Philosophy at Pitt

Bridging Science and the Humanities

Ask anyone how the Department of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh became one of the best in the United States, and Charlie Peake’s name will come up.

Appointed vice chancellor for academics—a forerunner to today’s Office of the Provost—by Chancellor Edward Litchfield, Peake had a background in English. Yet he had a keen appreciation of the importance of the philosophy department to the academic reputation of the University as a whole. In the late 1950s, Peake laid out a strategy to attract several young philosophers who were beginning to make their marks. If they would come, Peake reasoned, others would follow.

Peake appointed Adolf Grünbaum as Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy in 1960, and he served as a magnet to recruit others, including Wilfrid Sellars, then at Yale, in 1963.

Sellars, an epistemologist who already was widely considered to be one of the great thinkers of 20th-century philosophy, was one of the key acquisitions of Pitt’s Department of Philosophy.

In the period following World War II, the captains of Pittsburgh’s industry were interested in transforming the University from a commuter college into a center of rigorous intellectual research and training, and they had the money to make that happen. In 1956, Litchfield was appointed chancellor with a mandate to effect that change, and he, in turn, appointed Peake. The resulting growth in stature of Pitt’s philosophy department, its world-renowned Center for Philosophy of Science, and—after its creation in 1971—its internationally recognized Department of the History and Philosophy of Science in many ways mirrors the growth of the University itself. (Note: for more information about the Center for Philosophy of Science, contact the center to request the booklet “Celebrating 40 Years: A History.”)

From its status as a “provincial” backwater, in the words of Pitt’s Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy of Science Adolf Grünbaum, philosophy at Pitt has continued to evolve. On a global scale, Pitt philosophers have helped to reshape the very definition of their discipline, synthesizing new American schools of thought with Old World traditions.

“Philosophy in the 20th century has been involved in an ongoing negotiation between two powers,” says Pitt Philosophy Professor Nicholas Rescher, another early recruit to Pittsburgh and former chair of the department and co-chair of the Center for Philosophy of Science. “On the one hand, there’s the immense history of serious thought on philosophical issues that we inherit from our great forefathers, from Plato and Aristotle down to the last century,” Rescher says. “On the other, there is the rest of the world of learning.”

The “rest of the world of learning” encompasses every single area of human endeavor, from physics to logic to language, from ethics to biology to mathematics. Philosophy and philosophy of science provide a way to explore these disciplines’ histories, their purposes, their methods, and their biases. And by nearly every measure, the University of Pittsburgh’s philosophers in its three academic units are among the best in the world at those explorations.

A Philosophy Powerhouse

In philosophy of science, Pitt is one of five universities—along with the London School of Economics; Princeton University; the University of Washington, Seattle; and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor—that is ranked “excellent” by the Philosophical Gourmet Report, an American academic survey that asks top experts to rank the philosophy departments in the English-speaking world.

And the most recent report from the National Research Council ranked Pitt’s philosophy department second-best in the United States for both undergraduate and graduate study—behind only Princeton’s.

Those are the sources that prospective graduate students turn to when deciding where to apply; consequently, Pitt vies with just a few other schools for the top scholars in the country. It continues to attract talented junior faculty while it consolidates one of the most respected teams of philosophers in the world. In short, Pitt is a philosophy powerhouse.

“We attract some of the very best doctoral candidates in the world,” Robert Brandom, the University’s Distinguished Service Professor of Philosophy, said in a speech in February 2004 to Pitt’s Board of Trustees. “And we have been exceptionally successful at placing them in distinguished faculties when they finish their PhDs.”

Sellars’ arrival in 1963 cemented the philosophy department’s status as a “spire of excellence” at the University, and, indeed, “gave impetus” to the transformation of Pitt into a world-class institution, Brandom argued. By intentionally building the philosophy department into one of the country’s best, he said, Peake also helped reinvent the idea of the American university.

“Until about 50 years ago, there were a handful of elite universities maintaining uniformly excellent academic departments across the board, and the vast majority of world-class scholars, researchers, and experts in their fields were to be found in them,” Brandom said.

“Now, any serious American research university can be expected to have some world-class departments, and most of the departments will have at least some world-class faculty members,” he said. Pitt was “in the vanguard” of this “sea change,” said Brandom, who was recruited to Pitt in 1976.

Many philosophers have had offers to leave Pitt to go to Oxford or elsewhere, he said. But they stay because of the “unparalleled community of colleagues and students, which provides the best possible environment in which to do one’s work,” Brandom said.

