Project by Prof. Dr Omar W. Nasim
The research under this heading addresses both methodological and historical questions concerning the relationship between science and philosophy. On the one hand, there is the question of how the history of science is supposed to relate to philosophical problems. I have argued that employing close historical analysis can itself shed light on philosophical clarity with regard to scientific concepts. In particular, it can reveal the historical a priori that is fundamental to the emergence of a concept in science at one particular historical moment rather than another. On the other hand, there is a history of how philosophers articulated their relationship to the natural sciences. Studying these articulations within their historical and cultural contexts is a key way of charting the centuries-long interplay between philosophy and the study of nature, whether this took the form of natural philosophy in the seventeenth century or of scientific philosophies in the twentieth century. One interesting consequence of both these lines of inquiry—the methodological and the historical—is the realisation that what may have been a philosophical question or problem at one time becomes a scientific one at another. In fact, philosophical problems and the methods used to solve them have a history. The projects under this heading seek to unravel these histories.
Publications:
Bertrand Russell and the Edwardian Philosophers: Constructing the World ( Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)
• Winner of the Bertrand Russell Society’s Award for Best Book on Russell, 2009
Emergence of Analytic Philosophy and a Controversy at the Aristotelian Society, 1900–1916, Guest editor of a special issue of the *Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society*, Virtual Issue, No. 2, 2014.
“Introduction: The Emergence of Analytic Philosophy and a Controversy at the Aristotelian Society, 1900–1916,” in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, ed. Omar W. Nasim, virtual issue, No. 2, 2014, pp. 10–30.
“What is Historical Epistemology?” in *Nach Feierabend*, eds. M. Hagner and C. Hirschi, (Zurich/Berlin: Diaphanes, 2013), pp. 123–144.
“The Spaces of Knowledge: Bertrand Russell, Logical Construction, and the Classification of the Sciences,” in *British Journal for the History of Philosophy*, 2012, 20: 1163–1182.
“Explaining G.F. Stout’s Reaction to Russell’s ‘On Denoting’,” in Russell vs. Meinong: the Legacy of “On Denoting”, eds. Nicholas Griffin and Dale Jacquette (London: Routledge Press, 2009) pp. 101–112.
“Bertrand Russell’s July 1915 Letter on Sense-Data,” in *Bertrand Russell Society Quarterly*, May–November 2009, 142–144: 35–38.
