bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Space
Authors: Torretti Roberto 
Published: September 2018

In some of its uses, the word ‘space’ designates an empty or potentially empty expanse among things, for example, when a driver finds a space in a crowded parking lot, or when a typesetter increases the space between words on a page. In other uses, ‘space’ is meant to stand for a boundless extension which supposedly contains everything, or every thing of a certain sort. The former sense is well-grounded in ordinary experience and can be traced back to the etymology of the word (from the Latin word spatium, meaning ‘race-track’, or generally ‘distance’, ‘interval’, ‘terrain’). The latter sense originated in scholarly circles – possibly as late as the fourteenth century – by a bold extrapolation of the former; it does not refer to anything that can be exhibited in sense-perception; and yet, through the influence of Newtonian science on Euro-American common sense, it has become so entrenched in ordinary usage that it is normally viewed as the primary meaning of ‘space’, from which all others are derived.
According to Cornford, the ‘invention of space’ as a boundless, all-encompassing container happened in the fifth century bc. However, it is more likely to have occurred in the late Middle Ages. At any rate, the idea was rampant in Cambridge in the 1660s, when Newton made it a fundamental ingredient in his framework for the description of the phenomena of motion. In a posthumous paper, Newton stressed that space evades the traditional classification of entities into substances and attributes, and has ‘its own manner of existence’. Until the publication of this paper in 1962, philosophers took Newtonian space for a substance, and most of them thought this to be utterly absurd. In view of the role of all-encompassing space in Newtonian physics, Kant opted for regarding it as a precondition of human knowledge, contributed once and for all by the human mind. Newton had written that the points of space owe their individual identity to the relational system in which they are set. Nineteenth-century mathematicians vastly extended this concept of space by conceiving many such relational systems. They thus made it possible for relativity theory to substitute four-dimensional spacetime for Newtonian space and time, and for current string theory to countenance a ten-dimensional physical space. These developments confirm the productivity, but not the fixity, of the knowing mind.
Species
Authors: Sterelny Kim 
Published: September 2018

The diversity of life is not seamless but comes in relatively discrete packages, species. Is that packaging real, or an artefact of our limited temporal perspective on the history of life? If all living forms are descended from one or a few ancestors, there may be no real distinction between living and ancestral forms, or between closely related living animals.
Received wisdom holds that species are the ’units of evolution’, for it is they that evolve. They are the upshot of evolutionary processes, but, if species and not just their component organisms compete with one another, they are also important agents in the evolutionary process. If so, species are real units in nature, not arbitrary segmentations of seamless variation.
The ’species problem’ has been approached from two angles. One focus has been on specific taxa of the tree of life. What would settle whether some arbitrarily chosen organism is a member of homo sapiens or canis familiaris? This is sometimes known as the ’species taxon’ problem. An alternate way of approaching diversity has been to ask what all species have in common. What do all the populations we think of as species share? This is the ’species category’ problem.
One idea is to group organisms into species by appealing to the overall similarity. This ’phenetic’ conception is in retreat. Most contemporary species definitions are relational, the animals that compose pan troglodytes are a species, not because they are all very similar (they are very like the pygmy chimps as well) but because of their relations amongst themselves and with their ancestors. The most famous relational definition is the ’biological species concept’, according to which conspecific organisms are organisms that can interbreed, however different they look.
Relational species definitions aim to define a category of theoretical and explanatory interest to evolutionary and ecological theory. Given that there are many explanatory interests, one problem in evaluating these accounts is to determine whether they are genuinely rivals.
Postcolonial philosophy of science
Authors: Harding Sandra G. 
Published: September 2018

Are there laws of nature that today’s modern sciences are ill-designed to discover? Does the universal use of these modern sciences require their value-neutrality, or are their social values and interests an important cause of their universality? What resources for scientific knowledge can other cultures’ science projects provide?
Such questions are raised by recent postcolonial global histories that focus analyses on the role of European expansion in the advance of modern science and in the decline of other cultures’ science traditions. These accounts challenge philosophers to re-evaluate unsuspected strengths in other scientific traditions and identify modern science’s borrowings from them. They also identify European cultural features that have, for better and worse, constituted modern sciences and their representations of nature and thus seek to develop more realistic and useful accounts of the values, interests, methods, universality, objectivity and rationality of science.
Causation and laws in biology
Authors: Matthen Mohan 
Published: September 2018

