Models: Representation and the Scientific Understanding

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Springer Science & Business Media, 1979 M10 31 - 390 pages
Marx Wartofsky has been working for many years within an unusual confluence of philosophical problems. He brings to these intersecting problems his comprehensive intelligence, at once imaginative and rigorous, analytic and historical. He is a philosopher's philosopher, but also Everyman's. Wartofsky is philosopher of the natural and the social sciences, of perception, esthetics and the creative arts, of the 18th century French and the 19th century Germans, of politics and morality, ofthe methods and morals of medicine, and it is plain, of all human existence. To a colleague, he seems Jack-of-all-philosophical-trades, and master of them too. The reader soon will learn that Wartofsky is a genial, lucid and relaxed philosophical companion, deeply serious but without noticeable anxiety. I need not highlight these selected epistemological papers gathered as, and about, Models, since Wartofsky's own introductory remarks are helpful and stimulating in that respect. I need only, after 21 years of friendship and collaboration with him, warn the reader to beware of how profound and provocative these papers will show themselves to be beneath their good-humored and swiftly-flowing surface. And I must publicly note the pleasure with which I welcome Marx Wartofsky's volume to our Boston Studies. Boston University R.S.C. Center for the Philosophy and History of Science September 1979 vii TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITORIAL PREFACE VII xi AC K NOWLEDGEMENTS xiii INTRODUCTION The Model Muddle: Proposals for an Immodest Realism 1.
 

Contents

Proposals for an Immodest Realism
1
Models Metaphysics and the Vagaries of Empiricism
24
Metaphysics as Heuristic for Science 1965
40
Matter Action and Interaction 1973
90
Towards a Critical Materialism 1971
104
The Relation Between Philosophy of Science and History
119
Models as Modes of Action 1968
140
Genetic Epistemology
154
The Virtues of Constancy
211
Spinozas Construction of
231
in Spinozas Philosophy 1978
255
Humes Concept of Identity and the Principium
277
Diderot and the Development of Materialist Monism
297
Conflicting Models of Education?
338
Art as Humanizing Praxis 1976
357
NAME INDEX
371

Pictures Representation and the Understanding 1972
175

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