersubjectivity is fundamental to Dasein, Being-with is "equiprimordial" with Dasein's Being-in-theWorld and is an existential characteristic of Dasein, even when it is alone (149-169), this Being-with defines Dasein's inherent historiticity. Dasein is thrown into a culture, into a way of life. Sieroka's comparison of Weyl and Cassirer, that Cassirer's theory of symbolic forms provides a unity of knowledge, while Weyl's provides a unity of being, owing to his existentialist inflection, is interesting but perfunctory. It makes one wonder what such a distinction could tell us about the difference of method between phenomenology and neo-Kantianism, how this might relate to the interpretational dispute at the center of the Davos debate, and how Weyl's conception of physics and mathematics could have played a role in such rifts. Part 2: Phenomenological Contributions to (Philosophy of) Physics "A Revealing Parallel Between Husserl's Philosophy of Science and Today's Scientific Metaphysics" by Matthias Egg aims to show how the crises that Husserl saw as central to the contemporary sciences and his solution are echoed in the scientific metaphysics of Ladyman and Ross (2007). The crisis is rooted in the substitution of the lifeworld for mathematical idealities, which amounts to a forgetting of the "meaning-fundament" of the sciences, undermining their own epistemological standing. Egg frames his comparison of Husserl and the scientific metaphysicians with Habermas' critique of Husserl's project of making science presuppositionless, providing a bais for absolute practical responsibility. The supposed failure is that it is left unexplained how a more perfect theoretical knowledge is to have practical upshot. The lacuna is Platonic mimesis, wherein the philosopher "having grasped the cosmic order through theorizing, the philosopher brings himself into accord with it, whereby theory enters the conduct of life." (129), which is in direct ontological opposition with Husserl's transcendental idealism, as Habermas sees it. (Does Habermas commit the naturalistic fallacy?) Husserl's model claims only that the procedure or methodology of theoretical knowledge that provides normative force on our practical affairs, in Egg's example, our doing of physics. Egg presents Ladyman and Ross as agreeing with Husserl's science-cumEnlightment project, particularly, that science must be central to our worldview as it allows for a unified, intersubjectively valid approach to world even beyond theoretical practice. This too, falls short of Habermas' mimetic ideal -their project could only be preserved in the "ruins of ontology" (130). Ladyman and Ross share some skepticism about strong metaphysics but accept weak metaphysics. Unfortunately, Egg stops just before saying anything more substantive than an observation of convergent philosophical evolution. There is more to be said particularly regarding the link between this sort of communicative conception of the scientific project and structural realism which puts Ladyman and Ross and Husserl in the same camp. The metaphysical essays to follow cover some of what I would like to say, but let me gesture at a possible development. In Ideas II and the fifth Cartesian Meditation, Husserl develops an account of scientific objectivity such that it is constituted by intersubjective agreement via "appresentation". What is intersubjectively available are the appearances of objects, but what is agreed upon are the invariant structures supposed to explain the experiences of the community. Heelan's (1978) hermeneutic interpretation of Husserl provides a picture in which the infinite tasks of mathematization and measurement link together the lifeworld and the scientific image which is constituted by it. There is a structural realist position to be examined here which could provide a unified account of everyday and scientific perception. Lee Hardy's "Physical Things, Ideal Objects, and Theoretical Entities: The Prospects of a Husserlian Phenomenology of Physics" attempts to square Husserl's phenomenology with scientific realism. Husserl's seeming positivism is especially problematic given that Husserl argues "that the objective correlates of the mathematical laws of the physical sciences simply do not exist in the physical sense. They are ideal mathematical objects, not real physical things." (137) Hardy restricts Husserl's instrumentalism to scientific laws rather than scientific theories tout court. Husserl's view is that knowledge of physical objects is gained by mathematical approximation, leaving room open for the positing of actual physical entities. Hardy's argument, a rational reconstruction of a path not (explicitly) taken by Husserl, depends on a distinction that seems both interesting and suspicious. Hardy wishes to distinguish instrumentalism about the laws from instrumentalism regarding theories, the difference between the two lies in the fact that laws specify functional interdependenicies of physical quantities which state how empirical objects behave, but theories explain why physical quantities behave as they do. So then, the instrumentalist holds that the semantic value of theories is limited to that of the laws, which predict observable behavior. The realist holds that scientific theories as have as semantic values the behavior of unobservables. Husserl's radical empiricism is in apparent tension with the realist's explanation, Hardy reconstructs the received view: (1) A obtains if and only if p is true. (2) p is true is and only if p is evident. (3) p is true if and only if A is intuitively given in an act of consciousness. Ergo, (4) A