This week, I’ve been digging into the history of Kant commentary, and I’ve been struck by one thing: I can’t find much in the philosophy of science literature on the more “naturalist” commentators on Kant in the 19th Century. There’s plenty on the major schools of neo-Kantianism (Marburg and Southwest), but I can only find…
All posts by Chris Mitsch
About Chris Mitsch
Chris studies the history and philosophy of science and mathematics. He is currently translating several works by Hilbert, Nordheim, and von Neumann as part of a project on the philosophy of mathematics that informed early quantum mechanics formalisms. He is also interested in: historical method and how this should inform general philosophy of science; the cognitive foundations of mathematics; and the construction of identity in (especially American) politics. Chris posts under the banner "Method Matters".
How *you* understand and historical research
One thing I’ve come to appreciate better in recent months is the constraints your own understanding can place on your historical research. We’ve all likely run into a preposterous claim–say, that Kant was the first to discover the incompleteness theorem–and rolled our eyes, having recognized there is some anachronistic reasoning going on here. But the…
Academia and bad posture
In more recent discussions of health in graduate school and academia, much of the emphasis has seemed to fall on mental health. This is undoubtedly a good thing. However, I haven’t seen anyone discuss the (sometimes nasty) side effects of sitting and reading/typing all day, so I figured I’d mention a few things I’ve run…
A maybe-interesting feature of Sapolsky’s method
This year I’ve been running a reading group I’ve called “Effective Interdisciplinarity.” In my less professional moments I have been describing its concern as this: how does one avoid doing shitty interdisciplinary work? By “shitty” I mean to include not only the more obvious truth-y stuff–e.g., accurately representing the research of a non-native discipline–and methodological…
What I hope to get out of blogging
I want to start my first post by thanking Kino for actually getting this thing started. We’d been discussing it off-and-on for a while now, in vague terms, but several weeks ago she actually started one and asked me to join her. I’m a little late to the actually joining her part–having taken forever to…