Paul Franco
Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy
Biography
Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania
Dissertation Title: The Constitutive A Priori and the Structure of Physical Knowledge
B.A. Colorado State University at Fort Collins (Honors, Magna Cum Laude)
Research
My main research and teaching interests are in the history of modern philosophy, the history of 20th Century analytic philosophy, and the philosophy of science. My dissertation and future research are part of an expansionary and revisionary trend in studying philosophy’s most recent past. In my dissertation, I was particularly interested in tracing the development in the early 20th century of Immanuel Kant’s fundamental insight in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s insight was that certain a priori elements of knowledge provide the conceptual and methodological background necessary for making precise judgments about space, time, and objects and their relationships in space and time. Beginning with my own interpretation of Kant’s insight, my dissertation shows how Kantian minded philosophers of science in the early 20th century modify it in light of the relativistic revolution in physics. From there, I drew lessons for contemporary attempts to understand the possibility and conditions of objective physical knowledge.
My Links
Courses: Spring 2012, Haverford
Philosophy
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