obtains if and only if A is intuitively given in an act of consciousness. Theoretical entities cannot be so given, so statements about them can never be true, so we ought not be committed to them. This interpretation Hardy rejects in favor of one which changes the role of experience from semantic-metaphysical to epistemic: S is justified in believing p if and only if the correlative states of affairs A is given to S in an intuitive act of consciousness. (143) Hardy specifies that the perceivability condition on existence was meant to be dependent on an ideal possibility, not an actual possibility (dependent on sensory apparatuses). This point goes some way towards specifying the meaning of transcendental idealism, though this seems to go astray in attempting to recover realism. Transcendental idealism requires that possible perception by a transcendental subjectivity constitutes (the preconditions for) existence. Hardy picks up the thread in the Crisis regarding the essential approximative nature of the sciences as their conclusions are mediated by ideal, mathematical constructions: Exact, objective knowledge is possible only by way of a passage through the ideal; and for that very reason will never be more than approximative knowledge of the real. (146) In Crisis, Hardy claims, Husserl distinguishes the ideal, physical object and the perceived object ontologically: the objects of ordinary life are not "physical" objects. It is these limit-idealized objects that Husserl is anti-realist with respect to. The trouble with Hardy's distinction between theories and laws and between real objects and idealized objects is that the approximation relation is left unexplained. There remains an explanatory gap as to why physical objects should be subject to laws that properly only have idealities as their subjects. Arezoo Islami and H. A. Wiltsche's "A Match Made on Earth: On the Applicability of Mathematics in Physics" shows how phenomenology can provide a response to Wigner's puzzle, "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics", by moving on from why-questions to how-questions. The puzzle arises from a rejection of Pythagorean mathematical monism towards which the phenomenologist is officially neutral, due to the epoche1 , setting aside why-questions altogether. To answer the how-questions, the phenomenologist must also provide both synchronic and diachronic accounts of how we apply mathematics. The authors explicate constitution and replacement. They show what is meant by the horizon of experience, all the non-actual aspects of some experience which frame one's interpretation of it, one's anticipations. From this constitution is explicated: It is this process of intending objects through specific noemata and then constantly projecting new sensory data against horizons of possible further experiences that phenomenologists call constitution. Of particular importance in this context are those aspects of experience that remain invariant... (169) From these invariances of the noemata, lawlike relations are found and suitably objective properties can be ascribed of the noema. This structure generalizes to scientific constitution from the example of perceptual constitution. Aiming to intend all of reality through mathematical noemata is Galileo's great leap forward. Doing so is to replace the lifeworld with the scientific image. Nature is mathematical because we have made it so. While I am largely sympathetic with this approach, and hold that it contributes to a structuralist view that is worth developing, to satisfy mysterions like Wigner specific accounts of such constitution is needed. Thomas Ryckman's essay, "The Gauge Principle, Hermann Weyl, and Symbolic Constructions from the 'Purely Infinitesimal'", provides a mini-history of Weyl's development of the gauge principle (a fuller history in Ryckman 2005), in which Weyl is motivated to investigate Lie groups and algebras by phenomenology on the one hand and Naturwirkungphysik on the other. Naturwirkungphysik is a standard for explanation, "that all finite changes are to be comprehended as arising through infinitesimal increments" (182). In practice this is to take locally defined tangent spaces to be explanatorily fundamental. For Weyl, this standard of locality is justified by appeal to not just phenomenological epistemology, that direct givenness to the ego is the ground of all essential insight into the structure of things, and this givenness is attenuated at spatial distance, but full blown transcendental idealism: insofar as symbolic construction of the "objective reality" of the purportedly mindindependent objects of physics is, per Husserl, a constitution of the sense of such objects as having "the sense of 'existing in themselves". (184-5) Just as the previous essay establishes, the objects of mathematical physics are constructions which intend transcendent objects. However these objects are only fixed up to an isomorphism, any further "essence" is beyond cognitive grasp and therefore unreal (188). Ryckmann provides an able and clear derivation of the gauge principle in QED and a quick rundown of how this generalizes in the Standard Model. While this is a valuable contribution to the collection, those familiar with Ryckman's past work will wish that the closing remarks regarding the standard model and the Weyl-Nozickean (2001) slogan, "objectivity is invariance", were expanded upon. I look forward to further development of the alternative view implied by Ryckman's interpretational challenge this slogan, which centers locality as the source of gauge transformations (199). Part 3: Phenomenological