Phillip Kitcher is one of the stars in the philosophical firmament. Born in London in 1947, he took a degree in maths and the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge and a doctorate in HPS at Princeton where he worked closely with Karl Hempel and Thomas Kuhn. In the 1990s he was Professor of Philosophy and Faculty Coordinator for Science Studies at San Diego and since then he has been the John Dewey Professor of Philosophy at Columbia, with a spell as the Chair of Contemporary Civilization. His cv signals a stellar career.
His publication program demonstrates a very interesting move that mirrors some of the Popperian “turns”, especially the evolutionary approach and more significantly the social turn to examine the rules of the scientific game and the reciprocal relationship between science and political and social institutions.
1982 – Abusing Science: The Case Against Creationism.
1983 – The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge.
1985 – Vaulting Ambition: Sociobiology and the Quest for Human Nature.
1989 – Scientific Explanation, edited with Wesley Salmon.
1993 – The Advancement of Science.
1997 – The Lives to Come: The Genetic Revolution and Human Possibilities.
2001 – Science, Truth and Democracy.
2003 – In Mendel’s Mirror: Philosophical Reflections on Biology.
2005 – Finding an Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring.
2007 – Living with Darwin: Evolution, Design and the Future of Faith.
2007 – Joyce’s Kaleidoscope: An Invitation to Finnegans Wake.
2011 – The Ethical Project.
2011 – Science in a Democratic Society.
He moved on from early work on epistemology with the focus on the justification of beliefs to look closer at the way that beliefs are generated and the way that science functions as a social institution among other social and political institutions, notably democracy. In The Advancement of Science he made a serious effort to marry epistemology and economic theory. I think that work suffered from a sub-optimal theory of epistemology (belief theory) and also a sub-optimal economic theory, but the work has some potential by way of Popperism (critical rationalism) and Austrian economics.
