History and Philosophy of Science

Permanent link for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/17

The Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University was founded in 1960 by the late Norwood Russell Hanson. It was Hanson's view, paraphrasing Kant, that history of science without philosophy of science is blind, and that philosophy of science without history of science is empty. The department combines studies in both disciplines, enabling students to pursue both master's and doctoral training in history and philosophy of science.

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Charles Homer Haskins and Medieval Science
(1984-12-28) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
Although George Orwell made the year 1984 infamous, the very antithesis of intellectual inquiry and achievement, historians, historians of science, and historians of medieval science in particular, have good reason to celebrate this much-abused year. It is of course the centennial of the American Historical Association of which the History of Science Society feels itself a vital part. It is also the 60th anniversary of the founding of the History of Science Society and the 60th anniversary of Haskins's great volume on medieval science. One more significant anniversary must also be mentioned: it is the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Sarton, who was not only the founder of the journal Isis, and the moving force behind the formation of the History of Science Society, but a friend and admirer of Charles Haskins. In truth, although Sarton had been trained as a scientist, he was more a medievalist than anything else, as monumental three volume work, Introduction to the History of Science, attests. It was undoubtedly Sarton who recruited his Harvard colleague, Haskins, as a member of the organizing committee of the History of Science Society. Haskins's publications in Isis probably derived from his relationship with Sarton, who, as we saw, was well aware of the importance and quality of Haskins' research on the translation and transmission of medieval science. Together these two Harvard medievalists played a vital role in establishing the History of Science Society and in making research in medieval science an integral and respectable part of research in the history of science. It is appropriate and just, therefore, to number Charles Homer Haskins among that small group of medievalists who, during the first quarter of this century, effectively repudiated the idea, current since the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century, that the expression "medieval science" was a contradiction in terms.
Science and Religion in the Middle Ages
(1990-12-08) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
In contrast to a paper I did a few years ago on "Science and Theology in the Middle Ages," which focused solely on the Latin Middle Ages and almost exclusively on the period from 1200 to 1500, I shall expand my vistas considerably today and place the relations between Christianity and science in a broad societal context ranging from the beginnings of Christianity to the end of the Middle Ages. Although my topic is primarily on the relations between science and religion in Western Europe, I shall also briefly describe the same interrelationships in Islam, with the hope of better understanding Christian developments.
Jesuits and the New Cosmology
(1991-06-10) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
Because the Jesuit order was formed in 1540 and survived as a vibrant and powerful force until 1773, when it was dissolved in Europe, Jesuit natural philosophers found themselves living in a period of enormous scientific and intellectual change. Founded only three years before the publication of Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, the Jesuits had to confront the new science that was emerging from that landmark treatise. In a real sense, they were caught between two intellectual conceptions of the world: the geocentric Aristotelian world view and the new one taking shape around the heliocentric system of Copernicus and the new discoveries of Tycho Brahe and Galileo. What was the reaction of Jesuit natural philosophers?
The Nature of West European Science in the Late Middle Ages (1200-1500)
(1993-04-30) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
By the twelfth century, western Europe had developed a hunger for new secular learning. Up to that time, what scholars knew about the physical world was derived from traditional Latin handbooks that contained the remnants of a popular science that went back to the Greeks of the Hellenistic period. The knowledge they sought has been appropriately characterized as "Greco-Arabic" science because it consisted of works written in Greek within a Greek cultural orbit going back as far as the 5th century B.C., and also of works written in Arabic that had been either translated from Greek or were original compositions. The number of works translated from Arabic into Latin far exceeded those translated from Greek into Latin. These translations were made by scholars from all parts of Europe, who went to Spain, Sicily, and northern Italy, or were already inhabitants of these places. Most of those who translated from Arabic to Latin had to learn Arabic, which was not their native language. Without their extraordinary achievements, late medieval science in Europe might never have occurred. This vast amount of new learning that entered western Europe, and which had never before known in the Latin language, is appropriately divisible into two categories: the first includes treatises that were devoted to technical science, such as Euclid's Elements and Ptolemy's Almagest; the second embraces those that were classifiable as works of natural philosophy, especially those written by Aristotle (along with commentaries on Aristotle's treatises by the Arabian commentators, Averroes [1126-1198] and Avicenna [980-1037]). Although both of these divisions of Greco-Arabic science were important for the development of the history of science, I will argue that what medieval scholars did with natural philosophy and the role they assigned to it in intellectual life was ultimately more important than what they did with the technical sciences. In this lecture, I shall focus on the role of natural philosophy.
Indiana University in the Light of History
(IU Alumni Association, 1995) Capshew, James H.
Indiana University celebrates its 175tb anniversary in 1995. When it was founded in 1820, there were fewer than 65 institutions of higher education in America; now there are more than 2,000. As one of this country's oldest state universities, IU has grown from a tiny wilderness outpost to a major academic center. This growth echoes familiar themes in the history of American education.
