Michael Friedman | |
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Born | |
Nationality | American |
Education | Queens College, City University of New York Princeton University |
Notable work | Foundations of Space-Time Theories, Kant and the Exact Sciences, "A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger", Dynamics of Reason |
Spouse | Graciela De Pierris |
Awards | Matchette Prize, Lakatos Award, Humboldt Research Award |
Era | Modern philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | Analytic philosophy |
Institutions | Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, University of Illinois at Chicago, Indiana University, UC Berkeley, University of Western Ontario, University of Konstanz |
Notable students | Andrew Janiak, Eric Winsberg |
Main interests | Philosophy of science, philosophy of physics, history of philosophy, Kantianism |
Notable ideas | Dynamics of reason, retrospective communicative rationality, [2] relativized (constitutive) a priori principles as paradigms [3] [4] |
Website | philosophy |
Michael Friedman (born April 2, 1947) is an American philosopher who serves as Suppes Professor of Philosophy of Science and Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies at Stanford University. Friedman is best known for his work in the philosophy of science, especially on scientific explanation and the philosophy of physics, and for his historical work on Immanuel Kant. Friedman has done historical work on figures in continental philosophy such as Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. He also serves as the co-director of the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford University.
Friedman earned his BA from Queens College, City University of New York in 1969 and his PhD from Princeton University in 1973. [5] Before moving to Stanford in 2002, Friedman taught at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Indiana University, and UC Berkeley as a visiting professor.
Friedman has been a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences since 1997. Four of his articles have been selected as among the "ten best" of their year by The Philosopher's Annual .
Friedman's early work was on the nature of scientific explanation and the philosophy of physics. His first book, Foundations of Space-Time Theories, was published by Princeton University Press in 1983 won the Matchette Prize (now known as the Book Prize) from the American Philosophical Association, to recognize work by a younger scholar. It also won the Lakatos Award from the London School of Economics to recognize outstanding work in philosophy of science.
Kant and the Exact Sciences was described in Philosophical Review as "a very important book," "required reading for researchers on the relation between the exact sciences and Kant's philosophy." [6]
UC Berkeley German philosophy professor Hans Sluga described Friedman's 2000 book A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, a book that detailed the philosophies of Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger, as "eye-opening" and "ambitious". The book shed new light on the split between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy. [7]
In his book Dynamics of Reason, Friedman "provides the fullest account to date not only of [his] neo-Kantian, historicized, dynamical conception of relativized a priori principles of mathematics and physics, but also of the pivotal role that [he] sees philosophy as playing in making scientific revolutions rational." [8]
Friedman is an honorary professor at the University of Western Ontario.
Friedman is married to Graciela De Pierris, a professor of philosophy at Stanford who has published work on early modern philosophy. [9]
Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, is a movement whose central thesis is the verification principle. This theory of knowledge asserts that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Starting in the late 1920s, groups of philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians formed the Berlin Circle and the Vienna Circle, which, in these two cities, would propound the ideas of logical positivism.
Martin Heidegger was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is often considered to be among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century.
Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism.
The Vienna Circle of logical empiricism was a group of elite philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick. The Vienna Circle had a profound influence on 20th-century philosophy, especially philosophy of science and analytic philosophy.
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".
Hermann Cohen was a German Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and he is often held to be "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century".
Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.
Absolute idealism is chiefly associated with Friedrich Schelling and G. W. F. Hegel, both of whom were German idealist philosophers in the 19th century. The label has also been attached to others such as Josiah Royce, an American philosopher who was greatly influenced by Hegel's work, and the British idealists.
In late modern continental philosophy, neo-Kantianism was a revival of the 18th-century philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The neo-Kantians sought to develop and clarify Kant's theories, particularly his concept of the thing-in-itself and his moral philosophy.
Hans D. Sluga is a German philosopher who spent most of his career as professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Sluga teaches and writes on topics in the history of analytic philosophy, the history of continental philosophy, as well as on political theory, and ancient philosophy in Greece and China. He has been particularly influenced by the thought of Gottlob Frege, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Michel Foucault.
Hans Reichenbach was a leading philosopher of science, educator, and proponent of logical empiricism. He was influential in the areas of science, education, and of logical empiricism. He founded the Gesellschaft für empirische Philosophie in Berlin in 1928, also known as the "Berlin Circle". Carl Gustav Hempel, Richard von Mises, David Hilbert and Kurt Grelling all became members of the Berlin Circle.
Bruno Bauch was a German neo-Kantian philosopher.
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions' truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.
Lebensphilosophie was a dominant philosophical movement of German-speaking countries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which had developed out of German Romanticism. Lebensphilosophie emphasised the meaning, value and purpose of life as the foremost focus of philosophy.
Peter Eli Gordon is a historian of philosophy, a critical theorist, and intellectual historian. The Amabel B. James Professor of History at Harvard University, Gordon focuses on continental philosophy and modern German and French thought, with particular emphasis on the German philosophers Theodor Adorno and Martin Heidegger, critical theory, continental philosophy during the interwar crisis, and most recently, secularization and social thought in the 20th century.
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics is a 1929 book about Immanuel Kant by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. It is often referred to by Heidegger as simply the Kantbuch (Kantbook). This book was published as volume 3 of the Gesamtausgabe.
Allen William Wood is an American philosopher specializing in the work of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism, with particular interests in ethics and social philosophy. One of the world's foremost Kant scholars, he is the Ruth Norman Halls professor of philosophy at Indiana University, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor, emeritus, at Stanford University, and has held professorships and visiting appointments at numerous universities in the United States and Europe. In addition to popularising and clarifying the ethical thought of Kant, Wood has also mounted arguments against the validity of trolley problems in moral philosophy.
James Andrew Phillips is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales. He is known for his research on philosophy of art, the philosophy of film and performance, and Martin Heidegger's thought.
Cristina Lafont is Harold H. and Virginia Anderson Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University.
In 1929 Ernst Cassirer took part in a historically significant encounter with Martin Heidegger in Davos during the Second Davos Hochschulkurs,.