nLab Michael Friedman

Not to be confused with the historian of mathematics, Michael Friedman (historian).

Michael Friedman is an American philosopher. He has a developed a neo-Kantian philosophy which looks

to understand the concrete historical process by which mathematical structures, physical theories of space, time, and motion, and mechanical constitutive principles organically evolve together so as to issue, successively, in increasingly sophisticated mathematical representations of experience. (Friedman 2010, p. 698)

This he does in particular through detailed historical studies of the response of Kant to Newtonian physics and that of the Vienna Circle to Einstein’s general relativity.

Selected writings

  • Foundations of Space-Time Theories: Relativistic Physics and Philosophy of Science (1983), Princeton University Press.

  • Kant and the Exact Sciences (1992), Harvard University Press.

  • Reconsidering Logical Positivism (1999), Cambridge University Press

  • A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000), Open Court.

  • Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University (2001), CSLI/University of Chicago Press.

  • Synthetic History Reconsidered (2010) in Mary Domski and Michael Dickson (eds.), Discourse on a New Method: Reinvigorating the Marriage of History and Philosophy of Science, pp. 571–813.

  • Extending the Dynamics of Reason (2011), Erkenntnis 75(3): 431-444.

  • Kant’s Construction of Nature (2013), Cambridge University Press.

category: people

Last revised on October 20, 2022 at 10:40:03. See the history of this page for a list of all contributions to it.