Recently, Brandom, a former chair of the department, was honored with a Distinguished Achievement Award by the Mellon Foundation. The grant included $1.5 million for Brandom to continue his research; the honor places him on a very short list of humanities scholars whose contribution to intellectual life has been recognized internationally.

In making the award, the Mellon Foundation called Brandom’s book Making It Explicit (Harvard University Press, 1994) a “leading contribution to understanding the nature of norms, rules, and commitments in thought and action,” noting that it has been compared “to landmark works from the previous generation of philosophers.”

The award citation also praised Brandom’s upcoming book about the 18th-century German philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel, who made the then-radical argument that everything in life could be explained through rational examination of history and the world around us. The foundation said Brandom’s work promises to be “a comprehensive analytic reading of a markedly nonanalytic philosopher.”

Bridging the Gap

In the best tradition of Hegel and the other great thinkers, Pitt’s philosophy researchers have never shied away from challenging conventional wisdom. Yet the University’s philosophers have often sought to build bridges between disciplines or methods—between American and European schools of philosophy, for instance, or between the humanities and the sciences.

This linkage between the analytic and humanistic traditions of philosophy has been greatly strengthened by the work of Professor John McDowell, who came to Pitt from Oxford in 1986 and soon established himself as one of the most distinguished and widely recognized philosophers on this side of the Atlantic. His work in clarifying the difference between the humanistic and the scientific approach to understanding man’s position in the world’s scheme of things is widely appreciated and influential.

Relatively speaking, the schism between those fields is a recent one. Rescher points out that before the Italian Renaissance, it was possible for a scholar to be reasonably well versed in all of the branches of learning. But after the rise of higher mathematics and physics, the body of scientific knowledge exploded. Scientists began to specialize and were divided along what each felt was the most useful context for the exploration of philosophical issues: either the world of humanities and emotional models of human experience or the world of experimentation and observation.

Since then, philosophy often has been characterized by a struggle between two schools of thought: those of “hard” sciences—physics and biology, for example—and the “softer” sciences of psychology and sociology.

“We think it is neither science nor humanism that is a pivot-point of philosophical understanding,” Rescher says. The “middle way,” as he puts it, uses parts of both science and the humanities to study the world.

“As I see it, the Pittsburgh creed is that the crux of philosophical understanding is not observation, speculation, or imagination, but conceptualization,” Rescher says.

Using philosophy to deepen human understanding of other scientific and academic disciplines was an early goal of Grünbaum, a rising star at Lehigh University when he was approached by Peake in 1960. Grünbaum considered the Pitt philosophy department provincial—at the time, it was geared primarily toward undergraduate instruction, granted no doctorates, and conducted little, if any, research.  Appreciating Peake’s vision of building a first-class effort in philosophy of science, Grünbaum accepted Peake’s offer of a Mellon Professorship at Pitt.

A short time later, Grünbaum asked his Lehigh colleague, Rescher, to join him at Pitt, and Rescher accepted a full professorship and the chance to build the department from the ground up. From that point, the history of the department is marked by a series of high-level acquisitions from the philosophy departments of other universities. With Grünbaum and Rescher in place, respected philosophers who previously might have written Pitt off as an intellectual wilderness were eager to join the new endeavor. Kurt Baier came from the University of Canberra in Australia to chair the department, and Pitt took advantage of the Yale philosophy department’s internal discord by recruiting three of that university’s philosophers.

The University had marked its commitment to philosophy by establishing the Center for Philosophy of Science in 1960 with Grünbaum as its first director and Rescher as associate director. The center was modeled on Herbert Feigl’s University of Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, where Grünbaum had been a visiting researcher in the 1950s. In its 1961-62 inaugural season, Pitt’s center, backed with funds from U.S. Steel, hosted a lecture series featuring some of the most prestigious thinkers on the philosophy of science, including Feigl himself. The Center for Philosophy of Science has gone on to become a haven where visiting scholars come to conduct research. The lecture series marked the University of Pittsburgh’s emergence as a leader in connecting the humanities and the sciences.

That integral approach has characterized Pitt ever since, Rescher says. “You have to find a way of negotiating the humanistic dimension and the natural science dimension in a way that lets both of these play a significant role in our understanding of the human condition, the nature of knowledge, all of the kinds of things that philosophers care about,” he says.