Approaches to the Measurement Problem Steven French's "From a Lost History to a New Future: Is a Phenomenological Approach to Quantum Physics Viable?" does well to show that the phenomenological background of Fritz London was deeply influential on his approach to the measurement problem (with Bauer) and that this influence has been covered over by misinterpretation. The measurement problem is essentially the apparent inconsistency of deterministic dynamics of quantum mechanics and the collapse of the wave function. London and Bauer have been taken to merely restate von Neumann's notorious solution, that the uniqueness of the interaction of the system with a conscious observer explains how and when the "collapse" occurs. French shows this picture presented by Wigner, which fell to the criticism of Shimony and Putnam, to be a strawman. French argues that London and Bauer's phenomenological account of quantum measurement can stand up to such criticisms and for London. Quantum mechanics presupposes a theory of knowledge, a relation between observer and object "quite different from that implicit in naive realism" (211). Measurement, considered subjectively, is distinguishable from the unitary evolution of the quantum state by introspection giving the observer the "right to create his own objectivity" (212).This is not some (pseudo-)causal mind-world interaction that creates a collapse but rather a precondition for the quantum system to be treated objectively and by a different mathematical function the precondition being a reflective act of consciousness in which the ego-pole and object-pole of experience are distinguished, not a substantial dualism, "thereby cutting the 'chain of statistical correlations'" (212-3). The discussion that follows, while suggestive, shows that it is not clear how this general phenomenological view about the nature of objectivity is supposed to remove the particular quantum measurement problem. Whether this is the fault of French or of London and Bauer is unclear, the most direct quotation from London and Bauer suggests that this distinction of the ego and the object somehow licenses the transition from representing the measurement situation by the wave function, ψ, to representing the system as in a particular eigenstate. This is much too oblique, given that the nature of such fundamental acts of consciousness is, even to the phenomenological initiate, obscure, and requires some substantive claims about the determinate nature of consciousness. French too must find the explanation as given by London and Bauer incomplete as he invokes decoherence, decision theory, and the "relational" interpretation as elements of a fuller story, presenting something, protestations aside, very close to Everettianism indeed. If such a distinctive and useful interpretation can be fleshed out on phenomenological grounds, it would be the most direct and substantive proof of the progressive nature of a phenomenological programme. Michel Bitbol's "A Phenomenological Ontology for Physics: Merleau-Ponty and QBism" is another breath of fresh air in the collection, exploring phenomenological approach other than Husserl's. Taking the primacy of lifeworld and Bohr's challenge to traditional scientific epistemology as starting points, the essay sets up correspondence between Fuch's participatory realism and Merleau-Ponty's endo-ontology. More generally Bitbol takes recent developments in the philosophy of quantum mechanics, like Peres' nointepretation and Zeillinger's information-theoretic approach, to "all seem to be pointing in the same direction", in line with the phenomenological approach to the sciences as tools for navigation in the world. These are the pragmatists, as distinguished from the interpreters. Bitbol goes on to describe how the antiinterpretational approach is phenomenological by establishing an epoche1 for quantum physics. Rather than understand the states of quantum systems in a Hilbert space as properly predicative, we bracket any ontological posit and treat these states functionally as informational bridges between the preparation and outcome of experiments. Bitbol then considers a question a level up: what should the world be like in order to display such resistance to being represented as an object of thought? Answering this question would be tantamount to formulating a new kind of ontology, a non-object-based ontology, an ontology of what cannot be represented as an object external to the representation itself. (233) For Merleau-Ponty (and Michel Henry), the non-obectual ontology is provided by the priority of the body and raw, original experience. This is an ontology of radical situatedness: an ontology in which we are not onlookers of a nature given out there, but rather intimately intermingled with nature, somewhere in the midst of it... we cannot be construed as point-like spectators of what is manifest; instead, we are a field of experiences that merges with what appears in a certain region of it. This endo-ontology is therefore an ontology of the participant in Being, rather than an ontology of the observer of beings. (236) Here the central self-consciousness of transcendental idealism becomes self-perception of the body. In physics, this is translated into a participatory realism, wherein the observer is involved in the creation of Being. Merleau-Ponty's own statement of the relationship between his phenomenology of embodiment and physics starts from the observation that physics always attempts to take in the subjective as a part of or a special case of the objective. This is something of a category error, and in quantum mechanics it