Paul Hoyningen-Huene (born July 31, 1946 in Pfronten, West Germany) is a German philosopher who specializes in general philosophy of science and research ethics. He is best known for his Neo-Kantian interpretation of Thomas S. Kuhn's ideas. Hoyningen-Huene, until 2014, held the chair for theoretical philosophy, particularly philosophy of science at Leibniz Universität Hannover (Germany) and was director of the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science. [1]
Hoyningen-Huene studied physics as well as philosophy at the University of Munich, the Imperial College of Science and Technology, London, and the University of Zurich. He received a graduate degree in theoretical physics from the University of Munich in 1971 and earned his doctorate in theoretical physics at the University of Zurich in 1975. He was then an assistant with Hermann Lübbe at the Seminar for Philosophy at the University of Zurich. Hoyningen-Huene taught at the Universities of Zurich and Bern (Switzerland) and at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). In 1984-1985, he was a visiting scholar with Thomas S. Kuhn at the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT, and from 1987-1988 he was a senior visiting fellow at the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh. [2] [3]
In the period of 1990-1997, Hoyningen-Huene held the chair for foundational theory and history of the sciences, particularly the exact sciences, at the University of Konstanz (Germany). In 1997 he became the founding director of the Center for Philosophy and Ethics of Science at the University of Hannover (Germany). [3] In 2010, the center was integrated into the newly founded Institute of Philosophy under the direction of Hoyningen-Huene. [4]
Hoyningen-Huene held positions as visiting professor in Switzerland (1980, 1987, 2010, 2012), Jugoslavia (1989, 1990), Denmark (1995, 2000) and Norway (1999). [3]
Hoyningen-Huene's work has focused on issues in general philosophy of science, particularly on the philosophical writings of Thomas S. Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend and the subject of incommensurability. In his influential book Reconstructing Scientific Revolutions: Thomas S. Kuhn's Philosophy of Science he presents a Neo-Kantian reconstruction of Kuhn's philosophy of science and opposes an irrationalist interpretation of Kuhn. [5]
In addition, Hoyningen-Huene is interested in the limits of reductionism in science, emergentism and the development of a theory of anti-reductionist arguments. [6] [7] His most recent book Systematicity: The Nature of Science is devoted to the question of the nature of science (including the social sciences and humanities) and develops the thesis that scientific knowledge is primarily distinguished from other forms of knowledge by being more systematic. [8]
In the field of ethics of science, Hoyningen-Huene has primarily dealt with questions concerning the responsibility of scientists and engineers. [7]
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 asserted 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.
A paradigm shift is a fundamental change in the basic concepts and experimental practices of a scientific discipline. It is a concept in the philosophy of science that was introduced and brought into the common lexicon by the American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn. Even though Kuhn restricted the use of the term to the natural sciences, the concept of a paradigm shift has also been used in numerous non-scientific contexts to describe a profound change in a fundamental model or perception of events.
Paul Karl Feyerabend was an Austrian philosopher best known for his work in the philosophy of science. He started his academic career as lecturer in the philosophy of science at the University of Bristol (1955–1958); afterwards, he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught for three decades (1958–1989). At various points in his life, he held joint appointments at the University College London (1967–1970), the London School of Economics (1967), the FU Berlin (1968), Yale University (1969), the University of Auckland, the University of Sussex (1974), and, finally, the ETH Zurich (1980–1990). He gave lectures and lecture series at the University of Minnesota (1958-1962), Stanford University (1967), the University of Kassel (1977) and the University of Trento (1992).
In science and philosophy, a paradigm is a distinct set of concepts or thought patterns, including theories, research methods, postulates, and standards for what constitute legitimate contributions to a field. The word paradigm is Greek in origin, meaning "pattern", and is used to illustrate similar occurrences.
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.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a book about the history of science by philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. Its publication was a landmark event in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. Kuhn challenged the then prevailing view of progress in science in which scientific progress was viewed as "development-by-accumulation" of accepted facts and theories. Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of conceptual continuity where there is cumulative progress, which Kuhn referred to as periods of "normal science", were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of "anomalies" during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms. New paradigms then ask new questions of old data, move beyond the mere "puzzle-solving" of the previous paradigm, change the rules of the game and the "map" directing new research.
Commensurability is a concept in the philosophy of science whereby scientific theories are said to be "commensurable" if scientists can discuss the theories using a shared nomenclature that allows direct comparison of them to determine which one is more valid or useful. On the other hand, theories are incommensurable if they are embedded in starkly contrasting conceptual frameworks whose languages do not overlap sufficiently to permit scientists to directly compare the theories or to cite empirical evidence favoring one theory over the other. Discussed by Ludwik Fleck in the 1930s, and popularized by Thomas Kuhn in the 1960s, the problem of incommensurability results in scientists talking past each other, as it were, while comparison of theories is muddled by confusions about terms, contexts and consequences.
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.
The Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics is a Max Planck Institute whose research is aimed at investigating Einstein's theory of relativity and beyond: Mathematics, quantum gravity, astrophysical relativity, and gravitational-wave astronomy. The institute was founded in 1995 and is located in the Potsdam Science Park in Golm, Potsdam and in Hannover where it closely collaborates with the Leibniz University Hannover. Both the Potsdam and the Hannover parts of the institute are organized in three research departments and host a number of independent research groups.
Émile Meyerson was a Polish-born French epistemologist, chemist, and philosopher of science. Meyerson was born in Lublin, Poland. He died in his sleep of a heart attack at the age of 74.
The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, or Leibniz Prize, is awarded by the German Research Foundation to "exceptional scientists and academics for their outstanding achievements in the field of research". Since 1986, up to ten prizes have been awarded annually to individuals or research groups working at a research institution in Germany or at a German research institution abroad. It is considered the most important research award in Germany.
Rhetoric of science is a body of scholarly literature exploring the notion that the practice of science is a rhetorical activity. It emerged after a number of similarly-oriented topics of research and discussion during the late 20th century, including the sociology of scientific knowledge, history of science, and philosophy of science, but it is practiced most typically by rhetoricians in academic departments of English, speech, and communication.
Thomas Carell is a German biochemist.
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.
Robert Buford Pippin is an American philosopher. He is the Evelyn Stefansson Nef Distinguished Service Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought, the Department of Philosophy, and the College at the University of Chicago.
Gerhard Vollmer is a German physicist and philosopher. He is perhaps best known for his development of an evolutionary theory of knowledge.
Kai A. Konrad is a German economist with his main research interest in public economics.
Thomas Samuel Kuhn was an American historian and philosopher of science whose 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
In the philosophy of science, observations are said to be "theory-laden" when they are affected by the theoretical presuppositions held by the investigator. The thesis of theory-ladenness is most strongly associated with the late 1950s and early 1960s work of Norwood Russell Hanson, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend, and was probably first put forth by Pierre Duhem about 50 years earlier.
Sami Haddadin is an electrical engineer, computer scientist, and university professor in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). Since April 2018, he has been the executive director of the Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI) at the Technical University of Munich and holds the Chair of Robotics and Systems Intelligence.