Philosophy of Science in Crisis?
Prof. Matthew H. Slater is the John Howard Harris Professor and
Chair of the Philosophy Department at Bucknell University

12:00 PM Wednesday September 14, 2022
Clark Hall Room 206, 11130 Bellflower Road

The philosopher Ian Hacking famously suggested that philosophical theorizing on the
metaphysics of science has reached a sort of “scholastic twilight” owing to the
“proliferation of incompatible views” (2007, 203). Since he wrote in 2007, this state of
affairs has only intensified. I offer an analysis of this alleged “crisis” in broadly Kuhnian
terms, explaining the proliferation as a result of a broad set of options generated by
different ways of resolving tensions between distinct goals for accounts of the
metaphysics of science and accounts of the practices involved in scientific
classification. This suggests a less pessimistic interpretation: having recognized the
crisis brought on by the rejection of essentialism, we find ourselves again questioning
and disputing the foundations of our approach to the metaphysics of science in the
interregnum period between paradigms.

Matthew H. Slater is the John Howard Harris Professor and Chair of the Philosophy
Department at Bucknell University. He received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Columbia
University in 2006 under Philip Kitcher and Achille Varzi. He writes broadly on issues
concerning scientific classification, scientific literacy, and the public understanding of
science.