seems that there is a concrete proof of the impossibility of eliminating the subjective, or better yet shows that the objective-subjective distinction is not well formed. These are interesting points and one wishes that Bitbol (and Merleau-Ponty himself) would have spelled out this metaphysical picture in more detail. While the correspondence with QBism seems somewhat plausible, it is not shown that either view commits one to the other or that this endo-ontology provides an advance on the anti-metaphysical orientation of the QBist. The remarks regarding probability are paltry and given the significance of probabilities in quantum mechanics, a full account of is necessary if there is to be much uptake-the primary limitation here seems to be that Merleau-Ponty did not get to consider this matter much prior to his death. In contrast, "QBism from a Phenomenomenological Point of View: Husserl and QBism" by Laura de La Tremblaye is one of the fullest contributions in the collection. This essay serves as an able introduction to non-denomenational QBism, presented as a generalization of probability theory and cataloged as a participatory realist, -epistemic "interpretation" of quantum mechanics. QBism "stands out as an exception" (246) in this category because it focuses on belief, adding the Born Rule as an extra, normative rule in Bayesianism (the axiomatization is not explicitly shown). QBism removes the ontological significance of the collapse of the wave function, the state description and reality are decoupled, the collapse is a statement of some (ideal) agent's belief state. Accordingly, "knowledge" yielded by measurements is redefined as information about the system that is accepted via measurement (250). While the probabilities assigned are subjective, the updating rules are objective: It is no trivial task to draw a clear line between the subjective and the objective aspects of the Born rule... Fuchs and Schack invoke a completely new form of intersubjectivity. It is through the use of Bayesian probabilities that the multiplicity of subjectivities elaborates a reasoning that can be shared by everyone, and that, consequently, can be called "objective" in precisely this limited sense... this leads to the new conception of knowledge: knowledge is no longer understood in terms of an objectively true description of the intrinsic properties of the world; it is rather understood as the kind of knowledge that is needed to guide the future research of any agent, thus implying a weaker form of objectivity. (251) For Fuchs, the measuring device is analogous to a sensory organ, measurement is an experience. This leads de La Tremblaye to consider two notions of experience, one from Husserl, the other from William James, who influenced Chris Fuchs. de La Tremblaye argues that it is Husserl's model of experience as involving a normative, intentional horizonal structure, that better coheres with the Qbist view. This shows a positive contribution phenomenology may offer to QBism: an explanation of the source of the Born Rule's normativity. Another would be an adequate explanation of how it is that the rules of Bayesian probability can be objective via the intersubjective constitution of objectivity essential to Husserl's model of the sciences. In sum: this collection is promising though deficient in some respects. It will provide a number of starting points for a further development of a phenomenology of physics and provides the curious or sympathetic philosopher of physics something to chew on, but it is not a full meal. Many of the contributions would do well as additions to a graduate seminar or undergraduate course on phenomenology or the philosophy of science, with the materials on quantum mechanics showing the most potential for further development.1 1 Thanks to Porter Williams for reading the collection with me and sharing his thoughts with me, which allowed me to sharpen my own. References Heelan, P. A. (1987). "Husserl's Later Philosophy of Natural Science," in Philosophy of Science 54(3): 368390. Heidegger, Martin. (1977/1993). "The Question Concerning Technology," in Basic Writings, David F Krell (ed.), New York: HarperCollins. ---. (1962). Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.), New York: Harper and Row. Ladyman, J. & Ross, D. et al. (2007). Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized. Oxford University Press. Nozick, R. (2001). Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ryckman, T. (2005). The Reign of Relativity: Philosophy in Physics 1915-1925. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Philosophy

The suggestion that philosophers are responsible for global warming seems, on the face of it, absurd.  However, that we might cause global warming has been known for over a century.  If we had had in existence a more rigorous kind of academic inquiry devoted to promoting human welfare, giving priority to problems of living, humanity might have become aware of the dangers of global warming long ago, and might have taken steps to meet these dangers decades ago.  That we do not have academic inquiry of this type, giving priority to problems of living and able to warn humanity of the impending disaster of global warming, is the result of a philosophical mistake â a mistake about what constitutes rigorous intellectual inquiry.  This is a mistake of philosophers.  Thus philosophers, in failing to grasp the profound intellectual and humanitarian failings of academia as it is at present organized (the outcome of implementing a seriously defective philosophy of inquiry) can perhaps be said to be responsible for global warming.

