Martin Bunzl (born 1948, in London, England) is professor of philosophy emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, where he directed the Rutgers Initiative in Climate and Social Policy from 2007 to 2011.
Martin Bunzl (born 1948, in London, England) is professor of philosophy emeritus at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, where he directed the Rutgers Initiative in Climate and Social Policy from 2007 to 2011.
Bunzl graduated from the University of Minnesota, from which he obtained a BA and a Ph.D. His early work dealt primarily with causation, in which he developed a deflationary account of causal overdetermination; what David Lewis called "Bunzl events". [1]
In the Philosophy of History, Bunzl's focus has been on the ontological commitments of historians, including their use of counterfactuals. [2] Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Return of Martin Guerre and Society and Culture in Early Modern France, has written of Martin Bunzl's Real History: [the book] "provides a breath of fresh air in writing on the philosophy and epistemology of history. In language accessible to historians, philosophers, and the reading public more generally, he explores the questions posed by the various 'turns' of the post-war decades: deconstructive, linguistic, literary, anthropological, and quantitative. He looks not just at what historians say about their methods, but at what they actually do." [3]
With a specialty in the Philosophy of Science, he is the author of The Context Of Explanation, [4] Real History [5] and Uncertainty and the Philosophy of Climate Change, [6] and co-editor of Buying Freedom [7] and Foundational Issues in Human Brain Mapping, [8] as well as numerous scholarly articles.
Bunzl's current research is in the area of catastrophic risk.
Books
Edited Books
Selected Articles
Causality is influence by which one event, process, state or object contributes to the production of another event, process, state or object where the cause is partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is partly dependent on the cause. In general, a process has many causes, which are also said to be causal factors for it, and all lie in its past. An effect can in turn be a cause of, or causal factor for, many other effects, which all lie in its future. Some writers have held that causality is metaphysically prior to notions of time and space.
A thought experiment is a hypothetical situation in which a hypothesis, theory, or principle is laid out for the purpose of thinking through its consequences.
Counterfactual history is a form of historiography that attempts to answer the What if? questions that arise from counterfactual conditions. As a method of intellectual enquiry, counterfactual history explores history and historical incidents by extrapolating a timeline in which key historical events either did not occur or had an outcome different from the actual historical outcome. As a literary genre, counterfactual history is in two sub-genres, alternative history and speculative fiction.
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton University from 1970 until his death. He is closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than 30 years.
Ram Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014) was an English philosopher of science best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism (CR). Bhaskar argued that the task of science is "the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of the world" rather than the discovery of quantitative laws, and that experimental science only makes sense if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it. He went on to apply this realism about mechanisms and causal powers to the philosophy of social science, and also elaborated a series of arguments to support the critical role of philosophy and the human sciences.According to Bhaskar, it is possible and desirable for sociology to be scientific.
Molinism, named after 16th-century Spanish Jesuit priest and Roman Catholic theologian Luis de Molina, is the thesis that God has middle knowledge. It seeks to reconcile the apparent tension of divine providence and human free will. Prominent contemporary Molinists include William Lane Craig, Alfred Freddoso, Thomas Flint, Kenneth Keathley, and Dave Armstrong.
Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah is a British-Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah was the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, before moving to New York University (NYU) in 2014. He holds an appointment at the NYU Department of Philosophy and NYU's School of Law.
Paul Joseph Salomon Benacerraf is a French-born American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mathematics who has been teaching at Princeton University since he joined the faculty in 1960. He was appointed Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, and retired in 2007 as the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy.
Michael David Resnik is a leading contemporary American philosopher of mathematics.
Jaegwon Kim was a Korean-American philosopher. At the time of his death, Kim was an emeritus professor of philosophy at Brown University. He also taught at several other leading American universities during his lifetime, including the University of Michigan, Cornell University, the University of Notre Dame, Johns Hopkins University, and Swarthmore College. He is best known for his work on mental causation, the mind-body problem and the metaphysics of supervenience and events. Key themes in his work include: a rejection of Cartesian metaphysics, the limitations of strict psychophysical identity, supervenience, and the individuation of events. Kim's work on these and other contemporary metaphysical and epistemological issues is well represented by the papers collected in Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays (1993).
Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurence S. Rockefeller Professor of philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.
Stephen Dean Mumford is a British philosopher, who is currently Head of Department and Professor of Metaphysics in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University. Mumford is best known for his work in metaphysics on dispositions and laws, but has also made contributions in the philosophy of sport.
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental questions, such as those about existence, reason, knowledge, values, mind, and language. Such questions are often posed as problems to be studied or resolved. Some sources claim the term was coined by Pythagoras ; others dispute this story, arguing that Pythagoreans merely claimed use of a preexisting term. Philosophical methods include questioning, critical discussion, rational argument, and systematic presentation.
Brian Ellis is an Australian philosopher. He is an Emeritus Professor in the philosophy department at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, and Professional Fellow in philosophy at the University of Melbourne. He was the Editor of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy for twelve years. He is one of the major proponents of the New Essentialist school of philosophy of science.
Clark N. Glymour is the Alumni University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also a senior research scientist at the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
Ken Gemes is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London. His primary interests are Nietzsche and philosophy of science.
Susan James is a British professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College London. She has previously taught at the University of Connecticut and the University of Cambridge. She is well known for her work on the history of seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophy.
Critical realism is a philosophical approach to understanding science initially developed by Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014). It specifically opposes forms of empiricism and positivism by viewing science as concerned with identifying causal mechanisms. In the last decades of the twentieth century it also stood against various forms of postmodernism and poststructuralism by insisting on the reality of objective existence. In contrast to positivism's methodological foundation, and poststructuralism's epistemological foundation, critical realism insists that (social) science should be built from an explicit ontology. Critical realism is one of a range of types of philosophical realism, as well as forms of realism advocated within social science such as analytic realism and subtle realism.
Wolfgang Konrad Spohn is a German philosopher. He is professor of philosophy and philosophy of science at the University of Konstanz.
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