Not too serious. Most references can be found from Wikipedia… “On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hairWarm smell of colitas, rising up through the air” A reference to Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximenes of Miletus (c. 586 – c. 526 BC) who said “Just as our soul… being air holds us together, so pneuma and air encompass […]

In Laws and Explanation in History, William Dray takes a journey through the issue of historiographical explanation. In this post, I will explicate the many different conceptions of historiographical explanation that Dray is able to find. While there are many important arguments in the book, the book is still centered around explicating the problems of […]

It is easy to stumble upon conceptual questions and debates in historiography, especially in the historiography of science and knowledge. Historians are often wondering how to define historiographical subfields and their subjects of study. What counts as historiography of science? What is knowledge? Often these questions are centered around the issues of unity and distinctiveness […]

The history of knowledge is a quickly evolving field. As usual, many questions concerning the novelties, background, and prospects of the new field have arisen. Often the set of questions is impossible to answer. On the one hand, all sound historiography must stem from previous historiography and its results. On the other hand, the history […]

Scientific knowledge changes. In the past, there were different theories and ideas than now. In the future, there will probably be different theories and ideas that may or may not resemble the current ones. In the previous post (here), I noted that this makes it rather difficult to tell what theories there will be in […]

In today’s post, you can find a preprint of my paper The Philosophy of the Future of Science.

In this post, I will discuss E. H. Carr’s views on historical causality. Although some of his views are infamous, I attempt to defend and make a good case for some of the controversial views. I argue that his discussion about causal patterns, accidental causes, causal hierarchies, values behind causal selection, and future-oriented causal selection […]

In this post, I will continue my discussion about central figures in the history of historiography of science. I discuss Robert K. Merton’s views on science and, following the approach in the previous classics post, I analyze those views from the perspective of current conceptions of and interests towards science. It will be interesting to […]

This blog is related to my research project “Estimating Possible Futures of Science”. In the project, I focus on the question How to estimate possible futures of science? Here I write about topics of my research: The problems and prospects of estimating possible futures of science; Philosophy of science as a conceptual tool to understand […]