Author: Adolf Grünbaum
Adolf Grünbaum is the most recent past president (2006/2007) of the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science, a past president of the American Philosophical Association (1982/1983), and a past president of the Philosophy of Science Association (U.S.A.) for two consecutive two-year terms (1965/1967, 1968/1970). In 1960, he joined the faculty of the University of Pittsburgh, where he is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy of Science, Primary Research Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Research Professor of Psychiatry, and Chairman of the Center for Philosophy of Science. Oxford University Press in New York City will publish two volumes of his collected papers under the overall title Philosophy of Science in Action. Professor Grünbaum is a Contributing Editor for Free Inquiry and a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism.
Why Is There a Universe at All, Rather Than Just Nothing? Part 2
The Failure of Swinburne’s Simplicity Recipe for Verisimilitudinous Theories In his books Simplicity as Evidence of Truth (1997) and Epistemic Justification (2001), Richard Swinburne argued strenuously that simplicity provides probabilistic evidence of truth by being a tie-breaker among conflicting theories as follows: greater simplicity is a criterion for “choosing among [competing] scientific theories of equal …
Why Is There a Universe at All Rather than Just Nothing? Part 1
In his 1697 article “On the Ultimate Origination of Things,” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz posed a historic question: he demanded “a full reason why there should be any world rather than none.” In a sequel of 1714, he famously asked more generally: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (italics in original). And yet he spoke …