Are Philosophers Responsible for Global Warming? (Philosophy Now, issue 65, January/February 2008, pp. 12-13) Nicholas Maxwell says we need a total rethink concerning the way we think Are we philosophers responsible for global warming? It sounds absolutely crazy to suggest we are. How could our harmless, minute community of scholars, agonizing about abstruse intellectual problems, have any major role in bringing about global warming? But consider... Humanity has known about global warming for a long time. John Tyndall discovered that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas as long ago as 1859, and Svante Arrhenius realized in 1896 that we would cause global warming. Living in Sweden, he thought it would be a good thing. But the first person really to discover that we are causing global warming was Guy Callendar, who gave a lecture to the Meteorological Society in London on the subject in 1938. He was not believed. Of course, 1938 was not the best time to make the announcement! Any lingering doubts should have been removed, however when, in the early 1960s, Charles Keeling made extremely accurate measurements of the increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere [there is an article by his son in this issue Ed]. What is so shocking is that it has taken so long several decades for humanity to begin to take the impending threat seriously; let alone work out what needs to be done; let alone do it. But for adequate action to have occurred several decades ago, we would have had to have had traditions and institutions of inquiry devoted to helping humanity learn what our problems of living are and what we need to do about them. Global warming is the outcome of the way we live, and in order to arrest it we need to change the way we live. Having a kind of academic inquiry that gave intellectual priority to articulating, and working out how to tackle, problems of living, would have helped enormously with alerting the public to the problem of global warming, and to what needs to be done in response to it. But we have not had, and still do not have, academic inquiry of this type devoted to helping humanity learn how to tackle its problems in increasingly rationally cooperative ways. Instead we have science this long tradition of inquiry devoted to improving knowledge and technological know-how. But the successful pursuit of knowledge dissociated from a more fundamental concern for problems of living is a recipe for disaster. Science and technology massively increase our power to act. Inevitably, given human nature and human fallibility, this unprecedented increase in our powers has both good and bad consequences and that is just what has occurred. Modern science and technology have made possible all the multitude of blessings of the modern world: but they have also made possible the lethal character of modern war and terrorism the threats posed by modern armaments, conventional, chemical, biological and nuclear. Science without wisdom has led to the pollution of sea, air and land; rapid human population growth; rapid extinction of other species and destruction of natural habitats such as tropical rain forests; and the intensification of inequalities of wealth and power around the globe. In fact it is hardly too much to say that scientific and technological research have made possible all our current global problems. Above all, they have made possible global warming, the product of population growth, industry and modern transport. It is here that we philosophers enter the picture. Humanity is suffering from a massive, institutionalized philosophical blunder. The pursuit of scientific knowledge dissociated from the more fundamental tackling of problems of living is, as we have seen, a recipe for disaster. Judged from the highly conventional standpoint of helping to promote human welfare, inquiry devoted overwhelmingly to acquiring knowledge is damagingly even disastrously irrational. If academic inquiry were to help promote human welfare rationally, then at the very least, it would give intellectual priority to the tasks of (1) articulating and clarifying problems of living; and (2) proposing and critically assessing possible solutions - possible and actual actions. Tackling problems of technological know-how would be important, but secondary. In short, humanity urgently needs a kind of inquiry rationally devoted to helping us create a better -world. This is a type of inquiry that we do not at present have. We do not have it because academia has institutionalized a seriously defective and damaging conception of inquiry. This is a philosophical blunder. It is a blunder about what the aims and methods of science, and of academic inquiry more generally, ought to be. Philosophers ought to have cottoned on to this blunder long ago, and done everything in their collective power to alert humanity to just how damaging and dangerous this blunder is. They ought to have shouted from the rooftops about the philosophical disaster that lies behind so many of our human disasters! Philosophers have done nothing of the kind. In particular, philosophers have failed to grasp, let alone communicate, this simple message: We need a new, more rational kind of academic inquiry that gives intellectual priority to tackling problems of wise living over problems of technical knowledge. In particular, we need this if we are to learn in time what we need to do to avoid the worst that global warming may inflict upon us. So we philosophers are, in a way, responsible for global warming. We are responsible for having failed decades ago to warn humanity that it possesses only a dangerously irrational instrument of learning, and urgently needs to develop one that is more rational, better designed from the standpoint of helping people learn how to live well. Back in 1976 I argued for the need to develop the new kind of inquiry in my first book What's Wrong With Science? (Bran's Head Books). And in the Orwellian year of 19841 spelled it out in a much more detailed way in From Knowledge to Wisdom (Blackwell). Since then, I have reformulated and developed the argument in further books, papers, lectures, articles, letters to newspapers, radio interviews, email discussion groups - every way I know how. As far as the philosophy community is concerned, by and large, the message has fallen on deaf ears. However, I feel I must persist as the dangers from global warming in particular are getting very close. Given the urgency of our situation the unprecedented perils associated with the new, immense powers bequeathed to (some of) us by science we philosophers ought to do everything we can in our professional capacities to get the message across: there is a very serious philosophical disaster at the root of many of our current human disasters at the root of our current incapacity to respond adequately to our current global problems. We need to bring about a revolution in the aims and methods the philosophy of the academic enterprise so that it takes up its proper task of helping humanity learn how to create a better world or at least avoid some of the worst possible futures. I hope my fellow philosophers will at least turn their attention to the argument that we urgently need to transform the academic enterprise. Anyone interested need only click on www.nick-maxwell.demon.co.uk to find out more. © NICHOLAS MAXWELL 2008 Nicholas Maxwell is Emeritus Reader in Philosophy of Science at University College London. A revised and extended 2nd edition of his From Knowledge to Wisdom has recently been published by Pentire Press.


Philosophy

Nowadays, protecting trust in social sciences also means engaging in open community dialogue, which helps to safeguard robustness and improve efficiency of research methods. The combination of open data, open review and open dialogue may sound simple but implementation in the real world will not be straightforward. However, in view of Begley and Ellisâs (2012) statement that, âthe scientific process demands the highest standards of quality, ethics and rigour,â they are worth implementing. More importantly, they are feasible to work on and likely will help to restore plausibility to social sciences research. Therefore, I feel it likely that the triplet of open data, open review and open dialogue will gradually emerge to become policy requirements regardless of the research funding source.

