Philip Kitcher
Biographic Data
| ID | 282973 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Philip Kitcher |
| GIVEN NAMES | Philip |
| FAMILY NAME | Kitcher |
| SIGNATURE | KITCHER P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Columbia University |
| ORCID | 0009-0009-4978-4305 |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 93 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 568 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 93 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
The human project or what difference would God make?
Many people believe that, without any God or something similarly ‘transcendent’, human life would be meaningless. I oppose this position. In its most popular form, it supposes that meaning accrues because our mundane life is merely a prelude – a time of trial, to decide the character of our life in the hereafter. When probed, this approach involves a number of implausible corollaries. More abstract approaches suggest that meaningfulness results f…
Mathematical Methodology
In Proofs and Refutations , Imre Lakatos proposed to reorient the philosophy of mathematics. He suggested abandoning the search for a foundation for mathematics in favor of providing a methodology for mathematics. This essay attempts to pursue the methodological project in a different fashion. It sketches the long history of mathematics, and reflects on the kinds of benefits attained in a number of important transitions. It argues that these adva…
Imitation of Rigor
Mark Wilson’s “alternative history,” highly original, deeply informed, cogently argued, and elegantly written, aims to do more than chronicle the mistakes of the past. It presents a manifesto for the future, charting more profitable paths along which analytic philosophers might pursue their inquiries. Unlike some other reformers, Wilson does not take the rot to have set in fairly recently, with the ever more minute scrutiny of ever less significa…
The centrality of education
This article is intended as a precis of The Main Enterprise of the World and hopes to orient those who have not read it to the symposium discussion that follows. It outlines my own version of a radical rethinking of education. Instead of holding that educational systems should be shaped so as to satisfy socio-economic constraints, interpreted narrowly in recent decades to emphasize the preparation of the young to compete in the global economy, it…
Continuing the conversation
I offer some responses to the principal points raised by Ben Kotzee, Alexis Gibbs, Sheron Fraser-Burgess, and Nigel Tubbs in their commentaries on my book, The Main Enterprise of the World: Rethinking Education (MEW), and to John White's penetrating and constructive review (the four commentaries and White's review all appear in this issue). In reply to Kotzee's challenge, I argue that MEW supports an improved approach to specialized scientific ed…
Remembering Dick Bernstein
Moral Progress
The overall aim of this book is to understand the character of moral progress, so that making moral progress may become more systematic and secure, less chancy and less bloody. Drawing on three historical examples—the abolition of chattel slavery, the expansion of opportunities for women, and the increasing acceptance of same-sex love—it asks how those changes were brought about and seeks a methodology for streamlining the kinds of developments t…
Philosophy after Darwin
Life After Faith
A positive assessment of secularism and the possibilities it offers for a genuinely meaningful life without religion Although there is no shortage of recent books arguing against religion, few offer a positive alternative—how anyone might live a fulfilling life without the support of religious beliefs. This enlightening book fills the gap. Philip Kitcher constructs an original and persuasive secular perspective, one that answers human needs, reco…
Aging Oedipus
Oedipus at Colonus apparently shows the aging Oedipus finding a fulfilling ending to his life. The play characterizes that fulfillment in terms of a religious perspective few would now accept. This chapter attempts to construct a framework in which to appreciate Sophocles’s last play as a profound human drama (as is Oedipus Tyrannus ). The serenity Oedipus achieves is the product of a struggle. As the episodes of the drama, particularly the encou…
Putnam’s Happy Ending
Knowledge, Democracy, and the Internet
Quel âge post-séculier
Que signifient les discours actuels en faveur du « post-séculier » ? Et pourquoi faudrait-il en finir avec l'âge séculier ? Qui l'exige ou le demande ? Quels sont les événements qui le requièrent ? Ces dernières années, un débat sur la place de la religion dans les démocraties libérales s'est engagé dans le monde intellectuel. Si certains ont parlé d'un âge séculier et d'autres d'une « société post-séculière », c'est parfois la dynamique même de …
Experimental Animals
Deaths in Venice
Published in 1913, Thomas Mann's 'Death in Venice' is one of the most widely read novellas in any language. In the 1970s, Benjamin Britten adapted it into an opera, and Lucchino Visconti turned it into a successful film. Reading these works from a philosophical perspective, Philip Kitcher connects the predicament of the novella's central character to Western thought's most compelling questions.
