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This book presents an argument for a new type of scientific realism beyond naturalism, correlationism and what the author terms 'objective realism'. To achieve this positive philosophical proposal, Jan Voosholz develops a thorough critique of current debates surrounding realism and antirealism in philosophy of science as well as those concerning new and speculative realism. Moreover, in order to provide a new outlook for the philosophy of the natural sciences, this book advances and introduces decisive arguments to that debate from speculative and new realist discussions in ontology and epistemology. Consequently, it develops a unique starting point for a pluralistic philosophy of nature. Any proponent or adversary of new, speculative, perspectival or pragmatic realism, ontic or epistemic structural realism, scientific pluralism, feminist or structural empiricism, selective scepticism, non-reductive or reductive naturalism with an interest in general philosophy of science should take the careful reconstruction of the debates and the novel arguments presented in this book into account. Readers interested in philosophy and the sciences with an interest in these areas of theoretical philosophy will find in this book an informative and comprehensive outline of the state of the art in the epistemology and ontology of the natural sciences.
List of contents
1 Introduction.- Part I: Objective Realism and Philosophy of Science.- 2 A Map of the Realism-Anti-Realism Debates.- 3 What is Objective Realism?.- 4 Objective Realism in Philosophy of Science.- 5 The Double Stalemate of Objective Scientific Realism.- Part II New Realism for the Philosophy of Science.- 6 Correlationism.- 7 The Problem of Ancestrality.- 8 Towards the New Scientific Realism.- 9 A Short Conclusion.- Index.
About the author
Jan Voosholz is a tenured research associate at the International Centre for Philosophy at the University of Bonn. His research focuses on questions of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of science. He finished his PhD in 2022, this book presents the key findings of this project, in which he strove to understand the consequences of Quentin Meillassoux's and Markus Gabriel's new realism for the philosophy of science in general and the debate concerning realism and antirealism in particular. He is the editor of Top-Down Causation and Emergence (with Markus Gabriel; Synthese Library 439, Springer, 2021) and Markus Gabriel’s New Realism (Synthese Library XXX, Springer, 2024). For research stays, he has spent time at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Mumbai, and previously received a M.A. in philosophy and a B.A. in history from the Free University Berlin.
Summary
This book presents an argument for a new type of scientific realism beyond naturalism, correlationism and what the author terms 'objective realism'. To achieve this positive philosophical proposal, Jan Voosholz develops a thorough critique of current debates surrounding realism and antirealism in philosophy of science as well as those concerning new and speculative realism. Moreover, in order to provide a new outlook for the philosophy of the natural sciences, this book advances and introduces decisive arguments to that debate from speculative and new realist discussions in ontology and epistemology. Consequently, it develops a unique starting point for a pluralistic philosophy of nature. Any proponent or adversary of new, speculative, perspectival or pragmatic realism, ontic or epistemic structural realism, scientific pluralism, feminist or structural empiricism, selective scepticism, non-reductive or reductive naturalism with an interest in general philosophy of science should take the careful reconstruction of the debates and the novel arguments presented in this book into account. Readers interested in philosophy and the sciences with an interest in these areas of theoretical philosophy will find in this book an informative and comprehensive outline of the state of the art in the epistemology and ontology of the natural sciences.
