Continental Philosophy of Science

FROM THE BACK COVER: What is the essential nature of meaning? . . . . . This book answers by examining interpretive theories from the past and present. It finds that an historical struggle with meaning has been underway since the Reformation, a struggle that reaches crisis proportions in the 20th century. On the one hand, this crisis is mollified by Heidegger's hermeneutical phenomenology, which argues that we are always already in a meaningful relationship to the objects of the world. On the other hand, this crisis is exacerbated when phenomenology, structuralism, and aesthetic theory directly make meaning into an object of study. . . . . . . . . These historical developments culminate with the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, whose non-hermeneutical phenomenology delimits a cause of meaning said to be closely linked to the core of subjectivity. Intriguingly, Lacan's work reveals meaning to be sexual in nature. By integrating his notion of sexual difference with his work in discourse theory and topology, this book demonstrates how the subject's struggle with meaning can be suspended.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GENERAL DESCRIPTION: Broadly speaking, the majority of books on Jacques Lacan focus on the earlier periods of his career. They also tend to target the psychoanalytic clinical community, or else discuss his work in various political, social, and cultural contexts. But in almost all cases these books refrain from a detailed exegesis of his actual texts. They instead prefer to comment on his theoretical apparatus as a whole before turning to its practical implications. . . . . . This book positions itself against this grain. Firstly, it closely analyzes some half-dozen key Lacanian texts. This analysis is organized under a single thematic – the question of meaning – in order to advance the reader's understanding of the trajectory of Lacan's thought across his entire career, as well as to promote the book's thesis that the field of meaning can be suspended. Accordingly, an initial chapter takes up the hermeneutical tradition from Flacius onward. This is then supplemented by a chapter which surveys phenomenological, structuralist and aesthetic theories of meaning and their differing methods of textual analysis. Together these two chapters provide a unique context for the sustained analysis of Lacan's texts which begins in the third chapter, an analysis that forms the bulk of the book's content. This contextualization potentially widens the book's appeal to any scholar wishing to explore his relationship to those textual objects he interacts with on a daily basis. And because this book assumes the reader has little to no familiarity with Lacan, the reader will find patient explanations of the basics of his theories before slowly being led up to the more difficult theories of his late years. Again the argument is that Lacan has something to offer all scholars. His work is not just reserved for psychoanalysts. . . . . . It is with his late theories that the serious student of Lacan will find the book's most original contribution. For in the fourth chapter a detailed account is provided of how Lacan derived his infamous formulae of sexuation from Aristotelian logic. These formulae are then extensively discussed against the backdrop of interpretive theory and textual analysis, showing how these formulae capture much more than just the difference between the sexes. Strikingly, this difference is also found to run through meaning itself, something the final chapter aims to demonstrate. It does this by amalgamating three key components of late-Lacan: sexuation, discourse theory and his use of topological spaces. This amalgamation is a first in the literature. But this amalgamation is not just useful in demonstrating the book's thesis. It further suggests how seemingly divergent aspects of late-Lacanian theory can be made to work together.

Includes essays by internationally noted scholars, ranging from David B. Allison to Slavoj Žižek, honour the interpretive contributions of William J. Richardson's pathbreaking Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought. The essays move from traditional phenomenology to the idea of essential (another) thinking, the questions of translation and existential expressions of the turn of Heidegger's thought, the intersection of politics and language, the philosophic significance of Jacques Lacan, and several essays on science and technology. All show the influence of Richardson's first study. A valuable emphasis appears in Richardson's interpretation of Heidegger's conception of die Irre, interpreted as Errancy, set in its current locus in a discussion of Heidegger's debacle with the political in his involvement with National Socialism.

In the 1930s, Ernst Cassirer’s Determinismus und Indeterminismus in der modernen Physik (1937) was one of the very few defences of a neo-Kantian philosophy of science. As its main representative, Cassirer received enthusiastic responses from leading physicists. Moreover, three important physicists reviewed his daring book.
With the development of quantum mechanics the philosophical concepts of causality and determinism faced a serious trial. QM harmed the possibility of a precise and complete prediction and only assigned probabilities to multiple possible measurement outcomes. But against announcements of the bankruptcy of causality and determinism, Cassirer argued that they were advanced to more sophisticated forms. Firstly, Cassirer understood causality as the general postulate that our nature displays an intelligible orderliness according to law. Secondly, he argued that the sometimes celebrated title of indeterminism led to either scepticism or metaphysics. Cassirer argued that QM did not attack the “determinateness of law” at all, for the laws of the theory are necessary and always apply. However, all commentators found that Cassirer’s causality came across as too general. Also, it was asked whether his formulations could protect physics against the “indeterminateness” of individual (atomic) processes and their apparent “Willkürlichkeit”.
I will explore the aims of Cassirer’s philosophy and compare them with the critique of his commentators and conclude that Cassirer nevertheless met what C. F. von Weizsäcker called the “needs of the physicists”.

