Download or read book Philosophical Problems of Natural Science written by Dudley Shapere and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Nature of Philosophical Problems written by John Kekes and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical, context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.
Download or read book Philosophical Problems in Physical Science written by Herbert Hörz and published by . This book was released on 1980 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophical Problems of Space and Time written by Adolf Grünbaum and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 903 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is ten years since Adolf Griinbaum published the first edition of this book. It was promptly recognized to be one of the few major works in the philosophy of the natural sciences of this generation. In part, this is so because Griinbaum has chosen a problem basic both to philosophy and to the natural sciences - the nature of space and time; and in part, this is so because he so admirably exemplifies that Aristotelian devotion to the intimate and mutual dependence of actual science and philosophical understanding. More than this, however, the quality of his work derives from his achievement in combining detail with scope. The problems of space and time have been among the most difficult in contemporary and classical thought, and Griinbaum has been responsible to the full depth and complexity of these difficulties. This revised and enlarged second edition is a work in progress, in the tradition of reflective analysis of modern science of such figures as Ehrenfest and Reichenbach. In publishing this work among the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, we hope to contribute to and encourage that broad tradition of natural philosophy which is marked by the close collaboration of philoso phers and scientists. To this end, we have published the proceedings of our Colloquia, of meetings and conferences here and abroad, as well as the works of single authors.
Download or read book Philosophy of Science written by Alexander Bird and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 1998 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The third volume in McGill-Queen's University Press's Fundamentals of Philosophy series, Philosophy of Science is an engaging and accessible introduction to the main themes of contemporary philosophy of science. The book offers an indispensable grounding in the philosophical understanding of science and its problems.
Download or read book Open Problems in Philosophy of Sciences written by Pierluigi Graziani and published by . This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents philosophy of science at its best, i.e. as a philosophical questioning informed by current scientific research, which carefully assesses and evaluates its commitments and consequences. As such it represents philosophy simpliciter at its best, for it is concerned with and dares to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the results of the natural sciences, arguably our most reliable sources of knowledge of the world. The contributions collected in this volume make clear that a philosophy that is disconnected from science is sterile and that the practice of science that is disconnected from a philosophical attempt to understand the natural world in its most general features is blind. Throughout the book we are confronted with questions about the nature of species, numbers, space, time, matter, consciousness and so on. Taking seriously these questions, along with other open problems in philosophy of sciences, and keeping the dialogue between science and philosophy wide open, is likely to be our best bet for a deeper understanding of what surrounds us. The book has a further, deeply important merit. Being the result of a post-graduate conference, it brings together not only leading, long established experts in the field but also new, young researchers, who usually find too small a place within the academic environment. Promoting exactly this kind of interaction is an essential step in constructing a new paradigm for an open, collaborative and fruitful scientific community.
Download or read book Philosophy of Natural Science written by Carl Gustav Hempel and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1966 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores the logic and methodology of scientific inquiry rather than its substantive results.
Download or read book Time of Nature and the Nature of Time written by Christophe Bouton and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-05-30 with total page 403 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume addresses the question of time from the perspective of the time of nature. Its aim is to provide some insights about the nature of time on the basis of the different uses of the concept of time in natural sciences. Presenting a dialogue between philosophy and science, it features a collection of papers that investigate the representation, modeling and understanding of time as they appear in physics, biology, geology and paleontology. It asks questions such as: whether or not the notions of time in the various sciences are reducible to the same physical time, what status should be given to timescale differences, or what are the specific epistemic issues raised by past facts in natural sciences. The book first explores the experience of time and its relation to time in nature in a set of chapters that bring together what human experience and physics enable metaphysicians, logicians and scientists to say about time. Next, it studies time in physics, including some puzzling paradoxes about time raised by the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The volume then goes on to examine the distinctive problems and conceptions of time in the life sciences. It explores the concept of deep time in paleontology and geology, time in the epistemology of evolutionary biology, and time in developmental biology. Each scientific discipline features a specific approach to time and uses distinctive methodologies for implementing time in its models. This volume seeks to define a common language to conceive of the distinct ways different scientific disciplines view time. In the process, it offers a new approach to the issue of time that will appeal to a wide range of readers: philosophers and historians of science, metaphysicians and natural scientists - be they scholars, advanced students or readers from an educated general audience.
Download or read book Philosophy of Science written by Alex Rosenberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This user-friendly text covers key issues in the philosophy of science in an accessible and philosophically serious way. It will prove valuable to students studying philosophy of science as well as science students. Prize-winning author Alex Rosenberg explores the philosophical problems that science raises by its very nature and method. He skilfully demonstrates that scientific explanation, laws, causation, theory, models, evidence, reductionism, probability, teleology, realism and instrumentalism actually pose the same questions that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant and their successors have grappled with for centuries.
Download or read book A History of Natural Philosophy written by Edward Grant and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-29 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes how natural philosophy and exact mathematical sciences joined together to make the Scientific Revolution possible.
