Download or read book Essays in the History and Philosophy of Science written by Pierre Duhem and published by Hackett Publishing. This book was released on 1996-01-01 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here, for the first time in English, are the philosophical essays - including the first statement of the "Duhem Thesis" - that formed the basis for Aim and Structure of Physical Theory, together with new translations of the historiographical essays presenting the equally celebrated "Continuity Thesis" by Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), a founding figure of the history and philosophy of science. Prefaced by an introduction on Duhem's intellectual development and continuing significance, here as well are important subsequent essays in which Duhem elaborated key concepts and critiqued such contemporaries as Henri Poincare and Ernst Mach. Together, these works offer a lively picture of the state of science at the turn of the century while addressing methodological issues that remain at the center of debate today."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Trees of Life written by P.E. Griffiths and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 1992-05-31 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains papers presented by New Zealand and American philosophers of biology during a recent visit to New Zealand by Elliott Sober. Some of the papers reveal a unique local perspective on current debates. Robin Craw's highly original contribution to the `evolutionary' philosophy of science initiated by David Hull, applies to intellectual evolution the strongly biogeographic approach to the evolution of life that is a recognised New Zealand speciality. Other papers reflect past intellectual exchange between the two countries. Susan Oyama and Russell Gray's papers on the `developmental systems' approach to evolution, for example, are the outcome of several years of fruitful exchange. The remaining papers in the volume cover a wide range of topics. In addition to Sober's own discussion of post-sociobiological treatments of cultural evolution the volume includes Kim Sterelny's evaluation of `macroevolution', Paul Griffiths' analysis of adaptation and vestigiality, John Morss on the notion of ontogeny and Timothy Shanahan on the concept of drift.
Download or read book Inference Explanation and Other Frustrations written by John Earman and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1992-01-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These provocative essays by leading philosophers of science exemplify and illuminate the contemporary uncertainty and excitement in this changing field. The papers are rich in new perspectives, and their far-reaching criticisms challenge arguments long prevalent in classic philosophical problems of induction, empiricism, and realism. By turns empirical or analytic, historical or programmatic, confessional or argumentative, the authors' arguments both describe and demonstrate the fact that philosophy of science is in a ferment more intense than at any time since the heyday of logical positivism seventy years ago.
Download or read book Reading Natural Philosophy written by David B. Malament and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 2002 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, 13 leading philosophers of science focus on the work of Professor Howard Stein, best known for his study of the intimate connection between philosophy and natural science. Also included is a comprehensive bibliography of Howard Stein's writings.
Download or read book Essays on Galileo and the History and Philosophy of Science written by Stillman Drake and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 1999-01-01 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 3 volume collection includes 80 of the 130 papers published by Drake, most on Galileo but some on medieval and early modern science in general (principally mechanics). An essential supplement to Drake's translations and other books.
Download or read book Integrating History and Philosophy of Science written by Seymour Mauskopf and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-09-06 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though the publication of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions seemed to herald the advent of a unified study of the history and philosophy of science, it is a hard fact that history of science and philosophy of science have increasingly grown apart. Recently, however, there has been a series of workshops on both sides of the Atlantic (called '&HPS') intended to bring historians and philosophers of science together to discuss new integrative approaches. This is therefore an especially appropriate time to explore the problems with and prospects for integrating history and philosophy of science. The original essays in this volume, all from specialists in the history of science or philosophy of science, offer such an exploration from a wide variety of perspectives. The volume combines general reflections on the current state of history and philosophy of science with studies of the relation between the two disciplines in specific historical and scientific cases.
