Philosophy of Science

 
 Introduction

Philosophy of Science is my academic field of research and teaching. In 2006 I have finished posdoctoral work in PS on the history of methodology of physics (with funding by FAPESP). In 1999 I had completed my PhD on coherence and reflective equilibrium in Larry Laudan's reticulated model of scientific rationality. In 1994 I had already completed my MA on the problem-solving view in philosophy of science, which also focused on Laudan, as well as other authors such as Thomas Nickles.

Let me say a few words about the path I have followed during the last years. I was led to Philosophy of Science by way of two introductory undergraduate courses I have taken at the University of São Paulo in 1988, when I was still a Physics student. The teacher in one of them, Prof. Pablo Mariconda, was to become later my MA advisor; in the other the teacher, Prof. Caetano Plastino, would eventually become my PhD advisor. In these courses I heard for the first time about authors such as Pierre Duhem, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, N. Russell Hanson, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, and, last but not least, Wolfgang Stegmüller and Joseph Sneed, who impressed me very much. It was a time of intense reading. In two years I managed to read almost all of their main works. I read a lot from Mario Bunge as well. I would hear about, and read, Larry Laudan only in 1990, thanks to Prof. Alberto Villani from the Physics Teaching Group at the Institute of Physics. By that time I had already decided to do a MA in Phil Sci. For quite a few years since then my research would gravitate around Laudan's. During those first years, I had my first contact with some of the major questions in the philosophical agenda: realism, structure of theories, scientific rationality, underdetermination, naturalized epistemology, scientific progress, methodology, observation, models, and so on.

The first phase of Laudan's work -- which is centered on problem-solving, epitomized in his 1977 book Progress and Its Problems -- was analyzed in my MA. However, he was but one of the authors whose ideas I tried to chart. In my PhD he was to become the main character (whose importance is only matched, perhaps, by Laurence BonJour). There I focused on a latter phase of Laudan's work, which is related to the reticulational model of rationality, as exposed in his 1984 book Science and Values. Briefly stated, what I have proposed is a reconstruction of his model in terms of coherence and reflective equilibrium, giving in the process a sharper analysis of the place occupied by metamethodology. You can get more details here.

My former MA advisor, Prof. Mariconda, is a Galileo scholar, and has an impressive historical knowledge as well. Thanks to his influence and of the group of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows he directed (which lies at the origin of the Scientiae Studia group, with its journal and society), I was first able to gauge the importance history of science and history of philosophy have for a philosopher of science, even though I've been always more inclined toward the theoretical and structural side of Phil Sci. For my postdoctoral work, after over ten years working almost exclusively with the structural aspects of science and with questions about progress and rationality, I started doing history of methodology (19th century physics, especially electromagnetism, and 20th physics, mainly quantum theory and field theory). That way I managed to get a better grasp of the interaction between history and philosophy of science in practice.

My pages about philosophy of science are presented below. Three pages briefly introduce the reader to the work of Larry Laudan, Thomas Kuhn and Joseph D. Sneed. My PhD thesis and my MA dissertation are also available, as well as related resources. There are also pages about the structural view of scientific theories, model-theoretic philosophy of science, foundations of quantum mechanics, and undecidability and incompleteness in physical theories. Besides the links to my own philosophy pages, there are links to three exclusive philosophical surprises brought to you by V++. :-) You can also go to the philosophy of science links page and to the philosophical humor page.
 

 My Pages:

 Exclusive! :-)
 Philosophical Humor :-)
 Links:
 

This document last modified March 21, 2001 / May 5, 2009.  
 

 
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