Alexander Rosenberg - Research and Scholarship

Research and Scholarship

His early work focused on the philosophy of social science and especially the philosophy of economics. His doctoral dissertation, published as Microeconomic Laws in 1976, was the first treatment of the nature of economics by a contemporary philosopher of science. Over the period of the next decade he became increasingly skeptical about neoclassical economics as an empirical theory.

Rosenberg later shifted to work on issues in the philosophy of science that are raised by biology. He became especially interested in the relationship between molecular biology and other parts of biology. Rosenberg introduced the concept of supervenience to the treatment of intertheoretical relations in biology, soon after Donald Davidson began to exploit Richard Hare's notion in the philosophy of psychology. Rosenberg is among the few biologists and fewer philosophers of science who reject the consensus view that combines physicalism with antireductionism (see his 2010 on-line debate with John Dupré at Philosophy TV).

Rosenberg also coauthored an influential book on David Hume with Tom Beauchamp, Hume and the Problem of Causation, arguing that Hume was not a skeptic about induction but an opponent of rationalist theories of inductive inference.

Rosenberg's interests in social science and biology led him to write a series of papers on the bearing of differences in biological endowment on equality, the treatment of intellectual property rights in biotechnological discoveries, and the arguments advanced in the 1990s for sequencing the human genome.

In 2009 Rosenberg participated in on-line debates about economics prompted by the 2008 recession and by Paul Krugman's assessment of economic theory's response to it.