Download or read book The Light of Nature written by J.D. North and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 462 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of essays is meant as a tribute to Alistair Crombie by some of those who have studied with him. The occasion of its publication is his seven tieth birthday - 4 November 1985. Its contents are a reflection - or so it is hoped - of his own interests, and they indicate at the same time his influence on subjects he has pursued for some forty years. Born in Brisbane, Australia, Alistair Cameron Crombie took a first degree in zoology at the University of Melbourne in 1938, after which he moved to Je sus College, Cambridge. There he took a doctorate in the same subject (with a dissertation on population dynamics - foreshadowing a later interest in the history of Darwinism) in 1942. By this time he had taken up a research position with the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries in the Cambridge Zoological La boratory, a position he left in 1946, when he moved to a lectureship in the his tory and philosophy of science at University College, London. H. G. Andrewa ka and L. C. Birch, in a survey of the history of insect ecology (R. F. Smith, et al. , History of Entomology, 1973), recognise the importance of the works of Crombie (with which they couple the earlier work of Gause) as the principal sti mulus for the great interest taken in interspecific competition in the mid 194Os.
Download or read book Particles and Waves written by Peter Achinstein and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1991 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume brings together six published and two new essays by the noted philosopher of science, Peter Achinstein. It represents the culmination of his examination of methodological issues that arise in nineteenth-century physics. He focuses on the philosophical problem of how, if at all, it is possible to confirm scientific hypotheses that postulate 'unobservables' such as light waves, molecules, and electrons. This question is one that not only was of great interest to nineteenth-century physicists and methodologists, but continues to occupy philosophers of science up to the present day. The essays in this volume deal with this vexing problem as it arose in actual scientific practice in three nineteenth-century episodes: the debate between particle and wave theorists of light, Maxwell's kinetic theory of gases, and J.J. Thomson's discovery of the electron. Achinstein shows that the most important issue raised by these three cases concerns the legitimacy of introducing hypotheses that invoke "unobservables". If science is to be empirical, can such hypotheses be employed? How, if at all, is it possible to confirm them?; Achinstein here assesses the philosophical validity of nineteenth-century and modern answers to these questions and presents and defends his own solutions
Download or read book Essays in Philosophy and Its History written by Wilfrid Sellars and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In pulling these essays together for inclusion in one volume I do not believe that I have done them violence. Since they originally appeared at different times and places they constitute a scattered object. Never theless, to the author's eye they have unities of theme and development which, if they fail to give them the true identity of the book, may (to adapt a metaphor from Hume) generate those smooth and easy transi tions of the imagination which arouse dispositions appropriate to sur veying such identical objects. For the juxtaposition of historical and systematic studies I make no apology. It has been suggested, with a friendly touch of malice, that if Science and Metaphysics consists, as its subtitle proclaims, of Variations on Kantian Themes, it would be no less accurate to sub-title my historical essays 'variations on Sellars ian themes'. But this is as it should be. Phi losophy is a continuing dialogue with one's contemporaries, living and dead, and if one fails to see oneself in one's respondent and one's re spondent in oneself, there is confrontation but no dialogue. The historian, as Collingwood points out, becomes Caesar's contemporary by learning to think Caesar's thoughts. And it is because Plato thought so many of our thoughts that he is our contemporary and companion.
Download or read book Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science written by Matthew H. Slater and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of new essays, written by leading philosophers of science, explores a broadly methodological question: what role should metaphysics play in our philosophizing about science? The essays address this question both through ground-level investigations of particular issues in the metaphysics of science and by more general methodological investigations.
Download or read book Science in Print written by Rima D. Apple and published by University of Wisconsin Pres. This book was released on 2012-09-25 with total page 253 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since the threads of seventeenth-century natural philosophy began to coalesce into an understanding of the natural world, printed artifacts such as laboratory notebooks, research journals, college textbooks, and popular paperbacks have been instrumental to the development of what we think of today as “science.” But just as the history of science involves more than recording discoveries, so too does the study of print culture extend beyond the mere cataloguing of books. In both disciplines, researchers attempt to comprehend how social structures of power, reputation, and meaning permeate both the written record and the intellectual scaffolding through which scientific debate takes place. Science in Print brings together scholars from the fields of print culture, environmental history, science and technology studies, medical history, and library and information studies. This ambitious volume paints a rich picture of those tools and techniques of printing, publishing, and reading that shaped the ideas and practices that grew into modern science, from the days of the Royal Society of London in the late 1600s to the beginning of the modern U.S. environmental movement in the early 1960s.