Continental philosophy of science has developed alongside mainstream analytic philosophy of science. But where continental approaches are inclusive, analytic philosophies of science are not– and they exclude not merely Nietzsche’s philosophy of science but Gödel’s philosophy of
physics. As a radicalization of Kant, Nietzsche’s critical philosophy of science puts science in question and Nietzsche’s critique of the methodological foundations of classical philology
bears on science, particularly evolution as well as style (in art and science). In addition to the critical (in Mach, Nietzsche, Heidegger but also Husserl just to the extent that continental
philosophy of science tends to depart from a reflection on the crisis of foundations), other continental philosophies of science include phenomenology (Husserl, Bachelard, Merleau-Ponty, etc.) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, Heelan, etc.), especially incorporating history of science (Nietzsche, Mach, Duhem, Butterfield, Feyerabend, etc.). Examples are drawn from the philosophy of sciences (chemistry, geology, and biology) other than physics.

"Brower explores the way philosophers were inspired by entomological social systems and communication to reflect on human psyche, social behavior, community organization, communication, and inter-individual relationships. His essay rehearses the swarms of insects embedded in contemporary philosophy and literary theory, not only showing how many of the major concepts (or philosophemes) in continental philosophy – sexuality, politics, thinking, time, interdependence, and language – draw lessons from the world of insects, but also illustrating again how the insect world spurred human reflection."

In Chinese: "Continental Philosophy in Britain and America.” Trans. Dezhi Duan. In: K. Ouyang and S. Fuller, eds., The Map of Contemporary British and American Philosophy and Philosophers. Beijing. People’s Press, 2005. Pp. 22-82.

[“Introduction” 22-28; “Phenomenology” 28- 34; “Hermeneutic Phenomenology” 34-40; “Existentialism: Toward an Ethics of Responsibility & a Feminist Erotic Ethic” 40-44; Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur; Continental Aesthetics: Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of Perception” 51-56; “Continental Philosophy of Science” 56-58; “The Hermeneutics of the Other: The Dominion of the Ethical” 58-64; “The Frankfurt School and Critical Theory” 64-67; “From Structuralism to Deconstruction” 67-82.]

Canguilhem is known to have regretted, with some pathos, that Life no longer serves as an orienting question in our scientific activity. He also frequently insisted on a kind of uniqueness of organisms and/or living bodies – their inherent normativity, their value-production and overall their inherent difference from mere machines. In addition, Canguilhem acknowledged a major debt to the German neurologist-theoretician Kurt Goldstein, author most famously of The Structure of the Organism in 1934; along with Merleau-Ponty, Canguilhem was the main figure who introduced the work of Goldstein and his ‘phenomenology of embodiment’ into France. In this paper I inquire if we should view Canguilhem and Goldstein as ‘biochauvinists’, that is, as thinkers who consider that there is something inherently unique about biological entities as such, and if so, of what sort.

In the author's previous contribution to this journal (Rosen 2015), a phenomenological string theory was proposed based on qualitative topology and hypercomplex numbers. The current paper takes this further by delving into the ancient Chinese origin of phenomenological string theory. First, we discover a connection between the Klein bottle, which is crucial to the theory, and the Ho-t'u, a Chinese number archetype central to Taoist cosmology. The two structures are seen to mirror each other in expressing the psychophysical (phenomenological) action pattern at the heart of microphysics. But tackling the question of quantum gravity requires that a whole family of topological dimensions be brought into play. What we find in engaging with these structures is a closely related family of Taoist forebears that, in concert with their successors, provide a blueprint for cosmic evolution. Whereas conventional string theory accounts for the generation of nature's fundamental forces via a notion of symmetry breaking that is essentially static and thus unable to explain cosmogony successfully, phenomenological/Taoist string theory entails the dialectical interplay of symmetry and asymmetry inherent in the principle of synsymmetry. This dynamic concept of cosmic change is elaborated on in the three concluding sections of the paper. Here, a detailed analysis of cosmogony is offered, first in terms of the theory of dimensional development and its Taoist (yin-yang) counterpart, then in terms of the evolution of the elemental force particles through cycles of expansion and contraction in a spiraling universe. The paper closes by considering the role of the analyst per se in the further evolution of the cosmos.

