Models: Representation and the Scientific UnderstandingSpringer 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 |
371 | |
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abstract activity Agassi alternative animal argue argument artifacts becomes body Boston Studies characterized claim classical cognitive Cohen and Marx conceived concepts consciousness constancy construction context critical critique demarcation Descartes developmental psychology Diderot distinction effect ellipse entities existence formal framework function genesis geometrical optics heuristic history of science human action ideas identity individual infinite insofar interaction interpretation Joseph Agassi knowledge language Leibniz linear perspective logical materialism materialist matter means mental metaphysics methodological modes of action monism nature norm notion object ontological organism perception perceptual constancy perspective philosophy of perception Philosophy of Science physical Piaget picture Popper practice praxis problem production propose psychology question rational reconstruction reduction relation represent representation scientific theory sense shape simply social species Spinoza statements structure substance systematic teleological theoretical thesis things tilted circle transformation truth understanding universe vision visual visual perception Wartofsky