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 an influence by which one event, process, state, or object (acause) contributes to the production of another event, process, state, or object (an effect) where the cause is at least partly responsible for the effect, and the effect is at least partly dependent on the cause. The cause of something may also be described as the reason for the event or process.
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. The concept is also referred to using the German-language term Gedankenexperiment within the work of the physicist Ernst Mach and includes thoughts about what may have occurred if a different course of action were taken. The importance of this ability is that it allows the experimenter to imagine what may occur in the future, as well as the implications of alternate courses of action.
Counterfactual history is a form of historiography that attempts to answer the What if? questions that arise from counterfactual conditions. Counterfactual history seeks by "conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen." It has produced a literary genre which is variously called alternate history, speculative history, allohistory, and hypothetical history.
William Lane Craig is an American analytic philosopher, Christian apologist, author, and Wesleyan theologian who upholds the view of Molinism and neo-Apollinarianism. He is a professor of philosophy at Houston Christian University and at the Talbot School of Theology of Biola University.
David Kellogg Lewis was an American philosopher. 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 was an English philosopher of science who is 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 makes sense only if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it.
Molinism, named after 16th-century Spanish Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina, is the thesis that God has middle knowledge : the knowledge of counterfactuals, particularly counterfactuals regarding human action. It seeks to reconcile the apparent tension of divine providence and human free will. Prominent contemporary Molinists include William Lane Craig, Alfred Freddoso, Alvin Plantinga, Michael Bergmann, Thomas Flint, Kenneth Keathley, Dave Armstrong, John D. Laing, Timothy A. Stratton, Kirk R. MacGregor, and J.P. Moreland.
Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah is a British-American philosopher and writer who has written about political philosophy, ethics, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah is Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he joined the faculty in 2014. He was previously the Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. Appiah was elected President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in January 2022.
Paul Joseph Salomon Benacerraf is a French-born American philosopher working in the field of the philosophy of mathematics who taught at Princeton University his entire career, from 1960 until his retirement in 2007. He was appointed Stuart Professor of Philosophy in 1974, and retired 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).
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions by being critical and generally systematic and by its reliance on rational argument. It involves logical analysis of language and clarification of the meaning of words and concepts.
Robert Culp Stalnaker is an American philosopher who is Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor Emeritus 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.
Nikolas Kompridis is a Canadian philosopher and political theorist. His major published work addresses the direction and orientation of Frankfurt School critical theory; the legacy of philosophical romanticism; and the aesthetic dimension(s) of politics. His writing touches on a variety of issues in social and political thought, aesthetics, and the philosophy of culture, often in terms of re-worked concepts of receptivity and world disclosure—a paradigm he calls "reflective disclosure".
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.
Eleonore Stump is an American philosopher and the Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, where she has taught since 1992.
Maria Carla Galavotti is a retired Italian philosopher of science, an emeritus professor at the University of Bologna. She specializes in the philosophy of probability and causality. Particular concerns of her work have included subjectivist Bayesianism, according to which probability describes a personal belief, the origins of subjectivism in the works of Frank Ramsey and Bruno de Finetti, and the use of probability to describe causal relationships.