Alexander Rosenberg
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Alexander Rosenberg is an American philosopher, and the R. Taylor Cole Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.
Rosenberg was educated at Stuyvesant High School, the City College of New York and Johns Hopkins University. He received the Lakatos Award in 1993 and was the National Phi Beta Kappa Romannel Lecturer in 2006.
His early work focused on the philosophy of social science and especially the philosophy of economics. His doctoral dissertation, published as Microeconomic Laws in 1976, was the first treatment of the nature of economics by a contemporary philosopher of science. Over the period of the next decade he became increasingly skeptical about neoclassical economics as an empirical theory. Rosenberg later shifted to work on issues in the philosophy of science that are raised by biology, and especially on the relationship between molecular biology and other parts of biology. He introduced the concept of supervenience to the treatment of intertheoretical relations in biology, soon after Donald Davidson began to exploit Richard Hare's notion in the philosophy of psychology. Rosenberg is among the few biologists and philosophers of science who reject the consensus view that combines physicalism with antireductionism. Rosenberg also coauthored an influential book on David Hume with Tom L. Beauchamp, Hume and the Problem of Causation, arguing that Hume was not a skeptic about induction but an opponent of rationalist theories of ampliative inference,[1] that is trying to infer too much from scant or insufficient evidence.
[edit] References
- ^ See definition: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement3.html
[edit] Published books
- Microeconomic Laws: A Philosophical Analysis (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1976)
- Sociobiology and the Preemption of Social Science (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980; Basil Blackwell, 1981)
- Hume and the Problem of Causation (Oxford University Press, 1981) (with T.L. Beauchamp)
- The Structure of Biological Science (Cambridge University Press, 1985)
- Philosophy of Social Science (Clarendon Press, Oxford and Westview Press, 1988, Second Edition, Revised, Enlarged, 1995)
- Economics: Mathematical Politics or Science of Diminishing Returns? (University of Chicago Press, 1992)
- Instrumental Biology, or the Disunity of Science (University of Chicago Press, 1994)
- Darwinism in Philosophy, Social Science and Policy (Cambridge University Press, 2000)
- Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Approach (Routledge, 2000, second edition 2005)
- Darwinian Reductionism or How to Stop Worrying and Love Molecular Biology (University of Chicago Press, 2006)
