Nancy Cartwright (philosopher)

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the philosopher. For the American voice actress, see Nancy Cartwright.
Nancy Cartwright
University of Illinois at Chicago
EraContemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic
Stanford School
Main interests
Philosophy of science
Notable ideas
Entity realism
President of the DLMPST/IUHPST
In office
2020–2023
Preceded byMenachem Magidor
Nancy Cartwright's voice
from the BBC programme
In Our Time, 2 July 2009[1]
Problems playing this file? See media help.

Nancy Cartwright, Lady Hampshire

Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Technology
.

Education and career

Cartwright earned her BSc from the

University of Durham
.

Cartwright has mentored several students in England and the United States who have gone on to become professional philosophers of science, including Naomi Oreskes, Mauricio Suarez, Roman Frigg, Jeremy Howick, Peter Menzies, and Hasok Chang. She was also a supervisor of Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a subsequent source of controversy.[3]

Cartwright was married to the philosopher Stuart Hampshire until his death in 2004. She was also previously married to the philosopher Ian Hacking. She has two daughters, Emily and Sophie Hampshire Cartwright, and two granddaughters, Lucy Charlton and Tabitha Emily Cartwright Spray.[4]

Philosophical work

Cartwright's approach to the

objectivity and the unity of science. Her recent work focuses on evidence
and its use in informing policy decisions.

Carl Hoefer describes Cartwright's philosophy in the following terms:[5]

Nancy Cartwright's philosophy of science is, in her view, a form of empiricism but empiricism in the style of

demarcation
; she is concerned with how actual science achieves the successes it does, and what sort of metaphysical and epistemological presuppositions are needed to understand that success.

Cartwright, like many working scientists themselves, takes a rather pragmatic/realist stance toward observations and interventions made by scientists and engineers and particularly toward their connections to causality: Scientists see impurities causing signal loss in a cable, and they stimulate an inverted population, causing it to lase. Given these starting points, there can be no question of a skeptical attitude toward causation, in either singular or generic form. The fundamental role (or better, roles) played by causation in scientific practice is undeniable; what Cartwright does, then, is reconfigure empiricism from the ground up based on this insight. In the reconfiguration process, many mainstays of the received view of science take a beating; especially [...] the fundamentality of laws of nature.

Honors and awards

Cartwright served as the president of the

MacArthur Fellowship.[9]

Cartwright was the recipient of the Martin R. Lebowitz Prize for Philosophical Achievement of the Phi Beta Kappa Society 2017 (alongside Elliott Sober)[10] and was awarded the Carl Gustav Hempel Award in 2018 by the Philosophy of Science Association.[11]

In 2017, Cartwright was selected by the American Philosophical Association to deliver the Carus Lectures. She delivered a series entitled Nature, the Artful Modeler: She Reads the New Yorker, Trusts in God, and Takes Short Views.[12] The lectures were published in 2019 alongside additional essays under the title Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better.[13]

Selected works

Books

  • Cartwright, Nancy (1983). How the Laws of Physics Lie.
    ISBN 978-0-19-824704-3
    .     Translated to Chinese.
  • Nature's Capacities and Their Measurement,
    ISBN 0-19-824477-0
  • The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science,
    ISBN 0-521-64411-9
  • Hunting Causes and Using Them: Approaches in Philosophy and Economics,
    ISBN 0-521-86081-4
    . Translated to Chinese.
  • Evidence Based Policy: A Practical Guide to Doing It Better, with Jeremy Hardie, Oxford University Press (2012)
  • Philosophy of Social Science: a new introduction, with Eleonora Montuschi, Oxford University Press (2014)
  • Improving Child Safety: deliberation, judgement and empirical research, with Munro, E., Hardie, J. and Montuschi, E. (2017)
  • Nature, the Artful Modeler: Lectures on Laws, Science, How Nature Arranges the World and How We Can Arrange It Better (The Paul Carus Lectures). Open Court (2019)

Articles

References

  1. In Our Time (BBC Radio 4). 2 July 2009. BBC Radio 4. Archived
    from the original on 2022-09-23. Retrieved 2014-01-18.
  2. OCLC 38862354
    .
  3. ^ "LSE insider claims Gaddafi donation was openly joked about;". The Independent. 13 March 2011. Archived from the original on 2022-06-18. Retrieved 26 June 2018.
  4. ^ "Nancy Cartwright – Professor of Philosophy". profnancycartwright.com. 8 December 2020. Archived from the original on 23 September 2022. Retrieved 29 April 2022.
  5. ^ Hartmann, Stephann, Hoefer, Carl and Luc Bovens (eds.) - Nancy Cartwright's Philosophy of Science. London: Routledge. 2008. p. 14.
  6. ^ "Philosophy of Science Association – Governance". Archived from the original on 2011-07-27. Retrieved 2010-01-24.
  7. ^ "Pacific Division Officers & Committees 2007–2008". Retrieved 2010-01-24.[permanent dead link]; "Pacific Division Officers & Committees 2008–2009". Retrieved 2010-01-24.[permanent dead link]
  8. ^ "DLMPST Council 2020-2023". Archived from the original on 2019-08-11. Retrieved 2019-08-11.
  9. ^ CV Nancy Cartwright Archived 2022-09-23 at the Wayback Machine; "Eighty-four leading social scientists conferred as Fellows of the Academy of Social Sciences". Academy of Social Sciences. 19 October 2016. Archived from the original on 6 June 2019. Retrieved 5 August 2017.
  10. ^ Shepherd, Erin (1 May 2017). "Prominent Philosophers Cartwright and Sober Win 2017 Lebowitz Prize". American Philosophical Association. Archived from the original on 23 September 2022. Retrieved 23 September 2022.
  11. ^ "Hempel Award Recipients". Philosophy of Science Association. Archived from the original on 23 September 2022. Retrieved 23 September 2022. The Governing Board of the Philosophy of Science Association is pleased to announce that the recipient of the Carl Gustav Hempel Award for 2018 is Nancy Cartwright.
  12. ^ "Carus Lectures". APA Online. American Philosophical Association. Retrieved 13 February 2024.
  13. doi:10.1353/rvm.2020.0095
    . Retrieved 13 February 2024.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nancy Cartwright (philosopher).
Academic offices
Preceded by President of the Division for Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science and Technology of the International Union for History and Philosophy of Science and Technology (DLMPST/IUHPST)
2020-2023 		Succeeded by
incumbent
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nancy_Cartwright_(philosopher)&oldid=1218552248"