School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications
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ItemNo Preview AvailableGeometric Models for Relevant Logics(Springer International Publishing, 2022-01-01)Alasdair Urquhart’s work on models for relevant logics is distinctive in a number of different ways. One key theme, present in both his undecidability proof for the relevant logic R (Urquhart 1984) and his proof of the failure of interpolation in R (Urquhart 1993), is the use of techniques from geometry (Urquhart 2019). In this paper, inspired by Urquhart’s work, I explore ways to generate natural models of R+ from geometries, and different constraints that an accessibility relation in such a model might satisfy. I end by showing that a set of natural conditions on an accessibility relation, motivated by geometric considerations, is jointly unsatisfiable.
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ItemWomen, Early Modern: Society and Sociability(Springer International Publishing, 2020)Definition/Introduction: Beginning in the fifteenth century, European women began to question misogynist literature that attempted to justify their relegation to a subordinate position within society, generating the querelle des femmes. In time they developed new models of ideal social relationships between the sexes, along with concepts of society and sociability that elevated women’s social role. While the earliest defenses of women accepted women’s subjection within marriage as analogous to the legitimate subjection of citizens to their monarch, as Protestants and republicans questioned the legitimacy of arbitrary monarchical power, the justice of a husband’s rule over his wife also came into question. The concept of modernity embraced new developments in vernacular literature, hospitable to female participation, and the novel became a powerful vehicle for the articulation of egalitarian models of love and friendship between the sexes. The level of civilization of society came to be measured in relation to the social role and participation of women, and the possibility of equal friendship between the sexes outside marriage, slowly transformed into the ideal of marriage as an affective and more or less egalitarian companionship.
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ItemReason and Experience in women’s responses to Descartes and Locke(Springer, 2020-02-13)Definition/Introduction: From the nineteenth to the twentieth century, commentators characteristically divided the epistemological trends of the seventeenth century into two streams, the rationalists and empiricists. Cartesian rationalism, in particular, was associated with a distinctive form of metaphysical dualism and a sharp mind/body divide. Reason was not only claimed to be a more reliable source of knowledge than sensory experience, it provided access to an immaterial realm of immutable truths. Having been educated in this tradition, a significant group of late twentieth century feminist interpreters of early modern epistemology and metaphysics argued, from a number of perspectives, that Cartesian dualism, with its associated high evaluation of pure reason, was entangled with metaphorical and psychological tendencies that debased the bodily, sensual, emotional, and natural features of existence. The latter were marked feminine, while reason and the mind were elevated and conceptualized as masculine. These feminists argued that, at least metaphorically, rationalism excluded women. In response to such claims, other scholars pointed out that Cartesian rationalism had been attractive to many early modern women interested in philosophy, and that the idea of an immaterial mind or soul, which has no sex, fostered claims for the intellectual equality of the sexes. More recent detailed scholarship into the philosophical writings of early modern women reveals that many were, in fact, suspicious of philosophies that imposed a sharp opposition between reason and experience, or mind and body. Reading the works of these women demonstrates that even when influenced by Descartes, women philosophers questioned Cartesian forms of dualism, developing their own theories of the relationship between reason, sense perception, and knowledge. The complexity and variety of the positions they developed highlights the crudity of the historiographic tendencies to read historical texts through simple dichotomies such as rationalism and empiricism.
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ItemIntroduction: War and Memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017-01-01)This introductory essay begins with a discussion of World War II memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, in light of the recent and ongoing war in Ukraine. It outlines the main contours of the interplay between “memory wars” and real war, and the important “post-Crimean” qualitative shift in local memory cultures in this connection. Next, the essay sketches out the specifics of the war memory landscapes of the region, and then of each of the three individual countries, before moving on to introduce the key organizing themes and findings of the book.
