Experience and Beyond

Jan Faye teaches epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has published extensively within these areas in Danish as well as English. Some of his latest books include After Postmodernism (2012) and The Nature of Scientific Thinking (2014).

Preface and Introduction.- 1 Evolutionary Naturalism.- The manifest image.- The scientific image.-Kant's metaphysical dualism.- Evolutionary epistemology.- 2 Evolution and HumanCognition.- The Darwinian legacy. Setting the legacy straight.- A fallacy ofnaturalization.- Intention and innate dispositions.- 3 Sensation, Perception,and Observation.- Perception as belief acquisition.- From perception to observation.- Theory-ladenness.- Instrumentalobservation.- Observability.-4 Theory and Reality.- Forms of realism.- Conceptual frameworks and externalcommitments.- Theory realism.- The success argument.- Constructive empiricism.-Structural realism.- The failure of representationalism.- 5 Truth, Language,and Objectivity.- What istruth?.- Truth and meaning.- Non-realism concerning Truth.- A naturalized notionof truth.- Semantics and ontology.- 6 Abstraction and Reification.- Commonsense and externality.- What makes an entity abstract?.- Abstract objectsversus abstracted concepts.- Why did abstracted concepts evolve?.- 7 In Defenceof Nominalism.- Concrete, artificial, and nominal particulars.- Particulars anduniversals.- Conceptualism.- 8 Space, Time, and Space-time.- The existence of Space.-The existence of Time.- Space-time substantivalism.- Space-time relationism.- Space-timeas an abstracted concept.- Are space and time invented or discovered?.- 9Causality and Counterfactuality.- The concept.- Regularity.- Modality.- 10Human Evolution and Mathematical Physics.- Mathematics and representationalknowledge.- Mathematics - the language of quantities.- Possible worlds, many worldsand multiverses.- The Copenhagen interpretation: a non-representational view.- 11Conclusion.- Bibliography.