Van Lohuizen’s ideal of unity, must above all be seen as a challenge to attain the necessary integration of planning, research, and design to meet the requirements of a changing society. Though Van Lohuizen's ideas were influenced strongly by the rational and technical principles of the CIAM, he saw technology as a means to an end in an approach that is primarily based on humans and culture. In the ideas of Van Lohuizen, different dimensions can be traced. New developments in (...) these dimensions are discussed in the article. There is no lack of innovative ideas and methods. Nearly all the ideas and methods discussed were developed in the forties, fifties, or sixties. On the basis of the incubation period required for introduction on a wider scale, it is now time for them to find greater favor with society. Following the years of a no-nonsense policy, it seems that in many fields there is a new need for a wider, more qualitative approach. (shrink)

In this paper I apply the mechanistic account of explanation to engineering science. I discuss two ways in which this extension offers further development of the mechanistic view. First, functional individuation of mechanisms in engineering science proceeds by means of two distinct sub types of role function, behavior function and effect function, rather than role function simpliciter. Second, it offers refined assessment of the explanatory power of mechanistic explanations. It is argued that in the context of malfunction explanations of technical (...) systems, two key desiderata for mechanistic explanations, ‘completeness and specificity’ and ‘abstraction’, pull in opposite directions. I elaborate a novel explanatory desideratum to accommodate this explanatory context, dubbed ‘local specificity and global abstraction’, and further argue that it also holds for mechanistic explanations of malfunctions in the biological domain. The overall result is empirically-informed understanding of mechanistic explanation in engineering science, thus contributing to the ongoing project of understanding mechanistic explanation in novel or relatively unexplored domains. I illustrate these claims in terms of reverse engineering and malfunction explanations in engineering science. (shrink)

This book discusses the relationship between the philosophy of science and philosophy of engineering, and demonstrates how philosophers of engineering design as well as design researchers can benefit from the conceptual toolkit that the philosophy of science has to offer. In this regard, it employs conceptual tools from the philosophical literature on scientific explanation to address key issues in engineering design and philosophy of engineering design. Specifically, the book focuses on assessing the explanatory value of function ascriptions used in engineering (...) design and philosophy of technical functions; on elaborating the structure of explanation in engineering design; on assessing the role and value of design representations in engineering design and philosophy thereof; and on elaborating means for the testing of design methods. Presenting a novel and effective approach to tackling key issues in the field, philosophers of engineering and design alike will greatly benefit from this book. (shrink)

This paper adds to the philosophical literature on mechanistic explanation by elaborating two related explanatory functions of idealisation in mechanistic models. The first function involves explaining the presence of structural/organizational features of mechanisms by reference to their role as difference-makers for performance requirements. The second involves tracking counterfactual dependency relations between features of mechanisms and features of mechanistic explanandum phenomena. To make these functions salient, we relate our discussion to an exemplar from systems biological research on the mechanism for countering (...) heat shock—the heat shock response system—in Escherichia coli bacteria. This research also reinforces a more general lesson: ontic constraint accounts in the literature on mechanistic explanation provide insufficiently informative normative appraisals of mechanistic models. We close by outlining an alternative view on the explanatory norms governing mechanistic representation. (shrink)

The nature of architecture Building Architecture and Religion The sense of the past Following the example of antiquity.

"Dealing with the Visual will be of great use to advanced students because it offers an overview of current debates, and to graduate students and professionals in the field because the essays offer in-depth investigations of the methodological issues involved and various historical ways of defining visuality. The topics included range from early modern ways of viewing pictures and sixteenth-century views of Palladio's villas in their landscape settings to contemporary debate about whether there is life yet in painting."--BOOK JACKET.

Many readings of the Parable of the Labourers in the vineyard want to treat the owner as representing God. Knowledge of actual agricultural practices relating to the management of vineyards suggest, on the contrary, that the details of the parable obstruct an easy identification of the owner with God, and that he displays unusual behaviour not only by paying all the labourers the same wage, but by his very intervention in the hiring process. The conclusion reached is that the parable (...) constructs the vineyard owner, typically one of the nouveau riche who lived in cities, not only as a ‘good employer’ but also, contrary to expectation, as a patron who intervened well beyond the strict norms of economic exchange. (shrink)

Current philosophical theorizing about technical functions is mainly focused on specifying conditions under which agents are justified in ascribing functions to technical artifacts. Yet, assessing the precise explanatory relevance of such function ascriptions is, by and large, a neglected topic in the philosophy of technical artifacts and technical functions. We assess the explanatory utility of ascriptions of technical functions in the following three explanation-seeking contexts: why was artifact x produced?, why does artifact x not have the expected capacity to ϕ?, (...) how does artifact x realize its capacity to ϕ? We argue that while function ascriptions serve a mere heuristic role in the first context, they have substantial explanatory leverage in the second and third context. In addition, we assess the relevance of function ascriptions in the context of engineering redesign. Here, function ascriptions also play a relevant role: they enable normative statements of the sort that component b functions better than component a. We unpack these claims by considering philosophical theories of technical functions, in particular the ICE theory, and engineering work on function ascription and explanation. We close the paper by relating our analysis to current debates on the explanatory power of mechanistic vis-à-vis functional explanations. (shrink)

In this paper we assess the explanatory role of idealizations in ‘design explanations’, a type of functional explanation used in biology. In design explanations, idealizations highlight which factors make a difference to phenomena to be explained: hypothetical, idealized, organisms are invoked to make salient which traits of extant organisms make a difference to organismal fitness. This result negates the view that idealizations serve only pragmatic benefits, and complements the view that idealizations highlight factors that do not make a difference. This (...) analysis in particular strengthens the perspective that idealizations are means to highlight difference making factors, and identifies a novel, more direct role for idealizations in doing so. It thus offers a novel argument why in some explanatory contexts idealizations are in-eliminable. (shrink)