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ItemMemory, Kinship, and the Mobilization of the Dead: The Russian State and the “Immortal Regiment” Movement(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017-01-01)This chapter examines a new addition to the repertoire of Victory Day commemorative traditions in post-Soviet space: the newly invented annual “Immortal Regiment” parade, in which people march bearing photographs of their ancestors who fought in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–1945. The chapter focuses on attempts by the state authorities and their supporters to instrumentalize the new ritual and to appropriate the Red Army’s war dead, and the emotions they evoke. It explores the ways in which the figure of the dead Red Army soldier is being brought back to life in new ways as part of the current regime’s authoritarian project.
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ItemKuhn, Coherentism and Perception(Springer, 2023)The paper takes off from the suggestion of Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen that Kuhn’s account of science may be understood in coherentist terms. There are coherentist themes in Kuhn’s philosophy of science. But one crucial element is lacking. Kuhn does not deny the existence of basic beliefs which have a non-doxastic source of justification. Nor does he assert that epistemic justification only derives from inferential relationships between non-basic beliefs. Despite this, the coherentist interpretation is promising and I develop it further in this paper. I raise the question of whether Kuhn’s account of science can deal with the input objection to coherentism. I argue that the role played by problems in Kuhn’s theory of science ensures that there is input from the external world into scientists’ belief-systems. I follow Hoyningen-Huene in pointing to the causal role played by the external world in determining perceptual states. I next turn to the question of whether Kuhn’s rejection of foundationalism implies coherentism. I argue that Kuhn’s rejection of the one-to-one relation between object and experience is compatible with a foundationalist account of justification. Nor does Kuhn’s rejection of the given entail the same coherentist implications as Sellars’ critique of the myth of the given.
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ItemChildren in the Roman Farming Economy: Evidence, Problems and Possibilities(Palgrave Macmillan, 2022)Children’s roles within Roman farming have been little explored, despite a flood of recent work on many aspects of childhood in Roman society. Children were an important economic cohort, however, and would have made up a large group within the potential labour force of any farm. Close examination of textual and visual sources suggests that children played specific economic roles. Further, ethnographic studies on children’s farm work in the Mediterranean and beyond in more recent times reveal considerable correspondence with ancient practices. The allocation of certain categories of tasks to children appears highly consistent across time and geographic location. By combining these groups of evidence, we can consider the extent to which children’s labour would have contributed to the Roman farming economy. Children’s work should not be seen as insignificant or marginal: rather, it played an essential part, as in later times, within the economics of farm work.
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ItemWhy do we find Bohr obscure? Reading Bohr as a philosopher of experiment(Bloomsbury Academic, 2017)Niels Bohr's philosophical view of quantum mechanics has been the subject of extensive scholarship for the better part of five decades. Yet Bohr’s writings have remained obscure, as evidenced by the variety of different scholarly interpretations of his work. In this chapter, I review the historiography of Bohr scholarship, arguing that his meaning has remained elusive because his central preoccupations lay not so much with an interpretation of the quantum-mechanical formalism, which many commentators see as the problem of quantum theory, but rather with the epistemological question of how we can acquire empirical knowledge of quantum objects by means of experiment. Bohr’s doctrine of classical concepts, I argue, is therefore best understood as a philosophy of experiment.
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ItemBohr and the problem of the quantum-to-classical transition(Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017-10-19)
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ItemOrthodoxy and heterodoxy in the post-war era(Oxford University Press, 2022-05-19)
This chapter focuses on the responses of physicists such as Heisenberg, Pauli, von Neumann, Born, Dirac and Jordan, to the new wave of criticisms of quantum mechanics that emerged after the Second World War. The various attempts to defend the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ took the form of a series of retrospective reconstructions that often went beyond anything we can find in the writings of the late 1920s or 30s. Various interpretational commitments were appropriated, reinterpreted, and, in some cases, even revised. The postwar orthodoxy was a dialectical response to the new challenges it faced in the early 1950s. Yet this dialectic did not lead to a uniform ‘orthodox’ position. It was therefore never an orthodoxy in the true sense of the word. Far from creating a unitary Copenhagen interpretation, the postwar debates had the effect of dramatically expanding the range of interpretations that bore the label “orthodox” or “Copenhagen”.