Open data, open review and open dialogue in making social sciences plausible Quan-Hoang Vuong Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research Western University Hanoi, Vietnam This paper has been published by: Nature: Scientific Data Updates Date: 12 December 2017 Publisher's URL: http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2017/12/12/authors-corner-opendata-open-review-and-open-dialogue-in-making-social-sciences-plausible/ Version enclosed: web pdf * Bibliographic note: Vuong QH. Open data, open review and open dialogue in making social sciences plausible. Nature: Scientific Data Updates, 12 December 2017. Available from: <http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2017/12/12/authors-corner-open-dataopen-review-and-open-dialogue-in-making-social-sciences-plausible/> Abstract: A growing awareness of the lack of reproducibility has undermined society's trust and esteem in social sciences. In some cases well-known results have been fabricated or the underlying data has turned out to have weak technical foundations. Many researchers have investigated the plausibility of findings in the social sciences and humanities. A typical example is the mysterious Critical Minimum Positivity Ratio 2.9013 by Fredrickson and Losada (2005), which claimed to show that there exists such a positivity ratio and that "an individual's degree of flourishing could be predicted by that person's ratio of positive to negative emotions over time". This ratio had once been a well-known, highly influential and greatly admired psychological "constant" until it was shown by Brown, Sokal and Friedman (2013) to be an unfounded, arbitrary and meaningless number. To address the plausibility problem, I suggest that a combination of open data, open peer-review and open community dialogue, could serve as a feasible option for the social sciences. References: Aarts AA et al (2015) Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science; 349 (6251): aac4716, doi:10.1126/science.aac4716. Bammer G (2016) What constitutes appropriate peer review for interdisciplinary research? Palgrave Communications; 2: 16017, doi:10.1057/palcomms.2016.17. Begley CG and Ellis LM (2012) Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research. Nature; 483 (7391): 531–533, doi:10.1038/483531a. Brown NJL, Sokal AD, and Friedman HL (2013) The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: the critical positivity ratio. American Psychologist; 68 (9): 801–813, doi:10.1037/a0032850. Butler D (2016) Wellcome Trust launches open-access publishing venture. Nature News; available from: <http://www.nature.com/news/wellcome-trust-launches-open-access-publishing-venture1.20220>. Butler D (2017) Gates Foundation announces open-access publishing venture. Nature; 543 (7647): 599, doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21700. Eglen SJ et al (2017) Toward standard practices for sharing computer code and programs in neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience; 20 (6): 770-773, doi:10.1038/nn.4550. Fredrickson BL and Losada MF (2005) Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychologist; 60 (7): 678-686, doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.7.678. Jaynes ET (2003) Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. London, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nguyen HM (2017) Inequality in healthcare costs between residing and non-residing patients: evidence from Vietnam. Int. Journal for Equity in Health; 16 (1): 76, doi:10.1186/s12939-017-0581-3. Nosek BA et al (2015) Promoting an open research culture. Science; 348 (6242): 1422-1425, doi: 10.1126/science.aab2374. Scientific Data Editorial (2017) Open for business. Scientific Data; 4: 170058, doi:10.1038/sdata.2017.58. Van Noorden R (2013) Company offers portable peer review. Nature; 494 (7436): 161, doi: 10.1038/494161a. Vuong QH (2017) Survey data on Vietnamese propensity to attend periodic general health examinations. Scientific Data; 4: 170142, doi:10.1038/sdata.2017.142. Vuong QH and Nguyen TK (2016) Data on Vietnamese patients' financial burdens and risk of destitution. Data in Brief; 9: 543-548, doi:10.1016/j.dib.2016.09.040. Walsh E, Rooney M, Appleby L, and Wilkinson G (2000) Open peer review: a randomised controlled trial. British Journal of Psychiatry; 176 (1) 47-51; doi:10.1192/bjp.176.1.47. nature.com Sitemap Log In Register Previous post Author's Corner: Revisiting the personalities of wild chimpanzees QUAN HOANG VUONG SCIENTIFIC DATA | SCIENTIFIC DATA December 12, 2017 | 2:41 pm | Posted by Varsha Khodiyar | Category: Author's Corner, Guest Posts Guest post by Quan-Hoang Vuong of Centre for Interdisciplinary Social Research, Western University Hanoi, Vietnam A growing awareness of the lack of reproducibility has undermined society's trust and esteem in social sciences. In some cases, well-known results have been fabricated or the underlying data have turned out to have weak technical foundations. Many researchers have investigated the plausibility of findings in the social sciences and humanities. A typical example is the mysterious Critical Minimum Positivity Ratio 2.9013 by Fredrickson and Losada (2005), which claimed to show that there exists such a positivity ratio and that "an individual's degree of flourishing could be predicted by that person's ratio of positive to negative emotions over time". This ratio