Physicalism appears to undermine the autonomy of ‘special sciences’ such as biology, and to leave little room for proprietary biological laws or causation. Mendel’s ‘Laws’ are so-called because they are fundamental to the subject-area, but since they describe causal processes that are wholly physical in nature, they seem to reduce to physical laws, given certain propositions about the composition of DNA. The same goes for other principles of the biological sciences.
This argument has been challenged by Hilary Putnam, on the grounds that good explanations, for instance in mathematical terms, could range more widely than any given physical realization. Putnam argues that mathematics could thus have an autonomous role in science despite physicalism. Putnam’s insight has been applied to classical genetics by Philip Kitcher. A gene is a unit of inheritance that passes unchanged from parent to offspring according to certain rules. It is these rules that are essential to understanding inheritance, not details of interaction in the DNA substrate. Putnam and Kitcher here employ a notion similar to Aristotle’s ‘formal causes’ – functional and structural determinants of biological characteristics that are somewhat independent of material constitution.
There are other conceptions of laws to be found in philosophy of science. Some think that they are propositions with the capacity to impart axiomatic structure to what is known about a domain. The principle of natural selection plays this role in biology, though it is a priori. Again, some think that laws are necessary truths: on cladistic systems of classification, the proposition that the common raven is a bird is arguably a law under this understanding.
The nature of causal patterns in natural selection has been a matter of some discussion recently. The view that individual-level causes are sufficient to explain selection-outcomes is tempting to the reductionist, but distorts the explanatory aims of evolutionary theory. Clearly, evolutionary theory requires population-level causes. On the other hand, it has been questioned whether natural selection itself should be understood as a ‘force’ acting on a population, somewhat in the same manner as gravitation acts on a body. Statistical views of natural selection seek alternatives to this way of understanding selection.
Finally, what are biological entities? Some ontologies admit no priority among collections of atoms – the argument is that an organism, for instance, is nothing more than such a collection. Many biologists, however, treat of composite entities as internally organized complex systems. On this view, cells, organisms, populations, and ecosystems have privileged ontological status.
Time, direction of
Authors: Uffink Jos 
Published: September 2018

You can pour a tumblerful of water into the sea, but you can never get that same tumblerful of water out again. James Clerk Maxwell gave this as an example of an irreversible process. There are many other homely examples: coffee and milk will mix if stirred, but white coffee does not unmix if stirred in reverse. An ice cube in a glass of hot water will melt, but we never see water at room temperature spontaneously separate into ice and hot water. Physical theories like thermodynamics or hydrodynamics, which codify this type of irreversible phenomenon, do not allow the same kind of behaviour in the forward and backward direction of time. There is thus a striking asymmetry in the two temporal directions. This is usually referred to as the ‘direction of time’ (or ‘time asymmetry’ or ‘anisotropy’ or the ‘arrow of time’).
The source of this asymmetry has been sought in various theories of physics, both classical and quantum. Some explanations appeal to some sort of boundary condition, typically an initial condition, which the explanation admits to be, not a law of the theory, but a matter of happenstance. Other explanations advocate some additional general principle about, for example, temporally asymmetric notions of causality or randomness.
Economics, philosophy of
Authors: Hausman Daniel 
Published: September 2018

People have thought about economics for as long as they have thought about how to manage their households, indeed Aristotle compared the study of the economic affairs of a city to the study of the management of a household. During the two millennia between Aristotle and Adam Smith, one finds reflections concerning economic problems mainly in the context of discussions of moral or policy questions. For example, scholastic philosophers commented on money and interest in inquiries concerning the justice of ‘usury’ (charging interest on money loans), and in the seventeenth century there was a great deal of discussion of policy concerning foreign trade. Economics only emerged as a distinct field of study with the bold eighteenth-century idea that there were ‘economies’ – that is autonomous law-governed systems of human interaction involving production, distribution and exchange. This view was already well developed in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, from which much of economics derives.
Economics is of philosophical interest in three main regards: it raises moral questions concerning welfare, justice and freedom; it raises foundational questions concerning the nature of rationality; and it raises methodological or epistemological questions concerning the character and possibility of knowledge of social phenomena. The fundamental theory of standard orthodox economics is of particular epistemological interest because of its resemblance to theories in the natural sciences coupled with its uneven empirical performance.
More than 150 years ago John Stuart Mill confronted the problem of how to reconcile his high regard for economics (despite its empirical adequacies) with his commitment to empiricism. His solution, which was accepted by most economists until the 1930s, held that the basic principles of economics are well established by introspection or everyday experience. One can thus justifiably have confidence in economics, despite the inexactness of its implications, which is only to be expected, since economics deals only with the most important determinants of economic phenomena.
In the 1930s Mill’s views were rejected as too dogmatic and insufficiently empirical. But the views that succeeded Mill’s during the generation after the Second World War, most notably the position of Milton Friedman and views deriving from the work of Karl Popper and Imre Lakatos, were less able to deal satisfactorily with the empirical inadequacies of economic theories than were Mill‘s. Since the mid 1980s there have been several new approaches, ranging from Donald McCloskey’s rejection of methodological assessment at one extreme to Alexander Rosenberg’s conclusion that economics cannot be a successful empirical science at the other.
Explanation in history and social science
Authors: Ruben David-Hillel 
Published: September 2018

