Contingent Scientific Realism and Instrumentalism:
Beyond Rorty's "The End of Philosophy" and Fine's "Natural Ontological Attitude"
Eugene Lashchyk La Salle University Published in Ukrainian (translation) in Filosofs'ka y Sotsyolohychna Dumka (Philosophical and Sociological Thought), No. 11 and 12 (1992): pp. 57-69, 41-61 [Kyyiv, Ukraine]. It is published here in the original English.

Lashchyk Memorial Scholarship established at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy DETROIT -

The Prof. Eugene Lashchyk Memorial Scholarship Fund at the University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Kyiv was established on July 20, the first anniversary of his death. The scholarship in the sum of $2,000 will be awarded annually to the best Ukrainian student of philosophy at UKMA.
In addition to this scholarship, preparations are under way to open a library/reading room at the department of philosophy at the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. This library will house the collection of Prof. Lashchyk's books on philosophy and science, which he bequeathed to the university.

Dr. Lashchyk was born in Ukraine in 1937 and came to the United States in 1949. He attended high school in New York City, was active as a youth counselor in Plast and in the Ukrainian Students Organization and was a member of the Dumka Chorus.
He completed his B. A. and M. A. at City College in New York and his Ph. D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. He specialized in the philosophy of science and wrote his dissertation on the theories of scientific revolutions in the works of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend.
He was the recipient of the Bacon Fellowship, the Carnegie Summer Institute in Philosophy of Science at Notre Dame, and an academic visitor at the London School of Economics. He lectured at Brooklyn College, St. Francis College, the University of Delaware and the University of Pennsylvania. For three decades he taught such courses as philosophy of science, logic, epistemology, critical thinking and ethics at La Salle University.
Dr. Lashchyk also worked on Ukrainian philosophy and published works on Hryhoriy Skovoroda and Volodymyr Vynnychenko. Throughout his life he was concerned with the state of Ukrainian philosophy and cooperated with his colleagues in Ukraine.

He watched the developments in Ukraine's transition and rejoiced in the declaration of independence. He worked actively, assisting in making changes in the curriculum and compiling an anthology on critical thinking. In December 1994, at the invitation of the Soros Foundation in Kyiv, he conducted the Seminar on Critical Thinking for professors of philosophy.
In the academic sphere he was a member of the American Philosophical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, the British Society for the Philosophy of Science, the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Shevchenko Scientific Society. In the Philadelphia area, Dr. Lashchyk was one of the active organizers of the monthly Colloquium of the Greater Philadelphia Philosophical Consortium (GPPC) of universities and colleges.

As a member of the executive committee of the GPPC, he proposed and laid the groundwork of the conference on "Nationalism: Its Nature and Development in the Post-Soviet Republics and Central Europe." Due to his untimely death, the conference was held as a memorial to him and was made possible through the work of Prof. Hans Oberdiek of Swarthmore College, the generous support of the GPPC board of governors and Prof. Lashchyk's friends and colleagues, particularly Prof. Alex Marshal and Dr. Bipin Shah.

The participants included such noted scholars as: George Kline, James Scanlan, Murad Akhundov, Veljko Vujacic, Andrew Arato, Yevhen Bystrytsky, Alexander Motyl, William Sullivan, Andrew Chrucky and Michael Kerlin. Many of the speakers warmly reminisced about their joint work with their colleague.

Dr. Lashchyk died at the height of his creative work, not having the opportunity to complete his numerous plans. Despite his serious illness, he maintained a positive attitude and was optimistic to the end. This year the department of philosophy at La Salle University is planning a special lecture on philosophy of science in his memory.

The Prof. Eugene Lashchyk Memorial Scholarhip Fund was established from donations in memory of Dr. Lashchyk by family, friends, colleagues and acquaintances. (All donations are tax deductible.) Anyone wishing to make additional contributions can do so by writing a check for Ukrainian Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Dr. Eugene Lashchyk Scholarship Fund, c/o Liuba Lashchyk, 1101 River Road, Yardley, PA 19067.

                          Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, November 3, 1996, No. 44, Vol. LXIV

[author's note] I would like to thank Olexa Bilaniuk, Hugh Joswick, Michael Kerlin, Bill Sullivan, Richard Strosser and Joe Volpe for helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. Special thanks to Joseph Margolis who got me started on this topic and with whom I have had many fruitful exchanges on these issues. This research was in part supported by a grant from La Salle University.

Contemporary philosophy is in the midst of a crisis. For some philosophers like Rorty and Fine the crisis has passed. Philosophy is dead. But there is no mourning among the members of that group. Rorty has announced the end of philosophy first in a series of lectures and then in the book Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature.{2}

Arthur Fine has, in the spirit of this trend, announced the end of the philosophy of science and the beginning of a new attitude towards science which he called the "Natural Ontological Attitude"{3} or NOA for short. According to Fine's NOA "Realism is dead"{4} and so is its counter part anti-realism. As a matter of fact, there is no work for philosophers of science to do. Science is not in need of interpretation or explication. Philosophy together with philosophy of science is dead. Long live science!

In the present paper{5} I would like to look more closely at Fine's arguments for NOA as well as to address the more general position of the end of philosophy{6} or, under Rorty's newer formulation, the end of Philosophy{7} with a capital "P". But before I turn to this analysis let me briefly sketch the phenomenon of the "end of philosophy" as it has unfolded in the history of philosophy. The hope is that such a rehearsal will put the current "end of philosophy" movement in proper perspective and permit us to come up with some useful generalizations about the task of philosophy in this post-foundationalist era. In the end I will conclude with a sketch of a position on realism which I call contingent scientific realism.

Notes

{2} Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

{3} Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game: Einstein Realism and the Quantum Theory (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986): Chapter 7 "The Natural Ontological Attitude" was originally published in Scientific Realism, ed. Jarrett Leplin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).

{4} Ibid., p. 112.

{5} A critique of Fine's NOA was originally presented as part of my commentary on Fine's paper in defense of NOA at The Greater Philadelphia Philosophy Consortium's Conference on the Philosophy of the Human Studies in 1986. A shorter version of this paper was published and presented in Moscow in 1987. See Eugene Lashchyk (1987) "And Not Arthur Fine's Antiphilosophical Position "NOA" Abstracts of the VIII International Congress of Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, Section 13, Moscow, 1987: pp. 170-172.

{6} In one place Rorty says "I suggest that abandoning the scheme-content distinctions and accepting pragmatism does, in a sense, mean abandoning philosophy." Richard Rorty, "Transcendental Arguments, Self-Reference, and Pragmatism," in Transcendental Arguments and Science, ed. Peter Bieri et al. (Dordrecht: R. Reidel, 1979): p. 78; see also Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.

{7} This bifurcation of philosophy can be found for example in such passages as "This third motive -- the fear of what would happen if there were mainly philosophy, but no Philosophy -- is not simply the defensive reaction of specialists threatened with unemployment. It is a conviction that culture without Philosophy would be "irrationalist" -- that a precious human capacity would be unused . . . " R. Rorty Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982): p. xxii.

Works by Eugene Lashchyk