Anjan Chakravartty | |
---|---|
Education | University of Cambridge (Ph.D.) |
Era | Contemporary philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic |
Institutions | University of Toronto, University of Notre Dame, University of Miami |
Thesis | Semirealism: the metaphysical foundations of scientific realism (2001) |
Doctoral advisor | Peter Lipton |
Doctoral students | Kaave Lajevardi |
Main interests | Philosophy of science, metaphysics, epistemology |
Notable ideas | Semirealism |
Website | https://anjanchakravartty.com/ |
Anjan Chakravartty is an analytic philosopher and the Appignani Foundation Professor at the University of Miami. Previously, he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Toronto. His work focuses on topics in the philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology.
After receiving his BSc in Biophysics from the University of Toronto Chakravartty spent three years working for an international development project in Calcutta and a United Nations World Congress on Environment and Development. After receiving an MA in Philosophy from the University of Toronto he spent a year working at the University of British Columbia, and then went on to receive an MPhil and a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.
On July 1, 2018, he became Appignani Foundation Chair at University of Miami. [1] Prior to this he was the Director of the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at Notre Dame, and the Editor in Chief of the journal Studies in History and Philosophy of Science . [2] [3]
Books and Collections by Anjan Chakravartty:
• Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology, Oxford University Press (2017)
• Ancient Skepticism, Voluntarism, and Science’, International Journal for the Study of Skepticism (2015)
• Explanation, Inference, Testimony, and Truth: Essays Dedicated to the Memory of Peter Lipton’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (ed.) (2010) (in memory of his doctoral supervisor Peter Lipton, Hans Rausing Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge.)
• A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable, Cambridge University Press (2007) (The book won the Biennial Book Prize of the Canadian Philosophical Association in 2009. [4] )
Recent Publications by Anjan Chakravartty:
• 'Truth and the Sciences', in M. Glanzberg (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Truth, Oxford University Press (2018)
• ‘What is Scientific Realism?’ (with Bas C. van Fraassen), Spontaneous Generations: A Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science (2018)
• ‘Realism, Antirealism, Epistemic Stances, and Voluntarism’, in J. Saatsi (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism, Routledge (2018)
• ‘Reflections on New Thinking about Scientific Realism’, Synthese (2017)
• ‘Saving the Scientific Phenomena: What Powers Can and Cannot Do’, in J. D. Jacobs (ed.), Putting Powers to Work, Oxford University Press (2017)
• ‘Scientific Realism’ (version II: revised and updated), in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2017)
• ‘Case Studies, Selective Realism, and Historical Evidence’, in M. Massimi, J.-W. Romeign, & G. Schurz, EPSA15 Selected Papers, Springer (2017)
In analytic philosophy, anti-realism is a position which encompasses many varieties such as metaphysical, mathematical, semantic, scientific, moral and epistemic. The term was first articulated by British philosopher Michael Dummett in an argument against a form of realism Dummett saw as 'colorless reductionism'.
Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.
Hilary Whitehall Putnam was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. Outside philosophy, Putnam contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem.
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher who works primarily in the fields of philosophy of religion, epistemology, and logic.
In philosophy of science and in epistemology, instrumentalism is a methodological view that ideas are useful instruments, and that the worth of an idea is based on how effective it is in explaining and predicting phenomena. According to instrumentalists, a successful scientific theory reveals nothing known either true or false about nature's unobservable objects, properties or processes. Scientific theory is merely a tool whereby humans predict observations in a particular domain of nature by formulating laws, which state or summarize regularities, while theories themselves do not reveal supposedly hidden aspects of nature that somehow explain these laws. Instrumentalism is a perspective originally introduced by Pierre Duhem in 1906.
Scientific realism is the view that the universe described by science is real regardless of how it may be interpreted.
Crispin James Garth Wright is a British philosopher, who has written on neo-Fregean (neo-logicist) philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein's later philosophy, and on issues related to truth, realism, cognitivism, skepticism, knowledge, and objectivity. He is Professor of Philosophy at New York University and Professor of Philosophical Research at the University of Stirling, and taught previously at the University of St Andrews, University of Aberdeen, Princeton University and University of Michigan.
Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.
Perspectivism is the epistemological principle that perception of and knowledge of something are always bound to the interpretive perspectives of those observing it. While perspectivism does not regard all perspectives and interpretations as being of equal truth or value, it holds that no one has access to an absolute view of the world cut off from perspective. Instead, all such viewing occurs from some point of view which in turn affects how things are perceived. Rather than attempt to determine truth by correspondence to things outside any perspective, perspectivism thus generally seeks to determine truth by comparing and evaluating perspectives among themselves. Perspectivism may be regarded as an early form of epistemological pluralism, though in some accounts includes treatment of value theory, moral psychology, and realist metaphysics.
Philosophical realism is usually not treated as a position of its own but as a stance towards other subject matters. Realism about a certain kind of thing is the thesis that this kind of thing has mind-independent existence, i.e. that it is not just a mere appearance in the eye of the beholder. This includes a number of positions within epistemology and metaphysics which express that a given thing instead exists independently of knowledge, thought, or understanding. This can apply to items such as the physical world, the past and future, other minds, and the self, though may also apply less directly to things such as universals, mathematical truths, moral truths, and thought itself. However, realism may also include various positions which instead reject metaphysical treatments of reality entirely.
Bastiaan Cornelis van Fraassen is a Dutch-American philosopher noted for his contributions to philosophy of science, epistemology and formal logic. He is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at San Francisco State University and the McCosh Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at Princeton University.
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Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology and metaphilosophy that studies the underlying assumptions made in debates in epistemology, including those concerning the existence and authority of epistemic facts and reasons, the nature and aim of epistemology, and the methodology of epistemology.
Richard Newell Boyd was an American philosopher, who spent most of his career teaching philosophy at Cornell University where he was Susan Linn Sage Professor of Philosophy and Humane Letters Emeritus. He specialized in epistemology, the philosophy of science, language, and mind.
Peter Lipton was the Hans Rausing Professor and Head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge University, and a fellow of King's College, until his unexpected death in November 2007. According to his obituary on the Cambridge web site, he was "recognized as one of the leading philosophers of science and epistemologists in the world."
Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope (limitations) of knowledge. It addresses the questions "What is knowledge?", "How is knowledge acquired?", "What do people know?", "How do we know what we know?", and "Why do we know what we know?". Much of the debate in this field has focused on analyzing the nature of knowledge and how it relates to similar notions such as truth, belief, and justification. It also deals with the means of production of knowledge, as well as skepticism about different knowledge claims.
Cartesian doubt is a form of methodological skepticism associated with the writings and methodology of René Descartes. Cartesian doubt is also known as Cartesian skepticism, methodic doubt, methodological skepticism, universal doubt, systematic doubt, or hyperbolic doubt.
Paul Walter Franks is the Robert F. and Patricia Ross Weis Professor of Philosophy and Judaic Studies at Yale University. He graduated with his PhD from Harvard University in 1993. Franks' dissertation, entitled "Kant and Hegel on the Esotericism of Philosophy", was supervised by Stanley Cavell and won the Emily and Charles Carrier Prize for a Dissertation in Moral Philosophy at Harvard University. He completed his B.A and M.A, in Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford. Prior to this, Franks received his general education at the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, and studied classical rabbinic texts at Gateshead Talmudical College.
Jessica M. Wilson is an American professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Her research focuses on metaphysics, especially on the metaphysics of science and mind, the epistemologies of skepticism, a priori deliberation, and necessity. Wilson was awarded the Lebowitz Prize for excellence in philosophical thought by Phi Beta Kappa in conjunction with the American Philosophical Association.
David Macarthur is an Australian philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney who works primarily on skepticism, metaphysical quietism, pragmatism, liberal naturalism and philosophy of art. He has taken up these and other themes in articles on the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty and Ludwig Wittgenstein.