Michael Friedman



Co-Chair, History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

Frederick P. Rehmus Family Professor of Humanities
Director, Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology

Philosophy Department,
Building 100, Room 101L
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2155
Tel (650) 724-8588
Fax (650) 723-0985
mlfriedman@stanford.edu

 

Areas of Interest

Kant, Philosophy of Science, History of Twentieth Century Philosophy, including the interaction between philosophy and the exact sciences from Kant through the logical empiricists, prospects for post-Kuhnian philosophy of science in light of these developments, and the relationship between analytic and continental traditions in the early twentieth century.

Education

Ph.D. Princeton University, 1973
B.A. Queens College, 1969

Recent Courses

Philosophy 15N: Freedom, Community, and Morality - Does the freedom of the individual conflict with the demands of human community and morality? Or, as some philosophers have maintained, does the freedom of the individual find its highest expression in a moral community of other human beings? Course readings include Camus, Mill, Rousseau, and Kant.

Philosophy and HPST 61: Philosophy and the Scientific Revolution - The relationship between the scientific revolution of the 17th century that resulted in the birth of modern science and the contemporaneous intellectual developments constituting the birth of modern philosophy. Course readings focus on Galileo and Descartes.

Philosophy 224: Kant's Philosophy of Physical Science - Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science(1786), published between the first (1781) and second (1787) editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, in the scientific and philosophical context provided by Newtonian natural philosophy and the Leibnizean tradition. The place of this work in the development of Kant's thought. Prior acquaintance with either Kant's theoretical philosophy or the contemporaneous scientific context, principally Newton, Leibniz, and Euler required.

Philosophy 260: Core Seminar in Philosophy of Science

Selected publications

Books

Foundations of Space-Time Theories: Relativistic Physics and the Philosophy of Science (1983)
Kant and the Exact Sciences (1992)
Reconsidering Logical Positivism (1999)
A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger (2000)
Dynamics of Reason: The 1999 Kant Lectures at Stanford University (2001)

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