had once been a wellknown, highly influential and greatly admired psychological "constant" until it was shown by Brown, Sokal and Friedman (2013) to be an unfounded, arbitrary and meaningless number. To address the plausibility problem, I suggest that a combination of open data, open peer-review and open community dialogue, could serve as a feasible option for the social sciences. PostBlogScientific Data http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2017/12/12/authors-corner-open-data-open-review-and-open-dialogue-in-making-social-sciences-plausible/ Author's Corner: Open data, open review and... 1 of 5 12/12/2017, 9:47 PM Open data Ethical standards for open data can be difficult to meet. As I discuss below, my own experience of publishing with Scientific Data (Vuong 2017) showed me firsthand the issues with managing ethical concerns. However, addressing these issues is not impossible, and underneath the difficulty and challenges lies the beauty of shared values and open thinking. Still, psychological and financial barriers to open data remain. Although it sounds simple, the practice of pursuing an open data policy has turned out to be complicated and hard to achieve, so that "nudging scientific practices toward greater openness requires complementary and coordinated efforts from all stakeholders" (Nosek et al 2015). Unfortunately, the scientific community has not always taken this seriously (Begley and Ellis 2012), forsaking the opportunity for their valuable data to stand the test of time. Now with the existence of reliable data repositories such as Harvard Dataverse, Open Science Framework, Mendeley, UK Data Archive, depositing data for public use and replication has never been easier. Open publishing platforms such as F1000Research even helps to securely deposit multiple data sets to their own systems without reliance on a third party's service. Scientific Data goes even further to the ideal of removing restrictions on use of open data for commercial purposes, by advocating the practice of generating economic value through commercial enterprise, and showcasing the potential benefit for society and the economy (Scientific Data Editorial, "Open for business"). A benefit to authors of sharing data with a scholarly article is the opportunity for their data to be examined by other scholars, and possibly even lead to further scientific discoveries. The authors have the opportunity of having their colleagues verify both the soundness of data and robustness of the scientific process-as part of a cumulative process of uncertainty reduction (Aarts et al 2015). This is how the scientific workhorse of self-correction operates. My own experiences of open data Sometimes the process of data reuse can be quite fast, as is my own experience. When publishing a data article in Data in Brief, with open data sets deposited to Mendeley Data (Vuong and Nguyen, 2016), I was not sure if the data would be reused. To my surprise, a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh used them to make a quality contribution to International Journal for Equity in Health (Nguyen 2017). How quickly did this all happen? My paper was published on 30 September 2016 and Nguyen's manuscript was submitted on 15 November 2016! Publishing data that was later reused was a special experience. Work value is transmitted via rigorous peer-review, to data users, i.e., other researchers, for the sake of advancing human knowledge. My own questions about the data's value were answered not just once, with the editorial and peer-review process, but twice and perhaps more than twice, with subsequent scientific publications that used the contributed data. My subsequent experience while preparing data for publication at Scientific Data was even more special and unique, in the sense that meeting the most rigorous and demanding criteria boosted the sharpness, clarity, transparency, ethical values and reusability of my data. Even a highly http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2017/12/12/authors-corner-open-data-open-review-and-open-dialogue-in-making-social-sciences-plausible/ Author's Corner: Open data, open review and... 2 of 5 12/12/2017, 9:47 PM accomplished author can find that the publishing process at Scientific Data enhances their own learning attitude and scientific exploration. Open review In the course of encouraging transparency and open science for the sake of better science for all, open review has emerged to be a commendable solution. This may sound strange to researchers in social sciences, where double-blind review has been predominant; however, theoretically the system has its advantages. Evidence from Walsh, Rooney, Appleby and Wilkinson (2000) supports open peer-review since signed reviews are of higher quality, more courteous, and more thoughtful. In addition, social values of open peer-review cannot be ignored as "Improvement of journal policies can help those values become more evident in daily practice and ultimately improve the public trust in science, and science itself," (Nosek et al 2015). Heavyweight funders also see the value in the transparent peer-review process, public judgments, and the system's ability to address the issues of interdisciplinary research review as raised in Bammer (2016). That is why the young platform F1000Research received substantial support not long after its debut (Van Noorden, 2013), from