Download or read book The Genealogy of Knowledge written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-12-20 with total page 427 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1997, this volume expands the analytical philosophical tradition in the face of parochial Anglo-American philosophical interests. The essays making up the section on ‘Antiquity’ share one concern: to show that there are largely unrecognised but radical differences between the way in which certain fundamental questions – concerning the nature of number, sense perception, and scepticism – were thought of in antiquity and the way in which they were thought of from the 17th century onwards. Part 2, on early modern thought, explores the theoretical characterisation of the role of experiment in early modern physical theory through Galileo’s embracing of experiments, along with Descartes’ automata and issues in a relatively neglected but especially intractable part of Descartes’ philosophy: how he conceives of what a successful inference consists in and what it is that makes it successful. The final section deals with the philosophical foundations of physical theory, the distinction between the human and the natural sciences, the philosophical-cum-scientific foundations of Marx’s idea of socialism, and Nietzche’s criticisms of the very notion of science, concluding that Nietzsche’s probing questions cannot be dismissed, as he has opened up some genuinely challenging issues which we ignore at our peril.
Download or read book Physics Philosophy and Psychoanalysis written by Robert S. Cohen and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To celebrate Adolf Griinbaum's sixtieth birthday by offering him this bouquet of essays written for this purpose was the happy task of an autonomous Editorial Committee: Wesley C. Salmon, Nicholas Rescher, Larry Laudan, Carl G. Hempel, and Robert S. Cohen. To present the book within the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science was altogether fitting and natural, for Griinbaum has' been friend and supporter of philosophy of science at Boston University for twenty-five years, and unofficial godfather to the Boston Colloquium. To regret that we could not include contributions from all his well-wishers, critical admirers and admiring critics, is only to regret that we did not have an encyclopedic space at the committee's disposal. But we, and all involved in this book, speak for all the others in the philo sophical, scientific, and personal worlds of Adolf Griinbaum in greeting him on May 15, 1983, with our wishes for his health, his scholarship, his happiness. Our gratitude is due to Carolyn Fawcett for her care and accuracy in editing this book, and for the preparation of the Index; and to Elizabeth McMunn for her help again and again, especially in preparation of the Bibliography of the Published Writings of Adolf Griinbaum; and to Thelma Griinbaum for encouraging, planning, and cheering. Boston University R.S.C. Center for the Philosophy and History of Science M.W.W.
Download or read book Apologia Pro Tychone Contra Ursum written by Nicholas Jardine and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1988-02-18 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nicholas Jardine offers here an edition and the first translation into English of Johannes Kepler's A Defence of Tycho against Ursus. He accompanies this with essays on the provenance of the treatise - the circumstances which provoked Kepler to write it, an analysis of its strategy, style and historical sources and of the contents of Ursus' Treatise on Astronomical Hypotheses to which Kepler was replying. Dr Jardine also provides three extended interpretive essays on the intrinsic interest and historical significance of the work.
Download or read book Science and Selection written by David L. Hull and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One way to understand science is as a selection process. David Hull, one of the dominant figures in contemporary philosophy of science, sets out in this 2001 volume a general analysis of this selection process that applies equally to biological evolution, the reaction of the immune system to antigens, operant learning, and social and conceptual change in science. Hull aims to distinguish between those characteristics that are contingent features of selection and those that are essential. Science and Selection brings together many of David Hull's most important essays on selection (some never before published) in one accessible volume.
Download or read book The Nature and Function of Scientific Theories written by Robert G. Colodny and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-11-23 with total page 378 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The six essays in this volume discuss philosophical thought on scientific theory including:a call for a realist, rather than instrumentalist interpretation of science; a critique of one of the core ideas of positivism concerning the relation between observational and theoretical languages; using aerodynamics to discuss the representational aspect of scientific theories and their isomorphic qualities; the relationship between the reliability of common sense and the authenticity of the world view of science; removing long-held ambiguities on the theory of inductive logic; and the relationship between the actuality of conceptual revolutions in the history of science and traditional philosophical pictures of scientific theory-building.
Download or read book Ethics and the History of Philosophy written by C.D. Broad and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-06-17 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