Rescher’s own work has been called “a monument of 20th-century philosophy” by the encyclopedic World Philosophers and Their Works. His trilogy, A System of Pragmatic Realism, is considered a milestone in the establishment of pragmatism—the notion that there is an objective truth outside of human consciousness—as a specifically American philosophy. It also fuses some of the principles of pragmatism with idealism, which argues that the mind constructs its own reality. Rescher has argued that the mind’s fancies are curbed by the objective constraints of humanity and society and not just by the personal needs and impressions of the individual.

In addition to Hegel, Rescher’s work draws on that of American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce in that it points to dynamic characteristics of human thought. Besides Rescher’s own extensive bibliography, his work has been the subject of eight volumes by other philosophers and has been the subject of dozens of symposia and dissertations. He received the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984.

History and Philosophy of Science

Part of Pitt’s strength in philosophical inquiry into the sciences is attributable to its Department of the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS), one of only five of its kind in the world (Indiana University has the only other HPS department in the United States). The department evolved—again, under Peake’s leadership—as a spin-off from the history department: A couple of faculty members from history formed its core, and professors from the philosophy department also served as members of its executive committee. Today there are eight primary faculty members, 11 secondary faculty members, and approximately 28 graduate students, who hail from around the globe. The department offers an undergraduate major and collaborates closely with the philosophy department to educate students in classical philosophy. It also challenges students to grapple with up-to-date questions that scientists face.

Many HPS graduate students come to the program with graduate degrees or undergraduate majors in the sciences, and those who don’t are encouraged to get a master’s degree in a science field while working toward their HPS doctorate.

“We tend to get two kinds of graduate students,” says Professor Sandra Mitchell, who specializes in the philosophy of biology. “Many come from backgrounds in the sciences, and they find that what really excites them are questions that are conceptual or methodological. The other kind comes from the study of philosophy, and they have found during their studies that the epistemological questions—how do we know what we know—can be studied by using the history of science as a context.”

Indeed, partisans of the study of the history of science find it difficult to understand how other universities fail to grasp its essential role in the history of intellectual thought.

“It’s unthinkable today for a major university to be without a history of art program,” says HPS Professor Paul Griffiths, “yet we’re one of the only ones to have a history and philosophy of science program. So everywhere else when you study the Renaissance you study Michelangelo. But what about Galileo?”

Einstein and 1905

Pitt’s department of HPS is gearing up for a conference that will celebrate the 100-year anniversary of a significant year in Einstein’s development of scientific thought.

In 1905, Einstein found the special theory of relativity, his theory of light quanta, and irrefutable evidence of the existence of atoms. The conference will be an opportunity for Einstein scholars to deliver papers on how and why he came up with the theories he did.

Department of History and Philosophy of Science Chair John Norton has burrowed deep into documents on and by Einstein to trace the path of his subsequent development of general relativity. He established how Einstein connected gravity with the curvature of space-time in his theory.

Norton’s “eureka” came when he was a postdoctoral fellow working with physicist John Stachel. They were part of a team charged with going through Einstein’s papers at Princeton University. Einstein’s longtime secretary had loyally filed his papers in folders, and each was meticulously marked. As Norton was flipping through a batch of papers marked “Teaching Notes,” he came upon a formula that stopped him in his tracks.

“These weren’t teaching notes,” Norton says. “It just so happened I had spent the last few years on my doctoral dissertation reading everything I could on the history of general relativity. I had been working with a formula, and I knew that the key to Einstein’s discovery boiled down to getting rid of three of four terms in this humongous expression.”

The calculations were there in Einstein’s notes. “Everything was on that one page,” Norton says. He has continued working on reconstructing Einstein’s method of thought with the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. Scholars at the institute have amassed all the evidence Einstein left behind: his notes, interviews he gave later in his life, letters he wrote, and remarks he made that others have committed to writing.

Norton has made an argument on the significance of the page he found at Princeton: “I don’t know why we’re still arguing,” he adds. “I’m right.”

That a historian sifts through documentary evidence is nothing new, but to have a historian with the profound understanding of physics that Norton has, who can interpret the significance of every shred of paper, is rare.

HPS Professor John Earman also is studying Einstein’s work, but from a different angle. Earman’s research centers on the Cosmological Constant, a factor that Einstein introduced in 1917 to explain the stasis of the universe. The Cosmological Constant became known as “Einstein’s greatest blunder” as evidence grew that the universe was expanding rather than remaining static. However, the Cosmological Constant has been pulled off the shelf and used by physicists during the last century to explain various phenomena.