This article examines the early Christian reception of the apocryphal book Tobit, focusing on Greek and Latin Christian interpretations from the 2nd to the 5th century CE. The study asks: how did early Christians read Tobit and for what purposes? The article provides an overview of how and why Tobit ended up in the Christian Bible, whether canonical or apocryphal. It then examines how the figures of Tobit and his son, Tobias, function as a moral exemplum in early Christianity, especially (...) related to almsgiving and financial management, burials and the care of the dead, marriage and parenthood, prayer, the suffering and endurance of Tobit, and the role of Tobit in the Christian understanding of angels. The article demonstrates that Tobit had a rich and diverse reception in early Christian biblical interpretation, especially in the Latin church of the West. CONTRIBUTION: This article investigates the historical reception of the apocryphal Book of Tobit in early Christian thought. The focus is especially on the varieties of thought regarding Tobit. The article provides an overview of how and why Tobit ended up in the Christian Bible, whether canonical or apocryphal. It then examines how the figures of Tobit and his son, Tobias, function as moral exempla. (shrink)

The concept of technical function is a key concept to describe technical artifacts and artifacts-to-be-designed. Engineers often give such descriptions in terms of functional decomposition models, which represent relationships between functions and sets of other functions. Despite the importance of the concept of function there is no consensus among engineers about its meaning. Models of functional decomposition are likewise conceptually divergent. Although this conceptual diversity hampers information exchange between engineers, they accept and maintain it. Engineers do not, by and large, (...) engage in a focused debate to establish commonly shared functional conceptualizations. This contrasts with science where both debates on the adequacy of key conceptualizations and convergence toward shared conceptualizations are common. This book investigates the side-by-side usage of different functional decomposition models in engineering. It explains this phenomenon by applying and extending the analysis of theory choice in terms of methodological incommensurability to engineering functional decomposition, rather than to science. This analysis shows that engineers’ usage of competing functional decomposition models is rational from a practical point of view. This book furthermore investigates the communication problems that the side-by-side usage of different models engenders and presents a strategy that supports the exchange and re-use of functional information between engineers. (shrink)

In this paper we chart epistemological similarities between shared function talk in biology and the engineering sciences, focusing on the notions of biological advantage function and technical advantage function. We start by showing that biological advantage function ascriptions are common in biology and that technical advantage function ascriptions are common in engineering science. We then proceed to show that these ascriptions have a very similar structure and that their epistemic value also is similar: both biological advantage function and technical advantage (...) function ascriptions provide the means to answer what-would-happen-if questions. We develop and illustrate our claims with four case studies: two from biology, and two from engineering design research. Our results offer new insights into a relatively neglected issue in both philosophy of biology and technology, viz. assessing the explanatory and predictive utility of function ascriptions. (shrink)

At first sight, classical architecture, with its continuous revivals and reworking of the forms of Greek and Roman building, would appear to offer a privileged field in which to apply Warburg's central notion of the survival of classical forms and his view of art history's unfolding as a process of remembrance. Yet Warburg himself did not write on architecture. The topic has also largely vanished from the pages of the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, though in the past (...) the journal has been the venue for influential publications on classical architecture. By comparing two Warburg circle publications from 1949 — Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower's British Art and the Mediterranean World and Wittkower's Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism — this article shows that architectural history of this kind, developed in the context of the Warburg Institute, is connected not only to Aby Warburg's ideas on Nachleben der Antike and Mnemosyne, but also to the organization and holdings of the Warburg Institute Library. Working in the Warburg Library gives architectural historians the intellectual space to think about architecture in terms of design issues, but moreover as an actor shaping society and culture. This article concludes that Warburg's thought offers important, and thus far hardly explored, starting points for new investigations of the built classical heritage. (shrink)

In this paper I address the current debate on ontic versus epistemic conceptualizations of mechanistic explanation in the mechanisms literature. Illari recently argued that good explanations are subject to both ontic and epistemic constraints: they must describe mechanisms in the world (ontic aim) in such fashion that they provide understanding of their workings (epistemic aim). Elaborating upon Illari’s ‘integration’ account, I argue that causal role function discovery of mechanisms and their components is an epistemic prerequisite for achieving these two aims. (...) This analysis extends Illari’s account in important ways, putting more pressure on ontic readings of mechanistic explanation and providing an answer to the question how ontic and epistemic constraints on mechanistic explanation are related. I argue these point in terms of cases on memory research drawn from neuroscience and research on extinct neurogenetic mechanisms from early nervous systems biology. (shrink)

Analysis of the adequacy of engineering design methods, as well as analysis of the utility of concepts of function often invoked in these methods, is a neglected topic in both philosophy of technology and in engineering proper. In this paper, I present an approach—dubbed an explanationist perspective—for assessing the adequacy of function-based design methods. Engineering design is often intertwined with explanation, for instance, in reverse engineering and subsequent redesign, knowledge base-assisted designing, and diagnostic reasoning. I argue that the presented approach (...) is useful for validating function-based design methods with respect to their explanatory elements and that it supports assessment of the explanatory and design utility of “function”, and the different conceptualizations thereof, as used in such engineering design methods. I deploy two key desiderata from the explanation literature to assess the viability of function-based design methods: explanatorily relevant difference-making factors and counterfactual understanding defined in terms of what-if-things-had-been-different questions. I explicate the approach and its merits in terms of two case studies drawn from the engineering functional modeling literature: reverse engineering and redesign and malfunction analysis. I close the paper by discussing ramifications of the presented approach for the philosophy of design and the philosophy of explanation. (shrink)