Background
Grosholz, Emily Rolfe was born on October 17, 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Daughter of Edwin DeHaven and Frances Skerrett Grosholz.
(The Cartesian method, construed as a way of organizing do...)
The Cartesian method, construed as a way of organizing domains of knowledge according to the "order of reasons," was a powerful reductive tool. Descartes made significant strides in mathematics, physics, and metaphysics by relating certain complex items and problems back to more simple elements that served as starting points for his inquiries. But his reductive method also impoverished these domains in important ways, for it tended to restrict geometry to the study of straight line segments, physics to the study of ambiguously constituted bits of matter in motion, and metaphysics to the study of the isolated, incorporeal knower. This book examines in detail the negative and positive impact of Descartes's method on his scientific and philosophical enterprises, exemplified by the Geometry, the Principles, the Treatise of Man, and the Meditations.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0198242506/?tag=2022091-20
(Emily Grosholz offers an original investigation of demons...)
Emily Grosholz offers an original investigation of demonstration in mathematics and science, examining how it works and why it is persuasive. Focusing on geometrical demonstration, she shows the roles that representation and ambiguity play in mathematical discovery. She presents a wide range of case studies in mechanics, topology, algebra, logic, and chemistry, from ancient Greece to the present day, but focusing particularly on the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that reductive methods are effective not because they diminish but because they multiply and juxtapose modes of representation. Such problem-solving is, she argues, best understood in terms of Leibnizian "analysis"--the search for conditions of intelligibility. Discovery and justification are then two aspects of one rational way of proceeding, which produces the mathematician's formal experience. Grosholz defends the importance of iconic, as well as symbolic and indexical, signs in mathematical representation, and argues that pragmatic, as well as syntactic and semantic, considerations are indispensable fore mathematical reasoning. By taking a close look at the way results are presented on the page in mathematical (and biological, chemical, and mechanical) texts, she shows that when two or more traditions combine in the service of problem solving, notations and diagrams are subtly altered, multiplied, and juxtaposed, and surrounded by prose in natural language which explains the novel combination. Viewed this way, the texts yield striking examples of language and notation that are irreducibly ambiguous and productive because they are ambiguous. Grosholtz's arguments, which invoke Descartes, Locke, Hume, and Kant, will be of considerable interest to philosophers and historians of mathematics and science, and also have far-reaching consequences for epistemology and philosophy of language.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199299730/?tag=2022091-20
Grosholz, Emily Rolfe was born on October 17, 1950 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Daughter of Edwin DeHaven and Frances Skerrett Grosholz.
Bachelor, University Chicago, 1972. Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy, Yale University, 1978.
Fellow National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, 1985-1986. Senior research fellow Institute History & Philosophy of Science & Technology University Toronto, Canada, 1988-1989. Associate Center for Philosophy of Science University Pittsburgh, since 1992.
Adjunct associate professor department philosophy University Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1992. Professor philosophy Pennsylvania State University, University Park, since 1993, affiliate African and African-American studies, since 1997, fellow Institute for the Arts and Humanities, since 1995. Member research group REHSEIS/National Center for Scientific Research University Paris 7, since 2005.
(The Cartesian method, construed as a way of organizing do...)
(Emily Grosholz offers an original investigation of demons...)
Member American Philosophical Association, Leibniz Society North America, Leibniz Association, Clare Hall University Cambridge (life), Philosophy Science Association.
Married Robert Roy Edwards, January 2, 1987. Children: Benjamin, Robert, William, Mary-Frances.