Most recently, the Cosmological Constant has been applied to the rate of acceleration at which the universe’s expansion increases. The driving force of this acceleration, which physicists refer to as “Dark Energy,” is a hot topic among astrophysicists today. So, although it was Einstein’s greatest blunder, the Cosmological Constant still resounds in physics.

“Einstein worked at such a level that even his mistakes were useful,” Earman says.

Galileo’s Mathematics

It is a long way from being a control engineer in Italy’s Ferrari plant, charged with the mathematical modeling of the automobile’s dynamics, to poring over dusty archives in Florence. But that is the direction Pitt Assistant Professor Paolo Palmieri’s research has taken. Recently assigned to Pitt’s HPS faculty, Palmieri is exploring the intellectual context of Galileo’s work, in particular what Galileo knew of Archimedean mathematics.

While Galileo’s complete work has been published in a 20-volume set, the manuscripts, which are kept in Florence, contain the extras that are essential for a philosopher of science: notes, scribbles, and calculations. In addition, Palmieri is tracing what work Galileo had access to.

“It’s an exciting time in mathematics,” Palmieri says of the 16th century. The original Greek of Archimedes and Euclid was being translated into Latin, which was more widely used among Renaissance scholars. And as the mathematicians translated, they added commentary and interpretations of their own. To understand this process of translation and interpretation is to appreciate how Galileo’s concept of mathematics was shaped.

In order to read the manuscripts and fully interpret what the Renaissance scholars added, Palmieri has had to call on his knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, and German, as well as his native Italian. And even with his linguistic skill, the work is difficult: The handwritten manuscripts often contain ornate and obsolete script. Spaces that the scribes left for mathematical diagrams were sometimes left empty. Still, Palmieri has delved into a field that has been, until now, ignored by mathematical historians.

“These works were translated again by German mathematicians in the late 19th century,” Palmieri explains. These translations form the foundation for our modern knowledge of classical mathematics. But in an effort to reach back to the purer form of Archimedes and Euclid, the 19th-century scholars expunged many of the interpretations and grace notes that made the Renaissance works so fascinating, and thereby a link in the history of scientific thought was lost.

Palmieri also is examining the little-studied “Conversations with Galileo’s Sidereal Messenger,” written by astronomer Johannes Kepler in response to the work that established Galileo’s reputation. Kepler got an advance copy from the Medici ambassador in Prague. “It’s an interesting little book that veers into science fiction,” Palmieri says, including evidence of life on the moon. “Kepler suggests that the long lunar day inspired the moon’s inhabitants to build circular barriers for protection from the sun. It’s a funny way to explain the moon’s craters.”

Philosophy and Biology

In her just-published book Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism (Cambridge University Press, 2003), Pitt Professor of Philosophy Sandra Mitchell argues that scientists should overcome their allegiance to 19th-century methods of understanding complex models.

“We are looking at dynamically complex systems where you have complex processes in space and time, when you get bifurcations and centers of attraction, where you get unpredictability in deterministic systems,” she says. “And the other kind of complexity in biological systems is a kind of diversity. Rather than getting the uniformity that you have in physics or chemistry, in biology, diversity is part of the engine that runs evolution.”

In other words, contrary to the traditional way of reading Darwin’s theory of evolution as a kind of forward-reaching, inevitable process, Mitchell says, “There’s no inevitability. And there’s no progress, and for me that’s been spelled out in terms of what kinds of laws we should expect to have in biology and in what ways they look different than the laws we have in physics.”

The models of complexity Mitchell studies can have an impact on our understanding of probability and may influence policies based on risk analysis.

“There are alternatives now to strict assessment on the basis of cost-benefit analysis that have to do with adaptive management,” Mitchell says. She adds that our traditional cost-benefit analysis is inadequate to understand the truly complex and less predictable systems that govern phenomena like global warming.

Paul Griffiths, a Pitt professor of philosophy, has been amassing data on how scientists understand what a gene is. The answer is not as clear-cut as a layperson may think.

“Genes sometimes overlap each other,” Griffiths explains. “Pieces of DNA may be read as one gene in one direction and a completely different gene in another direction. The same DNA element may represent different genes at different times of an organism’s life cycle. So when you’re trying to say what a gene is, it’s kind of hard.”

Students, Griffiths says, often wonder why biologists don’t just agree on a definition before embarking on their research. However, that approach contradicts the very nature of discovery: The definition must come at the end of the exploration, not the beginning.