Journey Through the Spheres: The Cosmos in the Middle Ages
(1997-03-14) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
Questions or issues discussed in the paper include: WHAT IS COSMOLOGY? Descriptions of the structure and operation of the cosmos as it is understood by scholars in any society or civilization. THE ORIGINS OF COSMOLOGY IN THE EUROPEAN MIDDLE AGES BETWEEN 1200 AND 1500 WHO WERE THE COSMOLOGISTS IN THE MIDDLE AGES? THE LITERATURE OF COSMOLOGY THE MACROSTRUCTURE OF THE MEDIEVAL COSMOS COSMOLOGICAL QUESTIONS, PROBLEMS AND RESPONSES IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Natural Philosophy and Theology in the Late Middle Ages: A Surprising Relationship?
(1999-07-28) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
During the Middle Ages, the relations between science and religion are much more appropriately represented by the relations between natural philosophy and theology. Although there were recognizable sciences in the Middle Ages astronomy, optics, and statics, for example which had some relationship with theology, it was natural philosophy that had the most significant connection. In order to grasp the relationship between natural philosophy and theology, it is advisable to treat each discipline independently in two phases. Thus I shall first consider natural philosophy from two aspects: the first will be about the nature of the discipline itself, followed by the second aspect which will determine the extent to which natural philosophy was affected by theology. Theology will be treated similarly. I shall first convey a sense of theology as a discipline, and then describe how it was affected by natural philosophy and, to a lesser extent, logic, that is, how theology was affected by the two most important, widely studied, secular disciplines in the Middle Ages.
God and the Medieval Cosmos
(1999-07-29) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
Scholastic natural philosophers sought to understand the physical world at a time when controlled experiments, systematic observations, and the application of mathematics to physical phenomena, were rare occurrences. They had to rely on two powerful tools of analysis available to them. The first was REASON, which they usually applied in a largely a priori manner, based on a minimum of observation and empirical data. They applied reason most effectively in circumstances of their own devising, that is in the realm of the hypothetical, which enabled them to make use of the second great tool: THE HUMAN IMAGINATION, used in ways that I have already described. The conditions they imagined were possible, but only by virtue of God's absolute power, provided that God's action did not imply a logical contradiction. It was by such means that medieval natural philosophers got beyond Aristotle's limited world and came to consider momentous problems about space, vacuum, and other worlds. Many of the non-scholastics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grappled with the same problems, and profited from the earlier discussions. They were, however, in no mood to acknowledge indebtedness to the defenders of Aristotle and the status quo. After all, they were bringing a new world order into being, a Copernican-Newtonian heliocentric world that would completely replace the Aristotelian scholastic geocentric model that had reigned for more than four centuries. They saw no need to be gracious in triumph. Indeed, they had only contempt for their medieval predecessors, whose opinions they mocked and scorned at every opportunity. The image of medieval scholastic cosmology and science will forever be the hostile one Galileo constructed. Nevertheless, the significant process of "getting beyond Aristotle" had already begun in the Middle Ages, though it would come to spectacular fruition only in the seventeenth century. In retrospect, then, it seems appropriate to accord a small measure of credit to those much-maligned scholastics, and thereby modestly begin to redress a long-standing injustice inflicted upon the Middle Ages by the victors in the science wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The Dynamics of Natural Philosophy in the Aristotelian Tradition (and Beyond): Doctrinal and Institutional Perspectives
(1999-08-16) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
To understand why natural philosophy played such a fundamental role in medieval intellectual life, we must view it in the context within which it was born in Western Europe. Before the introduction in the twelfth century of Aristotle’s works, which formed the solid foundation on which medieval natural philosophy was built, natural philosophy was a marginal activity based upon two-thirds of Plato’s Timaeus, Calcidius’s commentary on that treatise, and what relevant works might be available from a few Roman authors and one or more of the Latin encyclopedists: Boethius, Macrobius, Martianus Capella, Isidore of Seville, Cassiodorus, and a few others. With such an intellectual fare, Western Europe would not have gone far. But even before the introduction of Aristotle’s natural philosophy, Western Europe was already undergoing a momentous transformation, one that was destined to shape its attitude toward the world until the present day, and that will continue to shape its outlook into the foreseeable future. I speak about the conscious desire of many scholars to follow the path of reason, as opposed to authority. In a Christian society founded upon faith and revealed truth, the new attitude was startling.
Natural Philosophy, Theology, and Reason in the Late Middle Ages
(2000-02-04) Grant, Edward; Edward Grant
The Spoiler: Paul Kammerer’s Fight for the Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics
(2002) Gliboff, Sander
In scientific controversy, as in sports, there are winners and losers, but sometimes also spoilers—unheralded outsiders, who defy convention and change the terms, the style, and the outcome of the competition, even if they cannot win it themselves. In the fight over the inheritance of acquired characteristics in the 1910s and 1920s, Paul Kammerer was the spoiler. His dramatic experimental results and provocative arguments surprised the established stars of genetics and evolution and exposed their weaknesses, particularly their inability to agree on the nature and causes of variation or on a better explanation of Kammerer’s results than Kammerer’s own “Lamarckian” one.
