Peter Lipton
Encyclopedia
Hans Rausing
Hans Rausing, KBE, is a Swedish businessman based in the United Kingdom. He made his fortune from his co-inheritance of Tetra Pak , a company founded by his father Ruben Rausing and currently the largest food packaging company in the world...
Professor
Professor
A professor is a scholarly teacher; the precise meaning of the term varies by country. Literally, professor derives from Latin as a "person who professes" being usually an expert in arts or sciences; a teacher of high rank...
and Head of the Department of History and Philosophy of Science
History and philosophy of science
The history and philosophy of science is an academic discipline that encompasses the philosophy of science and the history of science. Although many scholars in the field are trained primarily as either historians or as philosophers, there are degree-granting departments of HPS at several...
at Cambridge University, and a fellow of King's College
King's College, Cambridge
King's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge, England. The college's full name is "The King's College of our Lady and Saint Nicholas in Cambridge", but it is usually referred to simply as "King's" within the University....
, until his unexpected death in November 2007. According to his obituary on the Cambridge web site, he was "recognized as one of the leading philosophers of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
and epistemologists in the world."
Career
Lipton was an undergraduate at Wesleyan UniversityWesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
and a graduate student at Oxford University. Before coming to Cambridge, he taught at Clark University
Clark University
Clark University is a private research university and liberal arts college in Worcester, Massachusetts.Founded in 1887, it is the oldest educational institution founded as an all-graduate university. Clark now also educates undergraduates...
and Williams College
Williams College
Williams College is a private liberal arts college located in Williamstown, Massachusetts, United States. It was established in 1793 with funds from the estate of Ephraim Williams. Originally a men's college, Williams became co-educational in 1970. Fraternities were also phased out during this...
. He was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Bioethics
Bioethics is the study of controversial ethics brought about by advances in biology and medicine. Bioethicists are concerned with the ethical questions that arise in the relationships among life sciences, biotechnology, medicine, politics, law, and philosophy....
and chaired the working party that produced Pharmacogenetics: Ethical Issues. He was also on the AskPhilosophers panel. In 2004, Lipton had the honour of being the Medawar Prize Lecturer of the Royal Society
Royal Society
The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, known simply as the Royal Society, is a learned society for science, and is possibly the oldest such society in existence. Founded in November 1660, it was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II as the "Royal Society of London"...
.
Lipton's research interests focused on the philosophy of science, including topics such as explanation
Explanation
An explanation is a set of statements constructed to describe a set of facts which clarifies the causes, context, and consequencesof those facts....
, inference
Inference
Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions from premises known or assumed to be true. The conclusion drawn is also called an idiomatic. The laws of valid inference are studied in the field of logic.Human inference Inference is the act or process of deriving logical conclusions...
, testing
Test method
A test method is a definitive procedure that produces a test result.A test can be considered as technical operation that consists of determination of one or more characteristics of a given product, process or service according to a specified procedure. Often a test is part of an experiment.The test...
, theory change, laws of nature, and scientific realism
Scientific realism
Scientific realism is, at the most general level, the view that the world described by science is the real world, as it is, independent of what we might take it to be...
. Lipton's research in philosophy of science led him to do work in other related areas of philosophy; in epistemology, Lipton also investigated the philosophy of induction
Inductive reasoning
Inductive reasoning, also known as induction or inductive logic, is a kind of reasoning that constructs or evaluates propositions that are abstractions of observations. It is commonly construed as a form of reasoning that makes generalizations based on individual instances...
and testimony. Likewise in philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
Lipton researched notions of mental content and the mind-body problem.
He was a member of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics
Nuffield Council on Bioethics
The Nuffield Council on Bioethics is a UK-based independent charitable body, which examines and reports on ethical issues raised by new advances in biological and medical research...
(2003–2007).
Personal life
Lipton lived with his wife Diana and two sons Jonah and Jacob. He was a self-confessed "religious atheist"; he held that he could follow the customs and culture of a Jewish lifestyle, and use the teachings of JudaismJudaism
Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...
to help him tackle moral problems in life, without simultaneously believing in the metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
of such a religion (such as the existence of God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
).
On 25 November 2007, Lipton suffered a fatal heart attack after playing a game of squash
Squash (sport)
Squash is a high-speed racquet sport played by two players in a four-walled court with a small, hollow rubber ball...
. He was succeeded in his capacity as Head of Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
by Professor John Forrester.
Selected publications
- "Wouldn't It Be Lovely: Explanation and Scientific Realism", Metascience 14, 3 (2006) 331-361. (Review Symposium on the second edition of Inference to the Best Explanation, with James Ladyman, Igor Douven and Bas van Fraassen.)
- "Science and Religion: The Immersion Solution", in Andrew Moore & Michael Scott (eds) Realism and Religion: Philosophical and Theological Perspectives (Ashgate, forthcoming).
- "Waiting for Hume", in Marina Frasca-Spada & P.J.E. Kail (eds) Impressions of Hume, Oxford University Press, 2005, 59-76.
- "The Truth about Science", Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 360 (2005), 1259-1269.
- "Testing Hypotheses: Prediction and Prejudice", Science 307 (14 January 2005), 219-221.
- Inference to the Best Explanation, Routledge, 1991; expanded second edition, 2004. ISBN 0-415-24202-9.
- "Epistemic Options", Philosophical Studies 121 (2004) 147-158.
- "What Good is an Explanation?", in G. Hon & S. Rackover (eds.), Explanation: Theoretical Approaches, Kluwer, 2001, 43-59. Reprinted in J. Cornwell (ed.) Understanding Explanation, Oxford University Press, 2004, 1-22.
- "Genetic and Generic Determinism: A New Threat to Free Will?", in D. Rees and S. Rose (eds.) Perils and Prospects of the New Brain Sciences (CUP, 2004).
- "The Reach of the Law", Philosophical Books, 43, 4, October 2002, 254-260.
- "Quests of a Realist", Metascience, 10, 3 (2001), 347-353.
- "The History of Empiricism", International Encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, Pergamon, 2001, 4481-4485.
- "Is Explanation a Guide to Inference?", in G. Hon and S. Rackover (eds.), Explanation: Theoretical Approaches, Kluwer, 2001, 93-120.
- "Inference to the Best Explanation", in W.H. Newton-Smith (ed.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Blackwell, 2000, 184-193.
- "Tracking Track Records", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume LXXIV (2000), 179-205.
- "The Epistemology of Testimony", Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 29A (1998), 1-31.
- "All Else Being Equal", Philosophy 74 (1999), 155-168.
- "Binding the Mind", in J. Cornwell (ed.), Consciousness and Human Identity, Oxford University Press, 1998, 212-224.
- "Cambridge Contributions to the Philosophy of Science", in S. Ormrod (ed.), Cambridge Contributions, Cambridge University Press, 1998, 122-142.
- "Is the Best Good Enough?", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society XCIII (1993), 89-104; reprinted in D. Papineau (ed.), Philosophy of Science, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1996.
- "Popper and Reliabilism", in A. O"Hear (ed.), Karl Popper: Philosophy and Problems, Royal Institute of Philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1995, 31-43.
- "Making a Difference", Philosophica, Vol. 51, No. 1, 1993, 39-54. Reprinted in Revue Roumaine de Philosophie, 38, 3.4, 1994, 291-303.
- "Contrastive Explanation", in D. Knowles (ed.), Explanation and its Limits, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 247-266; reprinted in D. Ruben (ed.), Explanation, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1993.
- "Causation Outside the Law", in H. Gross & T.R. Harrison (eds.), Jurisprudence: Cambridge Essays, Oxford University Press, 1992, 127-148.