Through an exploration of theoretical physics, this paper suggests the need for regrounding natural science in phenomenological philosophy.  To begin, the philosophical roots of the prevailing scientific paradigm are traced to the thinking of Plato, Descartes, and Newton. The crisis in modern science is then investigated, tracking developments in physics, science’s premier discipline. Einsteinian special relativity is interpreted as a response to the threat of discontinuity implied by the Michelson-Morley experiment, a challenge to classical objectivism that Einstein sought to counteract. We see that Einstein’s efforts to banish discontinuity ultimately fall into the “black hole” predicted in his general theory of relativity. The unavoidable discontinuity that haunts Einstein’s theory is also central to quantum mechanics. Here too the attempt has been made to manage discontinuity, only to have this strategy thwarted in the end by the intractable problem of quantum gravity. The irrepressible discontinuity manifested in the phenomena of modern physics proves to be linked to a merging of subject and object that flies in the face of Cartesian philosophy. To accommodate these radically non-classical phenomena, a new philosophical foundation is called for: phenomenology. Phenomenological philosophy is elaborated through Merleau-Ponty’s concept of depth and is then brought into focus for use in theoretical physics via qualitative work with topology and hypercomplex numbers. In the final part of this paper, a detailed summary is offered of the specific application of topological phenomenology to quantum gravity that was systematically articulated in The Self-Evolving Cosmos (Rosen 2008a).

The work of Gaston Bachelard is known for two crucial concepts, that of the epistemological rupture and that of phenomenotechnique. A crucial question is, however, how these two concepts relate to one another. Are they in fact essentially connected or must they be seen as two separate elements of Bachelard’s thinking? This paper aims to analyse the relation between these two Bachelardian moments and the significance of the concept of phenomenotechnique for today. This will be done by examining how the concepts of Bachelard have been used from the 1960s on. From this historical perspective, one gets the impression that these two concepts are relatively independent from each other. The Althusserian school has exclusively focused on the concept of ‘epistemological break’, while scholars from Science & Technology Studies, such as Bruno Latour, seem to have only taken up the concept of phenomenotechnique. It in fact leads to two different models of how to think about science, namely the model of purification and the model of proliferation. The former starts from the idea that sciences are rational to the extent that they are purified and free from obstacles. Scientific objectivity, within this later model, is not achieved by eradicating all intermediaries, obstacles and distortions, but rather exactly by introducing as many relevant technical mediators as possible. Finally, such a strong distinction will be criticized and the argument will be made that both in Bachelard’s and Latour's thought both concepts are combined. This leads to a janus-headed view on science, where both the element of purification and the element of proliferation are combined.

This paper addresses three paradoxes of biomimicry. First of all: how can biomimicry be as old as technology as such and at the same time decidedly innovative and new? Secondly: how can biomimicry both entail a " naturalisation " of technology and a " technification " of nature? And finally: how can biomimicry be perceived as nature-friendly but at the same time (potentially at least) as a pervasive biotechnological assault on nature? Contemporary (techno-scientific) biomimicry, I will argue, aims to mimic nature on the level of bio-molecular processes and structures: contemporary biomimicry as micro-biomimicry. Moreover, building on Aristotle, Delbrück and Schrödinger, I will emphasise that what is mimicked by contemporary (techno-scientific) biomimicry, in contrast to traditional (artisanal) instances of biomimicry, is not the morphological form (εἶδος), but rather the program or formula (λόγος) of living systems. Contemporary biomimicry is " in accordance with nature " , but not in the tradition sense. Rather, building on decades of biomolecular research, it strives to reconcile nature and technology against the backdrop of advanced technicity. But biomimetics will only achieve its goals if it is not pursued purely as a technological endeavour, but complemented by an ethos of sustainability and respect for nature. These claims will be elucidated with the help of two case studies: a research project (namely the BaSyC project, launched in 2017 and aimed at producing a synthetic cell) and a science novel (namely Solar, revolving around the epistemic and moral challenges involved in artificial photosynthesis).