Animal Pain
(Blackwell Publishing, Inc., 2004-11-04) Allen, Colin
Working the Crowd: Design principles and early lessons from the social-semantic web.
(CEUR Workshop, 2009) Allen, Colin; Niepert, Mathias; Buckner, Cameron
The Indiana Philosophy Ontology (InPhO)project is presented as one of the first social-semantic web endeavors which aims to bootstrap feedback from users unskilled in ontology design into a precise representation of a specific domain. Our approach combines statistical text processing methods with expert feedback and logic programming approaches to create a dynamic semantic representation of the discipline of philosophy. We describe the basic principles and initial experimental results of our system.
How "weak" mindreaders inherited the earth
(Cambridge University Press, 2009-04-23) Buckner, Cameron; Shriver, Adam; Crowley, Stephen; Allen, Colin
Carruthers argues that an integrated faculty of metarepresentation evolved for mindreading and was later exapted for metacognition. A more consistent application of his approach would regard metarepresentation in mindreading with the same skeptical rigor, concluding that the “faculty” may have been entirely exapted. Given this result, the usefulness of Carruthers' line-drawing exercise is called into question.
The Campus as a Pedagogical Agent: Herman B Wells, Cultural Entrepreneurship, and the Benton Murals
(Indiana University, 2009-06) Capshew, James H.
A Conceptual and Computational Model of Moral Decision Making in Human and Artificial Agents
(John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2010-05-13) Allen, Colin; Franklin, Stan; Wallach, Wendell
Recently there has been a resurgence of interest in general, comprehensive models of human cognition. Such models aim to explain higher order cognitive faculties, such as deliberation and planning. Given a computational representation, the validity of these models can be tested in computer simulations such as software agents or embodied robots. The push to implement computational models of this kind has created the field of Artificial General Intelligence, or AGI. Moral decision making is arguably one of the most challenging tasks for computational approaches to higher order cognition. The need for increasingly autonomous artificial agents to factor moral considerations into their choices and actions has given rise to another new field of inquiry variously known as Machine Morality, Machine Ethics, Roboethics or Friendly AI. In this paper we discuss how LIDA, an AGI model of human cognition, can be adapted to model both affective and rational features of moral decision making. Using the LIDA model we will demonstrate how moral decisions can be made in many domains using the same mechanisms that enable general decision making. Comprehensive models of human cognition typically aim for compatibility with recent research in the cognitive and neural sciences. Global Workspace Theory (GWT), proposed by the neuropsychologist Bernard Baars (1988), is a highly regarded model of human cognition that is currently being computationally instantiated in several software implementations. LIDA (Franklin et al. 2005) is one such computational implementation. LIDA is both a set of computational tools and an underlying model of human cognition, which provides mechanisms that are capable of explaining how an agent’s selection of its next action arises from bottom-up collection of sensory data and top-down processes for making sense of its current situation. We will describe how the LIDA model helps integrate emotions into the human decision making process, and elucidate a process whereby an agent can work through an ethical problem to reach a solution that takes account of ethically relevant factors.
Mirror, Mirror in the Brain, What’s the Monkey Stand to Gain?
(Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 2010-05-25) Allen, Colin
Primatologists generally agree that monkeys lack higher-order intentional capacities related to theory of mind. Yet the discovery of the so-called “mirror neurons” in monkeys suggests to many neuroscientists that they have the rudiments of intentional understanding. Given a standard philosophical view about intentional understanding, which requires higher-order intentionality, a paradox arises. Different ways of resolving the paradox are assessed, using evidence from neural, cognitive, and behavioral studies of humans and monkeys. A decisive resolution to the paradox requires substantial additional empirical work and perhaps a rejection of the standard philosophical view.
Encounters with Genius Loci Herman Wells at/and/of lndiana University
(Transaction Publishers, 2011) Capshew, James H.
Making Herman B Wells: Moral Development and Emotional Trauma in a Boone County Boyhood
(Indiana University, 2011-12) Capshew, James H.
Monism and Morphology at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
(2012) Gliboff, Sander
Ernst Haeckel’s monistic worldview and his interpretation of Darwin’s theory of evolution worked together to help him rule out any role for divine providence or any non-material mind, spirit, will, or purpose in the organic world. In his account of 1866, the impersonal, unpredictable, and purposeless external environment was what drove evolutionary change. By around the turn of the twentieth century, however, new theories of evolution, heredity, and embryology were challenging Haeckel’s, but Haeckel no longer responded with his earlier vigor. Younger monistically oriented evolutionary biologists had to take the lead in modernizing and defending the monistic interpretation and the external causes of evolution. Three of these younger biologists are discussed here: Haeckel’s student, the morphologist-turned-theoretician Richard Semon (1859–1918); Ludwig Plate (1862–1937), who took over Haeckel’s chair at the University of Jena and became an influential journal editor and commentator on new research on heredity and evolution; and Paul Kammerer (1880–1926), whose experimental evidence for the modifying power of the environment was hotly debated.

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