Gary Gutting

Bio: Gary Gutting is an academic researcher from University of Notre Dame. The author has contributed to research in topics: Philosophy of science & Western philosophy. The author has an hindex of 18, co-authored 32 publications receiving 7034 citations.

French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century

Abstract: French philosophy from (roughly) 1890 to 1990 is open to a number of philosophically illuminating perspectives. An instructive story can be told, for example, in terms of the problems of freedom and of consciousness.1 Here, however, I will take the relation of philosophy to science as my leitmotif, showing how French thought from Poincare and Bergson to Foucault and Derrida can be understood in terms of opposing views of the cognitive authority of science in relation to philosophical inquiry. At the beginning of the twentieth century, French philosophers were fundamentally concerned with the question of how to reconcile the authority of a scientic worldview with the centrality of the free individual subject. Reection on this issue operated between two poles: positivism, originating with Auguste Comte (1798-1857) in the nineteenth century, saw science as the sole legitimate cognitive authority and reduced all reality to the material world of science; spiritualism, traceable back to Maine de Biran (1766-1824) in the eighteenth century and in a sense to Rene Descartes (1596-1650) himself, insisted that our autonomy as free subjects in a world created by God showed the need to complement science with distinctively philosophical knowledge of the world. It is plausible to read the subsequent development of French philosophy in terms of the conict of positivist and spiritualist positions. This may seem an odd claim, since both the radical empiricism of positivism and the religious metaphysics of spiritualism quickly became distinctly marginal in twentieth-century French thought. We shall see, however, that thinkers who reject the specic doctrines of classical positivism and spiritualism nonetheless are generally oriented to a worldview centered either on the objective concepts of science or on our experience of ourselves as free existents. In Michel Foucault’s terminology, French thought has been divided into the philosophy of the concept and the philosophy of experience. In the same vein I will speak of a positivist orientation and a spiritualist orientation, and will trace the development of the positivist orientation from Poincareand Duhem, through Brunschvicg, Bachelard, and Canguilhem, to Michel Foucault. Correspondingly, I will follow the spiritualist orientation from Bergson, through Blondel, Marcel, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty, to Derrida and Levinas. These two interweaving threads will guide us through the history of twentieth-century French philosophy, leading to some conclusions about the value of the French experience for Anglophone philosophers. In the early years of the twentieth century, even French philosophers who most rmly rejected positivism recognized the centrality of science for philosophical reection. Jules Lachelier (1832-1918) and Emile Boutroux (1845-1921), for example, offered unied accounts of nature that tried to synthesize the truths of science and of human freedom into a coherent whole. Their accounts presented science as limited by, for example, its indeterminism and failure to take account of nality, limitations that make it fall short of full concreteness and require supplementation by philosophy. The philosophy (or metaphysics) of nature they sought could not, however, be developed in a scientic vacuum. It required reection on actual scientic achievements and, therefore, familiarity with the methods and results of contemporary science. This philosophical approach to science also incorporated Comte’s conviction that science had to be studied through its history. The convergence of these desiderata led to the rapid development in France of what came to be known as the “epistemology of science,” a philosophico-historical effort to understand the cognitive structure of science. As the effort developed, however, it moved away from Lachelier’s and Boutroux’s subordination of science to philosophy and towards an autonomous study of science in its own terms. The new “philosophers of science,” as they came to be known, no longer tried to incorporate scientic truth into a synthetic metaphysical view of nature as a concrete whole.

The Logic of Invention

Abstract: “Is there a logic of discovery?” has been a continuing if not central question of philosophy of science ever since Hanson’s flamboyant defense of an affirmative answer. The question presupposes a distinction — attributed to Reichenbach — between discovery and justification as distinct (logically and perhaps temporally) stages of scientific inquiry. Justification of course, it is said, has a logic (explicated, e.g., by theories of confirmation); but most have thought discovery a nonrational process, amenable only to causal explanation. Hanson and a few others, including myself in (1973b), have contended that discovery has a distinctive logical structure and that explication of this structure will open philosophy of science to important but hitherto neglected aspects of scientific practice.

Continental Philosophy of Science

Abstract: Notes on Contributors. Acknowledgments. Introduction: What Is Continental Philosophy of Science (Gary Gutting). HEGEL. . 1. Speculative Naturphilosophie and the Development of the Empirical Sciences: Hegel's Perspective (Terry Pinkard). 2. Naturphilosophie (G. W. F. Hegel). BERGSON. 3. Bergson's spiritualist metaphysics and the sciences (Jean Gayon). 4. Psycho--physical parallelism and positive metaphysics (Henri Bergson). CASSIRER. 5. Ernst Cassirer and the Philosophy of Science (Michael Friedman). 6. From Substance and Function (Ernst Cassirer). HUSSERL. . 7. Science as a Triumph of the Human Spirit and Science in Crisis: Husserl and the Fortunes of Reason (Richard Tieszen). 8. From the Introduction to the Logical Investigations and from The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Edmund Husserl). HEIDEGGER. 9. Heidegger on Science and Naturalism (Joseph Rouse). 10. From On Time and Being (Martin Heidegger). BACHELARD. . 11. Technology , Science and Inexact Knowledge: Bachelard's Non--Cartesian Epistemology (Mary Tiles). 12. From Essai sur la connaissance approchee (Gaston Bachelard). CANGUILHEM. 13. Reassessing the Historical Epistemology of Georges Canguilhem (Hans--Jorg Rheinberger). 14. The Object of the History of Sciences (Georges Canguilhem). FOUCAULT. 15. Foucault's Philosophy of Science: Structures of Truth/Structures of Power (Linda Martin Alcoff). 16. "Objectives" and "Method" (Michel Foucault). DELEUZE. . 17. Gilles Deleuze, Difference, and Science (Todd May). 18. From What Is Philosophy (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari). IRIGARARY. . 19. On Asking the Wrong Question ("In Science, Is the Subject Sexed?") (Penelope Deutscher). 20. In Science, Is the Subject Sexed (Luce Irigaray). HABERMAS. . 21. Bisected Rationality: The Frankfurt School's Critique of Science (Axel Honneth). 22. Knowledge and Human Interest: A General Perspective (Jurgen Habermas). Index

In a Different Voice. Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Cambridge, MA (Harvard University Press) 1982.

Abstract: Introduction 1. Woman's Place in Man's Life Cycle 2. Images of Relationship 3. Concepts of Self and Morality 4. Crisis and Transition 5. Women's Rights and Women's Judgment 6. Visions of Maturity References Index of Study Participants General Index

Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research

Abstract: Part 1: Social Analysis, Discourse Analysis, Text Analysis 1. Introduction 2. Texts, Social Events, and Social Practices 3. Intertextuality and Assumptions Part 2: Genres and Action 4. Genres 5. Meaning Relations between Sentences and Clauses 6. Types of Exchange, Speech Functions, and Grammatical Mood Part 3: Discourses and Representations 7. Discourses 8. Representations of Social Events Part 4: Styles and Identities 9. Styles 10. Modality and Evaluation 11. Conclusion

A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems

Abstract: This article discusses the conduct and evaluatoin of interpretive research in information systems. While the conventions for evaluating information systems case studies conducted according to the natural science model of social science are now widely accepted, this is not the case for interpretive field studies. A set of principles for the conduct and evaluation of interpretive field research in information systems is proposed, along with their philosophical rationale. The usefulness of the principles is illustrated by evaluating three published interpretive field studies drawn from the IS research literature. The intention of the paper is to further reflect and debate on the important subject of grounding interpretive research methodology.

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Abstract: What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.