Deaths in Venice
Afterthoughts. Reply to Comments
I attempt to respond to the many questions and objections raised by the commentaries. The responses are grouped by themes, rather than focusing on the essays in sequence. So there are sections on worries about my analytical history, concerns about my meta-ethical perspective, doubts about my normative stance and complaints about my perpetration of a ‘naturalistic fallacy’
Précis of The Ethical Project
Most people who have ever lived have subscribed to principles about how to act and doctrines about what is valuable, ethical views they regard as handed down from an authoritative source, usually from a being or beings far more powerful and insightful than themselves. Most philosophers, by contrast, have supposed that any approach to ethics along these lines is erroneous, and have substituted the thought that insights into right action and the go…
The Ethical Project
Principles of right and wrong guide the lives of almost all human beings, but we often see them as external to ourselves, outside our own control. In a revolutionary approach to the problems of moral philosophy, Philip Kitcher makes a provocative proposal: Instead of conceiving ethical commands as divine revelations or as the discoveries of brilliant thinkers, we should see our ethical practices as evolving over tens of thousands of years, as mem…
Science in a Democratic Society
Claims that science should be more democratic than it is frequently arouse opposition. In this essay, I distinguish my own views about the democratization of science from the more ambitious theses defended by Paul Feyerabend. I argue that it is unlikely that the complexity of some scientific debates will allow for resolution according to the methodological principles of any formal confirmation theory, suggesting instead that major revolutions res…
Challenges for Secularism
Education, Democracy, and Capitalism
This article examines the relationships between education, democracy, and capitalism through the works of John Dewey, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith. It explores some basic questions that arise in developing an approach to education within our liberal democratic tradition. It suggests that that Dewey's philosophy of education has the resources to answer a challenge posed by Smith's economic analyses and that philosophers ought to embrace Dewey'…
Two forms of blindness
Varieties of Freedom and Their Distribution
The idea that there should be no limits on freedom of discussion receives passionate defenses from some of the most thoughtful and eloquent writers in our language, for example, Milton's evidential transparence condition and Mill's condition of equal benefit. My interest lies in exposing the consequences of this view for the derivative value of free discussion. I'm going to be particularly concerned with those instances in which these conditions …
Scientific Research–Who Should Govern
Explanatory Unification
The official model of explanation proposed by the logical empiricists, the covering law model, is subject to familiar objections. The goal of the present paper is to explore an unofficial view of explanation which logical empiricists have sometimes suggested, the view of explanation as unification. I try to show that this view can be developed so as to provide insight into major episodes in the history of science, and that it can overcome some of…
Species
I defend a view of the species category, pluralistic realism , which is designed to do justice to the insights of many different groups of systematists. After arguing that species are sets and not individuals, I proceed to outline briefly some defects of the biological species concept. I draw the general moral that similar shortcomings arise for other popular views of the nature of species. These shortcomings arise because the legitimate interest…
And all That. A Tale of Two Sciences
The Naturalists Return
Lrnst Haeckel, intellectual star of late-nineteenth-century Jena, continued a philosophical tradition by drawing on science to address the great questions of epistemology and ethics.' Haeckel would have been surprised to learn that one of his relatively obscure colleagues would help to overthrow that tradition. For many Anglo-American philosophers of our century, Jena is hallowed ground because it is the birthplace of contemporary philosophy. Fre…
The Advancement of Science
The Advancement of Science attempts to understand the notions of scientific progress, scientific objectivity, and the growth of knowledge by taking up the challenges that have been issued by scholars in the history and sociology of science. Begins from an outline of classical views in philosophy of science and explains how those views were confronted with apparently problematic examples from scientific practice past and present. Then builds an ac…
Theories, Theorists and Theoretical Change
Does ‘Race’ Have a Future
Real Realism
Research Article| April 01 2001 Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy Philip Kitcher Philip Kitcher Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google The Philosophical Review (2001) 110 (2): 151–197. https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-110-2-151 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Philip Kitcher; Real Realism: The Galilean Strategy. The Philosophical Review 1 April 2001; 110 (2): 151–197. doi: https://doi.…
Genes
On the Explanatory Role of Correspondence Truth
An intuitive argument for scientific realism suggests that our successes in predicting and intervening would be inexplicable if the theories that generate them were not approximately true. This argument faces many objections, some of which are briefly addressed in this paper, and one of which is treated in more detail. The focal criticism alleges that appeals to success cannot deliver conclusions that parts of science are true in the sense of tru…
The Third Way
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Frege's Epistemology
Global Health and the Scientific Research Agenda
Developmental Decomposition and the Future of Human Behavioral Ecology
I attempt to complement my earlier critiques of human sociobiology, by offering an account of how evolutionary ideas might legitimately be employed in the study of human social behavior. The main emphasis of the paper is the need to integrate studies of proximate mechanisms and their ontogenesis with functional/evolutionary research. Human psychological complexity makes it impossible to focus simply on specific types of human behavior and ask for…