Wellcome Trust in 2016 (Butler 2016) and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2017 (Butler 2017). As Begley and Ellis (2012) put it, social sciences now need that open review system, which helps facilitate a transparent discovery process leading to significant social benefits. Open community dialogue. We refer to an enlarged notion of "dialogue" that consists of technical expert discussions about scientific methods and computer codes (Eglen et al 2017) and the research communication processes that can be made available to the community for evaluation, critique, reuse or extension (Nosek et al 2015). PubPeer has further incentivized the need for open community dialogue, as flagging a paper on the site is now perceived (incorrectly) by many as a threat. This is a technical expertise community that can help fix problems, deal with statistical weaknesses (that is to improve overall quality of manuscripts), and serve the quality gatekeeping for scientific outlets. PubPeer has been pushing what Eglen et al (2017) advocate, "Share the methods and computer codes." In social sciences, their values help update and verify, "stylized facts," in a Bayesian probabilistic world where, "an erroneous argument does not necessarily lead to a wrong conclusion," due to Gödel's theorem (Jaynes 2003). Nowadays, protecting trust in social sciences also means engaging in open community dialogue, which helps to safeguard robustness and improve efficiency of research methods. The combination of open data, open review and open dialogue may sound simple but implementation in the real world will not be straightforward. However, in view of Begley and Ellis's (2012) statement that, "the scientific process demands the highest standards of quality, ethics and rigour," they are worth implementing. More importantly, they are feasible to work on and likely will help to restore plausibility to social sciences research. Therefore, I feel it likely that the triplet of open data, open review and open dialogue will gradually emerge to become policy requirements regardless of the research funding source. http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2017/12/12/authors-corner-open-data-open-review-and-open-dialogue-in-making-social-sciences-plausible/ Author's Corner: Open data, open review and... 3 of 5 12/12/2017, 9:47 PM References Aarts AA et al (2015) Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science; 349 (6251): aac4716, doi:10.1126/science.aac4716. Bammer G (2016) What constitutes appropriate peer review for interdisciplinary research? Palgrave Communications; 2: 16017, doi:10.1057/palcomms.2016.17. Begley CG and Ellis LM (2012) Drug development: Raise standards for preclinical cancer research. Nature; 483 (7391): 531–533, doi:10.1038/483531a. Brown NJL, Sokal AD, and Friedman HL (2013) The complex dynamics of wishful thinking: the critical positivity ratio. American Psychologist; 68 (9): 801–813, doi:10.1037/a0032850. Butler D (2016) Wellcome Trust launches open-access publishing venture. Nature News Butler D (2017) Gates Foundation announces open-access publishing venture. Nature; 543 (7647): 599, doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21700. Eglen SJ et al (2017) Toward standard practices for sharing computer code and programs in neuroscience. Nature Neuroscience; 20 (6): 770-773, doi:10.1038/nn.4550. Fredrickson BL and Losada MF (2005) Positive affect and the complex dynamics of human flourishing. American Psychologist; 60 (7): 678-686, doi:10.1037/0003-066X.60.7.678. Jaynes ET (2003) Probability Theory: The Logic of Science. London, UK: Cambridge University Press. Nguyen HM (2017) Inequality in healthcare costs between residing and non-residing patients: evidence from Vietnam. Int. Journal for Equity in Health; 16 (1): 76, doi:10.1186/s12939-017-0581-3. Nosek BA et al (2015) Promoting an open research culture. Science; 348 (6242): 1422-1425, doi:10.1126/science.aab2374. Scientific Data Editorial (2017) Open for business. Scientific Data; 4: 170058, doi:10.1038/sdata.2017.58. Van Noorden R (2013) Company offers portable peer review. Nature; 494 (7436): 161, doi:10.1038/494161a. Vuong QH (2017) Survey data on Vietnamese propensity to attend periodic general health examinations. Scientific Data; 4: 170142, doi:10.1038/sdata.2017.142. Vuong QH and Nguyen TK (2016) Data on Vietnamese patients' financial burdens and risk of destitution. Data in Brief; 9: 543-548, doi:10.1016/j.dib.2016.09.040. Walsh E, Rooney M, Appleby L, and Wilkinson G (2000) Open peer review: a randomised controlled trial. British Journal of Psychiatry; 176 (1) 47-51; doi:10.1192/bjp.176.1.47. http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2017/12/12/authors-corner-open-data-open-review-and-open-dialogue-in-making-social-sciences-plausible/ Author's Corner: Open data, open review and... 4 of 5 12/12/2017, 9:47 PM © 2017 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All Rights Reserved. partner of AGORA, HINARI, OARE, INASP, ORCID, CrossRef and COUNTER Previous post Author's Corner: Revisiting the personalities of wild chimpanzees Comments There are currently no comments. You need to log in or register to comment. http://blogs.nature.com/scientificdata/2017/12/12/authors-corner-open-data-open-review-and-open-dialogue-in-making-social-sciences-plausible/ Author's Corner: Open data, open review and... 5 of 5 12/12/2017, 9:47 PM