Download or read book Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems written by Ludwig Boltzmann and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: l. The work of Ludwig Boltzmann (1844-1906) consists of two kinds of writings: in the first part of his active life he devoted himself entirely to problems of physics, while in the second part he tried to find a philosoph 1 ical background for his activities in and around the natural sciences. Most scientists are much more aware of his creative work in physics than of his digressions on the meaning and structure of science. I think in the present case the reason is not so much that most scientists are usually almost entirely occupied with their trade, because Boltzmann's philosophical work is also concerned with the (natural) sciences. I rather believe that the quality and consistency of Boltzmann's purely scientific work is of a more appealing nature than his less structured considerations on human activity in science and in life in general. 2. I think that it may be appropriate for the readers of this anthology to say a few words on the main findings of Boltzmann in physics, since in the end their 'philosophical' inlpact has been larger than the effect of his later writings. Moreover some knowledge of his scientific achievements can be helpful for the understanding and appreciation of the essays printed in this book, which almost all stem from Boltzmann's philosophical period. Boltzmann was one of the main protagonists - at least in continental Europe - of atomistics for explaining the phenomena of physics.
Download or read book Philosophy of Science written by Samir Okasha and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In this new edition Samir Ikasha reviews the main themes of contemporary philosophy of science. Beginning with a brief account of the history of modern science, he asks whether there is a discernible pattern to the way scientific ideas change over time. He examines scientific inference, scientific explanation, and the debate between realist and anti-realist views of science."--
Download or read book The Laboratory of the Mind written by James Robert Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2005-09-26 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thought experiments are performed in the laboratory of the mind. Beyond this metaphor it is difficult to say just what these remarkable devices for investigating nature are or how they work. Though most scientists and philosophers would admit their great importance, there has been very little serious study of them. This volume is the first book-length investigation of thought experiments. Starting with Galileo's argument on falling bodies, Brown describes numerous examples of the most influential thought experiments from the history of science. Following this introduction to the subject, some substantial and provocative claims are made, the principle being that some thought experiments should be understood in the same way that platonists understand mathematical activity: as an intellectual grasp of an independently existing abstract realm. With its clarity of style and structure, The Laboratory of the Mind will find readers among all philosophers of science as well as scientists who have puzzled over how thought experiments work.
Download or read book Representing and Intervening written by Ian Hacking and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1983-10-20 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1983 book is a lively and clearly written introduction to the philosophy of natural science, organized around the central theme of scientific realism. It has two parts. 'Representing' deals with the different philosophical accounts of scientific objectivity and the reality of scientific entities. The views of Kuhn, Feyerabend, Lakatos, Putnam, van Fraassen, and others, are all considered. 'Intervening' presents the first sustained treatment of experimental science for many years and uses it to give a new direction to debates about realism. Hacking illustrates how experimentation often has a life independent of theory. He argues that although the philosophical problems of scientific realism can not be resolved when put in terms of theory alone, a sound philosophy of experiment provides compelling grounds for a realistic attitude. A great many scientific examples are described in both parts of the book, which also includes lucid expositions of recent high energy physics and a remarkable chapter on the microscope in cell biology.
Download or read book Philosophy of Science in Practice written by Hsiang-Ke Chao and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-27 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume reflects the ‘philosophy of science in practice’ approach and takes a fresh look at traditional philosophical problems in the context of natural, social, and health research. Inspired by the work of Nancy Cartwright that shows how the practices and apparatuses of science help us to understand science and to build theories in the philosophy of science, this volume critically examines the philosophical concepts of evidence, laws, causation, and models and their roles in the process of scientific reasoning. Each chapter is an important one in the philosophy of science, while the volume as a whole deals with these philosophical concepts in a unified way in the context of actual scientific practice. This volume thus aims to contribute to this new direction in the philosophy of science.
Download or read book The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy 1637 1739 written by Kenneth Clatterbaugh and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-04-23 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy examines the debate that began as modern science separated itself from natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The book specifically explores the two dominant approaches to causation as a metaphysical problem and as a scientific problem.
Download or read book The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century written by Peter R. Anstey and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2006-06-28 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the hallmarks of the modern world has been the stunning rise of the natural sciences. The exponential expansion of scientific knowledge and the accompanying technology that so impact on our daily lives are truly remarkable. But what is often taken for granted is the enviable epistemic-credit rating of scientific knowledge: science is authoritative, science inspires confidence, science is right. Yet it has not always been so. In the seventeenth century the situation was markedly different: competing sources of authority, shifting disciplinary boundaries, emerging modes of experimental practice and methodological reflection were some of the constituents in a quite different mélange in which knowledge of nature was by no means p- eminent. It was the desire to probe the underlying causes of the shift from the early modern ‘nature-knowledge’ to modern science that was one of the stimuli for the ‘Origins of Modernity: Early Modern Thought 1543–1789’ conference held in Sydney in July 2002. How and why did modern science emerge from its early modern roots to the dominant position which it enjoys in today’s post-modern world? Under the auspices of the International Society for Intellectual History, The University of New South Wales and The University of Sydney, a group of historians and philosophers of science gathered to discuss this issue. However, it soon became clear that a prior question needed to be settled first: the question as to the precise nature of the quest for knowledge of the natural realm in the seventeenth century.