In recent years, analytic philosophers have begun to recognize the value of the French school of historical epistemology (as embodied by figures such as Jean Cavaillès, Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem, and Michel Foucault) for contemporary debates in the history and philosophy of science. This tradition, which some characterize as a ‘French’ approach to the philosophy of science, however, remains largely un-read by mainstream philosophers of science. This article offers an interpretation of this tradition, highlighting what the author takes to be its two central features: (i) its claim that scientific discourse is the object of epistemology and (ii) its claim that scientific concepts are the building blocks of scientific discourse.

This paper analyses the technoscientific objective of building a synthetic cell from a Jungian perspective. After decades of fragmentation and specialisation, the synthetic cell symbolises a turn towards restored wholeness, both at the object pole of the knowledge relationship (putting the fragments together again) and at the subject pole (synthetic biology as a converging field, a Gesamtwissenschaft, fostering individuation). From a Jungian perspective, it is no coincidence that visual representations of synthetic cells often reflect an archetypal, mandala-like structure. As a symbol of restored unity, the synthetic cell mandala compensates for technoscientific fragmentation via active imagination, providing a visual aid for the current technoscientific turn towards reintegration. Although the biotechnological desire to reconstruct life in vitro has been compared to alchemy before, a Jungian analysis allows us to make this comparison more specific and precise. The problem of archetypal images, however, is that alluring prospects of reintegration may underestimate and obfuscate the deficiencies and tensions at work in the current situation. As a projection of a future wholeness, it may foster optimism, but also function as a misleading façade, covering up collisions and complexities. This can only be averted by the conscious employment of the synthetic cell mandala as a symbolic scaffold fostering processes of individuation and working through.

In this paper I confront an anti-realistic approach to Edmund Husserl's Phenomenological work and I suggest that this work could most suitably constitute into the Scientific Realistic framework. In order to this, I will first show one of most recent and elaborate claims which relates Husserl with Van Fraassen's Constructive Empiricism. Later, I will point out some existing difficulties to interpret the Husserlian thesis using the anti-realist framework. I will specially focus on the discussion about unobservable entities, arguing how the existence of the unobservable is not an alien thesis to the Phenomenology of Husserl. Finally, I will point out how Husserl is closer to the Realistic framework.

My effort to address the comments made by the two distinguished scholars (to "negate their negations" as it were), consists of three steps. I will start with a brief resume of Hegel's dialectical logic, to provide a scaffold for the debate. Subsequently, I will address the comments made. In the case of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, I will focus on his reference to Althusser. In the case of Bart Gremmen, I will focus on the dialectics of biology (on biology as an inherently dialectical science), notably on his reference to Mendel. Finally, I will address the tension between the conceptual and the empirical dimension of philosophical scholarship. Keywords Hegel's dialectical logic · Althusser's philosophy of science · Dialectical biology · Gregor Mendel · The empirical turn in philosophy

Cyborgs are ongoing becomings of a doubly “in-between” temporality of humans and machines. Materially made from components of both sorts of beings, cyborgs gain increasing function through an interweaving in which each alters the other, from the level of “neural plasticity” to software updates to emotional breakthroughs of which both are a part. One sort of temporal in-between is of the progressive unfolding of a deepening becoming as “not-one-not-two” and the other is a “doubling back” of time into itself in which moments that were once disparate are conjoined or enjambed. Tracing the experience of Michael Chorost during a four year period of coming to terms with his cochlear implant, related in Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, the essay pinpoints shifts in awareness, perceptual belief, and being-with others that unfold within the in-between of person and machine.

Cyborgs are ongoing becomings of a doubly “in-between” temporality of humans and machines. Materially made from components of both sorts of beings, cyborgs gain increasing function through an interweaving in which each alters the other, from the level of “neural plasticity” to software updates to emotional breakthroughs of which both are a part. One sort of temporal in-between is of the progressive unfolding of a deepening becoming as “not-one-not-two” and the other is a “doubling back” of time into itself in which moments that were once disparate are conjoined or enjambed. Tracing the experience of Michael Chorost during a four year period of coming to terms with his cochlear implant, related in Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human, the essay pinpoints shifts in awareness, perceptual belief, and being-with others that unfold within the in-between of person and machine.

This article attempts to distil as simply and concisely as possible the author's previous work on the need to transform the philosophical foundation of modern physics (Rosen 1994, 2008, 2015, and others). Here we basically see that while subject-object interaction lies at the heart of quantum mechanics, the default setting that grounds mainstream physics has been the non-interactive philosophy of René Descartes. After indicating the obstacle this has created for further progress in physics, the author proposes that the problem can be addressed by shifting physics' philosophical underpinning from objectivism to phenomenology. Rosen shows that this can be accomplished by employing qualitative mathematics in a phenomenological way.