Historians and social scientists explain at least two sorts of things: (a) those individual human actions that have historical or social significance, such as Stalin’s decision to hold the show trials, Diocletian’s division of the Roman Empire, and the Lord Chief Justice’s attempt to reform the English judicial system; (b) historical and social events and structures (‘large-scale’ social phenomena), such as wars, economic depressions, social customs, the class system, the family, the state, and the crime rate. Philosophical questions arise about explanations of both kinds (a) and (b).
Concerning (b), perhaps the most pressing question is whether explanations of this sort can, ultimately, be understood as merely explanations of a large number of individual human actions, that is, as a complex set of explanations of the first kind, (a).
A causal explanation is an explanation of something in terms of its event-cause(s). Some explanations under (b) appear not to be causal explanations in this sense. There are two ways in which this appears to happen. First, we sometimes seem to explain a social structure or event by giving its function or purpose. This seems to be an explanation in terms of its effects rather than by its causes. For example, it might be claimed that the explanation for a certain social custom in a tribal society is the way in which it contributes to social stability or group solidarity. An explanation of a thing in terms of its effects cannot be a causal explanation of that thing. Second, we sometimes seem to cite social structure as the explanation of something. Whatever a social structure is, it is not itself an event, and since only (it is often said) events can be causes, such a ‘structural’ explanation does not seem to be a causal explanation.
A second question, then, about explanations of kind (b) is whether some of them, at any rate, are genuinely non-causal explanations, or whether functional and/or structural explanations of this sort can be seen as special sorts of causal explanation.
Explanations of kind (a) are a proper subset of explanations of human actions generally. Although some of the discussion of these issues began life as a distinct literature within the philosophy of history, it has now been absorbed into philosophical action theory more generally. Even so, a question that remains is just which proper subset of human actions are the ones of interest to the historical and social sciences: how can we discriminate within the class of human actions between those in which historians or social scientists have a legitimate interest and those outside their purview?
Functionalism in social science
Authors: Bigelow John C. 
Published: September 2018

In the social sciences, functionalists are theorists who give an especially prominent role to functional explanations. One of the most influential self-defined functionalists, Malinowski (1926), summed up this view: the functionalist ‘insists… upon the principle that in every type of civilisation, every custom, material object, idea and belief fulfils some vital function, has some task to accomplish, represents an indispensable part within a working whole’. As an example of a functionalist explanation, one might consider the hypothesis, as argued for instance by Evans-Pritchard in his work on the Azande in Africa, that belief in witches generally plays a role in maintaining social stability (1937).
In the last few decades of the twentieth century, postmodern, or post-structuralist, sociologists have largely disavowed the pursuit of functional explanations. The extremism of some functionalist theses has been matched by an equal extremism in postmodern antitheses. In denying that everything must be explained functionally, some go so far as to say that nothing should ever be explained functionally.
Yet there is liveable logical space between the modernist’s ‘There has always got to be a reason, the real reason, for everything’, and the postmodernist’s ‘There is never any real reason for anything’. We do not have to be card-carrying functionalists to suspect that functional explanations might be found for at least some of the bewildering things that some people do in various parts of the world. New models of functional explanation are emerging from recent ferment in the biological sciences, and these new models may suggest new ways of approaching functional explanations in the social sciences.
Holism and individualism in history and social science
Authors: Bhargava Rajeev 
Published: September 2018

