Michela Massimi, "Perspectival Realism" (Oxford UP, 2022)
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What is Perspectival Realism and why does it matter for scientific realism?
Welcome to the new books network.
Hello and welcome to New Books and Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Figdoor, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. I'm co host of the channel along with Robert Talise, Sarah Tyson, and Malcolm Keating. Together we bring you conversations with philosophers about their new books. In a wide range of areas of contemporary philosophical inquiry. Today's interview is with Michela Masimi, professor of philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Her new book, Perspectival Realism, is just out from Oxford University Press. For many philosophers, the fact that scientists take different perspectives on the world is an obstacle to being a realist about the world. In perspectival realism, Massimi argues that to the contrary, the plurality of perspectives is the driving force beh behind realism.
On her view, the scientific realism that emerges out of the perspectival nature of scientific representation Takes perspectival models as inferential blueprints for exploring what is possible. The realist's primitives are not essential properties, but the stable law like dependencies that are identified again and again from different perspectives. Masimi also shows how scientific communities develop what she calls natural kinds with a human face, which are evolving groupings of modally robust phenomena that result from the historically and culturally situated systems of scientific practices. Massimi's Brook constructs a new vision of what realism can be and That will be highly influential for years to come.
Let's turn to the interview. Hello, Michela Masimi. Welcome to New Books in Philosophy. Hello, Carrie. Thank you for having me. Um I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Um This is the more one of the most interesting books, defenses and uh explanations and elaborations of realism that that I've come across and recent years, which, you know, comes from, as the title says, um, integrating the whole idea of different perspectives in science. Um, so it's I I'm quite sure it's gonna be very influential in in years coming forward. Um So before we get into the the nitty gritty of the book itself, maybe you can say a bit about uh yourself as you as a philosopher who you came to to philosophy and then Uh, the genesis of this book.
Thank you very much, Carrie, for the really kind introduction. Um I discovered philosophy when I was in secondary school. I was lucky enough to grow up in a country like Italy where А філософі із таутін секундари шкул стат шкулс. and I was mesmerized by the subject at a very young age. Um but I always been also interested in science. So I remember as a teenager I would read um popular science books about physics, for example. So when I had to choose at the age of eighteen what I wanted to study at university, it was a really tough choice because uh There was a part of me that was really interested in science, but um I think my love for philosophy um prevailed in the end.
So that's uh that's how I ended up um studying philosophy at university. Um The story behind this particular book. has been kind of long. It's been a long book in the making and uh um really started maybe seventeen years ago or something. I've always been interested in debates about realism and anti-realism in science, really since I was a postgraduate student. And um In a way my interest on realism has always got entangled with my interest in uh um Kant philosophy of nature and Kantianism and philosophy of science in general. Um and so it was really when uh Ron Geary's book came out in two thousand and six called Scientific Perspectivism. that in a way I saw in uh the position that Gidi was developing in the in the book, um, a possible way of answering some of the general questions I had about realism.
um and in a way developing the project that Ron Geary Um started in that book. I mean Suntivi perspective is a Maronghiri's book was not. intended to be a book about realism was really a book about the role the perspectives play in
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