Abstract In a reply to Mizrahi (2019), Bryant (2020) raises several methodological concerns regarding my attempt to test hypotheses about the observation that academic philosophers tend to find “scientism” threatening empirically using quantitative, corpus-based methods. Chief among her methodological concerns… Read More ›
“The Scientism Debate” in Summary In his article “The Scientism Debate: A Battle for the Soul of Philosophy?” (2019), Moti Mizrahi sets out to empirically test two hypotheses that putatively explain why philosophers find scientism threatening. The hypotheses are: H1:… Read More ›
In these days of the COVID-19 pandemic it makes sense to recall Max Weber, who died from an epidemic virus 100 years ago, in order both to reflect on the practical value of scientific methods and the possibility of science… Read More ›
Moti Mizrahi, in his 2019 “The Scientism Debate: A Battle for the Soul of Philosophy?” argues that the perceived threat of scientism to philosophy hinges upon a confluence of two distinct, but overlapping, phenomena. The first of these phenomena is… Read More ›
Let us start by examining a couple of assumptions which, albeit not explicitly, seem to inform Mizrahi’s text. He writes that “many philosophers seem to think that scientism poses a threat to them as teachers” and also that “scientism is… Read More ›
The crux of Mizrahi’s essay is the thesis that scientific knowledge is the best kind of knowledge. It is quantitatively the best because of the sheer volume of its published research (output) and citations (impact), as compared to other non-scientific… Read More ›
As I commit my thoughts to ink on paper, I hear a fly buzzing around my ear. The fly happened to fly from a workshop about relativism, and its varieties, as it occurs in today’s society. Needless to say, I… Read More ›
Scientism is defined by those who reject it as a brace of theses: 1. The unwarranted confidence in the methods of science as the only way to secure knowledge; 2. The unwarranted acceptance of the implications of contemporary natural science… Read More ›
A little while ago, historian of science Nathaniel Comfort wrote a piece for Nature in which he gives an overview of historically shifting senses of identity—both human and personal—that have accompanied changes in scientific understanding of human biology. He argues… Read More ›
Moti Mizrahi’s “The Scientism Debate: A Battle for the Soul of Philosophy?” frames the introduction of scientific methods into philosophy as scientism (specifically a kind of weak scientism). This contrasts with the view that scientific methods only have their place… Read More ›