Methodological individualists such as Mill, Weber, Schumpeter, Popper, Hayek and Elster argue that all social facts must be explained wholly and exhaustively in terms of the actions, beliefs and desires of individuals. On the other hand, methodological holists, such as Durkheim and Marx, tend in their explanations to bypass individual action. Within this debate, better arguments exist for the view that explanations of social phenomena without the beliefs and desires of agents are deficient. If this is so, individualists appear to have a distinct edge over their adversaries. Indeed, a consensus exists among philosophers and social scientists that holism is implausible or false and individualism, when carefully formulated, is trivially true.
Holists challenge this consensus by first arguing that caricatured formulations of holism that ignore human action must be set aside. They then ask us to re-examine the nature of human action. Action is distinguished from mere behaviour by its intentional character. This much is uncontested between individualists and holists. But against the individualist contention that intentions exist as only psychological states in the heads of individuals, the holist argues that they also lie directly embedded in irreducible social practices, and that the identification of any intention is impossible without examining the social context within which agents think and act. Holists find nothing wrong with the need to unravel the motivations of individuals, but they contend that these motivations cannot be individuated without appeal to the wider beliefs and practices of the community. For instance, the acquiescence of oppressed workers may take the form not of total submission but subtle negotiation that yields them sub-optimal benefits. Insensitivity to social context may blind us to this. Besides, it is not a matter of individual beliefs and preferences that this strategy is adopted. That decisions are taken by subtle strategies of negotiation rather than by explicit bargaining, deployment of force or use of high moral principles is a matter of social practice irreducible to the conscious action of individuals.
Two conclusions follow if the holist claim is true. First, that a reference to a social entity is inescapable even when social facts are explained in terms of individual actions, because of the necessary presence of a social ingredient in all individual intentions and actions. Second, a reference to individual actions is not even necessary when social facts are explained or understood in terms of social practices. Thus, the individualist view that explanation in social science must rely wholly and exhaustively on individual entities is hotly contested and is not as uncontroversial or trivial as it appears.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude (1908–2009)
Authors: Harris Olivia 
Published: September 2018

Lévi-Strauss is one of the outstanding figures of mid-twentieth century intellectual life, influential far beyond the boundaries of France or the French language, and he has continued to write new work well into his eighties. His name is linked above all to the structuralist movement, of which he has been probably the most single-minded and unwavering exponent, and he was one of the key figures in the experiment of applying the insights of linguistics to the material of the social sciences. Through his work, public recognition of the discipline of anthropology grew dramatically to become an important element in discussion of philosophical issues.
The philosophical environment in France, in which structuralism developed and against which it reacted, was that of Sartrean humanism. In contrast to the existentialist emphasis on individual subjectivity, structuralism expected to find objective solutions to problems in the study of human beings. It was a form of intellectual modernism, a radical break with previous theoretical models and philosophical traditions, symptomatic of post-war optimism for the global applicability of science. It was hostile to metaphysics, bracketed the search for truth and was indifferent to the human subject. And, in contrast to Bergson’s emphasis on continuity and flux, structuralism took discontinuity as its founding principle.
Post-structuralism in the social sciences
Authors: Gutting Gary 
Published: September 2018

Structuralism was a twentieth-century approach in various social scientific disciplines (the ‘human sciences’) that promised to put them on a solid scientific basis. The origin and model of structuralism was Saussure’s work in linguistics. Saussure’s approach was later adapted in anthropology (by Lévi-Strauss), in psychoanalysis (by Lacan), and in literary theory (by Barthes). The core of structuralism was the treatment of distinctively human domains as formal structures in which meanings were constituted not by conscious subjects but by relations among the elements of a formal system.
Post-structuralism comprises a variety of reactions to structuralism, primarily by philosophers such as Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard. The first stage of post-structuralist reflection on the social sciences, best represented by Foucault’s discussion at the end of The Order of Things, accepted the structuralist approach and drew from it the philosophical consequences for our understanding of the social sciences. A later stage (including Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Lyotard’s writings from the 1970s on) sought to transform our conception of the human sciences through a critique of structuralist presuppositions. In this later stage, post-structuralists continued to accept structuralism’s elimination of the conscious subject but maintained that human existence could not be adequately understood without taking account of non-structural causal factors such as power (Foucault) and desire (Lyotard). Foucault argued for the inextricable tie between our knowledge of society and society’s power structures. Lyotard maintained that Lacan’s structuralist version of psychoanalysis ignored the way that desire corresponds to a reality that escapes the boundaries of any formal structure. He also developed a political and ethical stance based on the fundamental value of a plurality of desires.