Series: Spinoza lectures

Professor Michael Friedman of Stanford University is famous for his
interpretation of Kant’s writings on space, time mathematics and
physics, but his philosophical aims are wider, as indicated by the title
of a recent book dedicated to his work: Discourse on a New Method:
Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science (Open
Court, 2010).

The two Spinoza Lectures presented here belong to Friedman’s
ongoing project of articulating a ‘post-Kuhnian’ philosophy of science.
Friedman’s approach, like Kuhn’s, is essentially historical, and builds
on a careful depiction of the development of the mathematical and
physical sciences in the Western tradition. By embedding these
developments within a wider narrative depicting their complex
relations to a parallel set of developments in what he calls ‘scientific
philosophy’, however, Friedman aims to provide a more adequate
philosophical response to the conceptual incommensurability
between succeeding Kuhnian paradigms that arises in the great
scientific revolutions that have defined this tradition. Encouraged by
Kuhn’s own description of his approach as ‘Kantianism with movable
categories’, moreover, Friedman endeavors to develop a neo-Kantian
approach to the problems concerning scientific rationality that have
afflicted the history, philosophy, and sociology of science since Kuhn;
in particular, by constructing a narrative depicting how our present
situation results, among other things, from successive conceptual
transformations of Kant’s original approach.

In the course of these two lectures, Professor Friedman expands the
scope of his original project by proceeding temporally backwards into
the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
that preceded Kant, and by proceeding culturally outwards so as to
include social, institutional, and technological developments along
with purely intellectual developments.
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