Irrationalism and Rationalism in Religion.

Leibniz and Kant on Miracles: Rationalism, Religion, and the Laws

Both Leibniz and Kant were heirs of such a tradition. But both were also explanatory rationalists about the empirical world: more committed than your average philosopher to its thoroughgoing intelligibility. (Leibniz was also an explanatory rationalist about the nonempirical, fundamental world; on that issue, given his commitments to freedom and noumenal ignorance, Kant famously demurred.) Thes...

The new irrationalism in weaning.

Biological Rationalism

I argue that contemporary philosophy of language in the analytic tradition rests on two fundamentally wrong assumptions: empiricism and externalism. After I show why these two assumptions are incorrect, I turn my attention to biological rationalism. Biological rationalism—a research program inspired by the work of Noam Chomsky—is committed to nativism and internalism. I believe biological ratio...

Against Rationalism

Rationality and the issues associated with it have always occupied a central place within the Western philosophical tradition. Moreover, as the humanities and social sciences have found themselves under assault from post-modernists and deconstructionists, the role of rationality has also become a pressing problem well beyond the borders of philosophy. In this paper I am going to take issue with...

Critical rationalism and engineering: ontology

Engineering is often said to be ‘scientific’, but the nature of knowledge in engineering is different to science. Engineering has a different ontological basis—its theories address different entities and are judged by different criteria. In this paper I use Popper’s three worlds ontological framework to propose a model of engineering theories, and provide an abstract logical view of engineering...