A Priori Knowledge
A44 has been popular term with philosophers at least since Kant distinguished between priori and posteriori knowledge. Yet, despite the frequency with which it has been used in twentieth century philosophy, there has been little discussion of the concept of apriority.' Some writers seem to take it for granted that there are propositions, such as the truths of logic and mathematics, which are priori; others deny that there are any priori propositi…
Experimental Animals
Reply to Helen Longino
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Essence and Perfection
Theory Structure and Theory Change in Contemporary Molecular Biology
Traditional approaches to theory structure and theory change in science do not fare well when confronted with the practice of certain fields of science. We offer an account of contemporary practice in molecular biology designed to address two questions: Is theory change in this area of science gradual or saltatory? What is the relation between molecular biology and the fields of traditional biology? Our main focus is a recent episode in molecular…
Hilbert's Epistemology
Hilbert's program attempts to show that our mathematical knowledge can be certain because we are able to know for certain the truths of elementary arithmetic. I argue that, in the absence of a theory of mathematical truth, Hilbert does not have a complete theory of our arithmetical knowledge. Further, while his deployment of a Kantian notion of intuition seems to promise an answer to scepticism, there is no way to complete Hilbert's epistemology …
Bolzano's ideal of algebraic analysis
Kant and the Foundations of Mathematics
Scientific Research–Who Should Govern
Games Social Animals Play
Knowledge, Democracy, and the Internet
Fluxions, Limits, and Infinite Littlenesse. A Study of Newton's Presentation of the Calculus
Bolzano's ideal of algebraic analysis
Kant and the Foundations of Mathematics
Hilbert's Epistemology
Hilbert's program attempts to show that our mathematical knowledge can be certain because we are able to know for certain the truths of elementary arithmetic. I argue that, in the absence of a theory of mathematical truth, Hilbert does not have a complete theory of our arithmetical knowledge. Further, while his deployment of a Kantian notion of intuition seems to promise an answer to scepticism, there is no way to complete Hilbert's epistemology …
Theories, Theorists and Theoretical Change
The Nativist's Dilemma
Journal Article The Nativist’s Dilemma Get access Philip Kitcher Philip Kitcher Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 28, Issue 110, January 1978, Pages 1–16, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219039 Published: 01 January 1978
Frege's Epistemology
Kant
A Priori Knowledge
A44 has been popular term with philosophers at least since Kant distinguished between priori and posteriori knowledge. Yet, despite the frequency with which it has been used in twentieth century philosophy, there has been little discussion of the concept of apriority.' Some writers seem to take it for granted that there are propositions, such as the truths of logic and mathematics, which are priori; others deny that there are any priori propositi…
Nombre, mesure et continu
Wittgenstein on the Foundations of Mathematics . Crispin Wright
Explanatory Unification
The official model of explanation proposed by the logical empiricists, the covering law model, is subject to familiar objections. The goal of the present paper is to explore an unofficial view of explanation which logical empiricists have sometimes suggested, the view of explanation as unification. I try to show that this view can be developed so as to provide insight into major episodes in the history of science, and that it can overcome some of…
Frege and the Philosophy of Mathematics . Michael D. Resnik
Genes
Between Science and Values
Against the Monism of The Moment
In his “Discussion” (1984), Elliott Sober offers some criticisms of the view about species— pluralistic realism —advocated in my 1984. Sober's comments divide into three parts. He attempts to show that species are not sets; he responds to my critique of David Hull's thesis that species are individuals; and he offers some arguments for the claim that species are “chunks of the genealogical nexus.” I consider each of these objections in turn, argui…
Species
I defend a view of the species category, pluralistic realism , which is designed to do justice to the insights of many different groups of systematists. After arguing that species are sets and not individuals, I proceed to outline briefly some defects of the biological species concept. I draw the general moral that similar shortcomings arise for other popular views of the nature of species. These shortcomings arise because the legitimate interest…
And all That. A Tale of Two Sciences
Abusing Science, the Case against Creationism
The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge. BY Philip Kitcher. Oxford: O.U.P., 1983. Pp. ix + 287. Price £15.00) Donald Gillies Donald Gillies Chelsea College, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 35, Issue 138, January 1985, Pages 104–107, https://doi.org/10.2307/2219556 Published: 01 January 1985
The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge
Vaulting Ambition
"On the Crest of "La Nouvelle Vague
I examine the attempt of R. Paul Shaw and Yuwa Wong to construct a sociobiological model for the origins of intergroup hostilities in hominids. After delineating a number of general difficulties that attend such models and that affect the treatment offered by Shaw and Wong, I argue that their mathematical claims rest on conflating two different scenarios. When the appropriate distinctions are made, it is highly unclear that the sociobiological ex…
The Return of the Gene
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2026953
The Dialectical Biologist
Philosophy (73 works) · Epistemology (69 works) · Sociology (37 works) · Computer Science (33 works) · Philosophy and History of Science (29 works) · Philosophy (24 works) · Political science (19 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Contemporary philosophy (15 works) · History (14 works)