“It’s the opposite of geometry,” Griffiths says. However, scientists are at a point in genome research where understanding how scientists see their work can be useful to the development of the research as a whole. The idea is not to come up with a consensus, but to have an understanding of how different scientific contexts can result in different ways of conceptualizing the gene.

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Griffiths is conducting a massive Web-based survey of biologists. The survey poses hypothetical cases that stretch the common wisdom of what a gene is and asks in noncommittal language how the scientist would respond to various nomenclatures. An initial workshop to discuss the definition of a gene brought biologists and philosophers from around the world to Pitt in early 2003 and 2004.

The Center for Philosophy of Science

Leading neuroscientists and philosophers from around the world recently joined colleagues from Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University for a weekend-long symposium titled Consciousness Explaining: The Role of Feelings in Neuroscience. The scholars came together to discuss the hypothesis by Antonio Damasio, author of the book Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (Macmillan, 1995), that a somatic marker indicates the impact of emotion on our reasoning process. Descartes, who is perhaps most famous for having said, “I think, therefore I am,” erred in separating the mind and the body in how we respond to problems, according to Damasio.

“It was a coincidence,” Griffiths says, “that some of the leading researchers in this work were here at Pitt as visiting fellows under the auspices of the center, and two or three happened to be in town. We had a world-class conference without having to pay for travel expenses!”

The scholars discussed for a day and a half whether recent empirical evidence, including Damasio’s observations of patients with prefrontal cortex lesions, substantiates the physiological underpinnings of emotion that were debunked by early-20th-century behaviorists. That a conference of such extraordinary scholarship could be called together so expeditiously is a reflection of the stature the Center for Philosophy of Science has in its field.

Some of the visiting scholars at the Center have included Professor Rich Grush, who conducts research at the University of California at San Diego in the philosophy of representation; Tetsuji Iseda, a philosopher of science at Nagoya University in Japan; Vasiliki Grigoropoulou from the University of Athens in Greece, whose work is on identity and self in the philosophy of John Locke; and Alan Chalmers, from Flinders University in Australia, who is conducting a project on an epistemological history of atomism. There were other scholars—from Germany, the Netherlands, and five other universities in the United States.

The center gives the scholars an office and the time to dig into their research for a semester or two. They don’t teach, but each visitor gets a chance to present his or her research at a lunchtime colloquium that colleagues and graduate students attend.

“The visitors have their offices on the eighth floor, the graduate students on the ninth, and the department is on the tenth floor” of the Cathedral of Learning, Professor Earman says. The center provides a graduate student, in five or six years of study at Pitt, exposure to the greatest minds in the field. HPS philosophers joke that former students, teachers, and colleagues come through the center as visiting fellows; if you stay at Pitt long enough, you’ll see all your old friends come through.

In addition to the lunchtime colloquia, the annual lecture series (the initial program of the center, as its founder, Professor Grünbaum, envisioned it 44 years ago) brings in scholars seven or eight times a year. Topics for the 2003-04 series included “What Was Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages?”; “Are Infants Little Scientists? Rethinking Domain-Specificity in Conceptual Development”; and “Epistemic Warrant and the Value of Truth.”

First-Rate Graduate Students

Attracting top graduate students to the Departments of Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science at Pitt is not a problem. Similarly, having bright students is a point of attraction for faculty, who can work out problems in their graduate seminars with an articulate, sharp audience.

“We compete with the same two or three other universities for the top students,” says Associate Professor Laura Ruetsche, who directs graduate studies for the philosophy department. She should know: She got her doctorate from Pitt herself in 1996, after studying at Oxford for several years.

Students may not necessarily have a strong background in any of the special areas of philosophy when they apply to the graduate program here. Professors are more interested in seeing whether the student has a future in the field, judging from the student’s writing and recommendations—whether he or she has the capacity to examine a problem philosophically, even if the student’s background is only in science, mathematics, or economics. Once offers have been made by one of the academic units in philosophy, students are invited to a recruitment weekend in the spring that features informal and formal meetings with faculty. The prospects stay with graduate students to get a taste of Pittsburgh life, and the female graduate students organize a brunch for the female applicants.ere’s a great breadth of faculty interests,” Ruetsche says. “They don’t have to feel they’ve picked a specialty already and have to find a professor to match it. No matter what interests students develop at Pitt, there will be a faculty member here for them to study with.