Having heard a lecture by his younger colleague Wolfgang Pauli, the renowned physicist Niels Bohr is said to have commented: " We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that it is not crazy enough. " Many contemporary physicists acknowledge that the phenomena of their field are so odd, the problems so befuddling to our current ways of thinking, that only a completely " crazy " theoretical approach to them has any possibility of success. But resolving the problems of modern physics may require something " crazier " still—not just an entirely new theory, but a whole new philosophical base, a new way of intuiting the world. The general features of quantum mechanics are widely known. At the heart of the matter is Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle. If you throw a ball into the air, in principle you are able to pinpoint both its position in space from moment to moment and the velocity with which it is traveling. But, in probing the subatomic world, the focus of physical reality softens and blurs and you are no longer able to be entirely certain about the locations and velocities of the tiny bits of matter found there. Why does reality lose its focus in the microworld? It is because, at this level of nature, the very act of observing a particle significantly affects the particle observed. So the fundamental uncertainty of quantum physics—an indeterminacy that no refinement of measuring instruments can eliminate—brings to light the intimate interaction of observer and observed, subject and object, mind and matter. No doubt the radical interaction of subject and object in the microworld flies in the face of mainstream objectivist science, which has been deeply committed to keeping subject and object apart. Has this led physicists to call for a fundamental change in science's posture? By and large it has not. Physics still operates on a set of unspoken assumptions, an underlying philosophical base that is incompatible with

In its two parts, this study intends to reconstruct with some detail the fiasco of the Artificial Intelligence research project and the devastating critique carried out against it by Hubert Dreyfus in his magnum opus What Computers Still Can’t Do (1972, 1979, 1992). Part of these consequences is the emergence within this specialized field of a group of scholars who have called themselves ‘Heideggerian’. This definition shall be dealt with and criticized in the second part of this study. In this first part, we go on to analize (i) the bizarre dreams and false expectations of AI researchers, and (ii) Dreyfus’ own criticism and its definitive thrust of phenomenological nature.

Abstract. This article analyses two novels on academic plagiarism, namely Solar by Ian McEwan and Perlmann's Silence by Pascal Mercier. Both novels describe experiences of academics in the second half of life who have lost contact with their areas of research and no longer seem able to live up to the daunting expectations associated with their international status, prominence and fame in the natural sciences (Solar) and in the humanities (Perlmann's Silence). The novels are analysed on three levels (knowledge, power and the Self) distinguished by Michel Foucault, pointing out how scientific plagiarism is connected with new forms of knowledge production and with power relationships in contemporary research. Most attention, however, will be given to the ethical dimension of the Self: the ways in which the academics involved fail to constitute themselves as responsible subjects, vis-à-vis the integrity challenges emerging in contemporary research practices. From a science ethics perspective, a more optimal scenario could have been available, but a close comparative reading reveals that both perpetrators face a far more devastating form of crisis, for which available guidelines fail to provide a fix. Both the challenge (loss of contact with their field of research) and the solution (plagiarism) are symptomatic of a structural problematic pervading the current research system, which I will thematise as self-exploitation, resulting in the eradication of a former, prolific Self, an experience that is articulated in Perlmann's Silence in psychoanalytic (Lacanian) terms, namely as an experience of 'splitting' (Spaltung). In both novels, plagiarism is enacted as a desperate (but faltering) attempt to achieve what Solar refers to as 'conflation': i.e. the effort to somehow restore an integrity (or wholeness) that already eroded long before the plagiarism was actually committed. Thus, science novels may contribute to our understanding of plagiarism and other instances of scientific misconduct.

"La obra colectiva Leer El capital, de la que presentamos aquí una nueva edición, se encontraba hacía muchos años agotada e inhallable. No por ello ella había dejado de funcionar como un hito y de servir de referencia en los debates e investigaciones suscitadas por el pensamiento de Marx (más allá de las diferentes corrientes del “marxismo”), o sobre el objeto y el estatus de la epistemología (capturada entre los modelos “internalistas” y “externalistas”), o sobre los
problemas de filosofía política y filosofía de la historia que suscita la crítica de la categoría de “sujeto”, de la cual, la noción de estructuralismo sirvió durante un tiempo de señal, más allá de las inexactitudes que serán evocadas más abajo. (...) [del comienzo del texto]