Postmodern Philosophy and the Scientific Turn

What can come of a scientific engagement with postmodern philosophy? Some scientists have claimed that the social sciences and humanities have nothing to contribute, except perhaps peripherally, to their research. Dorothea E. Olkowski shows that the historic link between science and philosophy, mathematics itself, plays a fundamental role in the development of the worldviews that drive both fields. Focusing on language, its expression of worldview and usage, she develops a phenomenological account of human thought and action to explicate the role of philosophy in the sciences. Olkowski proposes a model of phenomenology, both scientific and philosophical, that helps make sense of reality and composes an ethics for dealing with unpredictability in our world.

Dorothea E. Olkowski is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and Director of the Cognitive Studies Minor. She is author of Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation and Resistance, Flight, Creation: Feminist Enactments of French Philosophy and editor (with Christina Schües and Helen A. Fielding) of Time in Feminist Phenomenology (IUP, 2011).