| The dissertation consists of three separate papers. Although seemingly unrelated in subject-matter, the three do possess two related features of great importance, gestured at by the title of the dissertation. On the one hand, all three could be said to manifest a certain spirit of unmitigated skepticism with regard to the interest and indeed the coherence of many questions dealt with traditionally by philosophers, both in their content and in their framing. On the other hand, they also all manifest a spirit that may be thought at first contrary to the first, though it is not, one of guarded optimism for the advancement of real understanding and comprehension of the issues these traditionally philosophical questions have purported to describe, albeit an optimism qualified by a demand intimated as well by the title of the dissertation: that many questions traditionally dealt with by philosophers require knowledge both detailed and comprehensive of our best physical theories, and that of both their formal and empirical content, if one is to make any substantive progress on them.; These three papers also share, if one likes, a spirit of revolt against a naive and virulent form of neo-Aristotelianism persisting still among many philosophers of science and among many physicists today, exemplifed by the idea that there is such a thing as 'the causal relation', or 'the proper definition' of a singularity in general relativity, or 'the relations' that theoretical and experimental knowledge have to each other in the practice of contemporary physics, and that, if physical theories are nagged and worried enough, they will yield up the o ,usi &d12;a of the thing, without the investigator's ever having paused to consider whether what she asks of the theory is reasonable or even coherent, when framed in its terms. This is like trying to define the way to cook sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving, without even pausing to consider whether one is making the dinner for a bunch of yankees or for a bunch of confederates. |
