The authors describe systematic methods for uncovering scientific laws a priori, on the basis of intuition, or "Gedanken Experiments". Mathematical expressions of scientific laws are, by convention, constrained by the rule that their form must be invariant with changes of the units of their variables. This constraint makes it possible to narrow down the possible forms of the laws. It is closely related to, but different from, dimensional analysis. It is a mathematical book, largely based on solving functional equations. In fact, one chapter is an introduction to the theory of functional equations.

The book examines the emerging approach of using qualitative methods, such as interviews and field observations, in the philosophy of science. Qualitative methods are gaining popularity among philosophers of science as more and more scholars are resorting to empirical work in their study of scientific practices. At the same time, the results produced through empirical work are quite different from those gained through the kind of introspective conceptual analysis more typical of philosophy. This volume explores the benefits and challenges of an empirical philosophy of science and addresses questions such as: What do philosophers gain from empirical work? How can empirical research help to develop philosophical concepts? How do we integrate philosophical frameworks and empirical research? What constraints do we accept when choosing an empirical approach? What constraints does a pronounced theoretical focus impose on empirical work? Nine experts discuss their thoughts and empirical results in the chapters of this book with the aim of providing readers with an answer to these questions.

The essays and commentaries presented here are intended to strike a balance between the disciplines to which the Bar-Hillel Colloquium (formerly the Israel Colloquium) is dedicated. The historical and sociological vantage point is addressed in Krammick's and Mali's treatment of Priestley, in Vicker's and Feldhay's studies of the Renaissance occult and in Warnke's and Barasch's work on the imagination. From a philosophical angle several concepts, all material to the methodology of science, are taken up: rule following, by Smart and Margalit; analysis, by Ackerman, explanation, by Taylor; and the role of mathematics in physics, by Levy-Leblond and Pitowsky. In addition, the volume contains the proceedings of two symposia dedicated to two towering scientific figures: one celebrates Bohr's centennial, and the other examines the "other" Newton. The book should appeal to people whose interest or research is in the fields of philosophy, sociology and history of science, technology and medicine, as well as those interested in science education.

The fifth volume of the collected works of Professor M.A.K. Halliday, The Language of Science, explores the semantic character of scientific discourse. The chapters are organized into two sections, one being on grammatical metaphor; the other dealing with scientific English. In language, there exists the potential for constructing new discourses, among them scientific discourse. The volume opens with a new work from Professor Halliday addressing the question, How big is a language? It is a question that goes to the heart of the paradigmatic complexity, or meaning potential, that characterizes language.

"The Emerging Religion of Science" is a broad and erudite examination of the individual's place in the modern world. What can we believe today that will not betray us tomorrow? the author asks. Religion is losing influence. But the scientist, who explores the laws of nature, may be the modern guide to meaning. The mathematical equations of science have become unifying elements of the world as we know it. The author explores ways to face today's problems within the context of good and evil, freedom and restraint, probability and certainty, the real and the illusory, and the concept of self. He offers the view that, thought the paths we take may be different, we are all searching for the same thing: a thread on which the beads of experience and education can be strung.

This is a translation of work which first appeared in 1816 in Germany. Although Schopenhauer himself acknowledged that the treatise did not present any new and significant doctrines to his philosophy, he nonetheless considered it important enough to publish it again in revised form toward the end of his life, in 1854. As Professor Cartwright argues in his introduction, the book's philosophical value is to be found in the means it provides for increasing our understanding of Schopenhauer's philosophy, both in terms of its method and meaning. Not only does this book aim to offer insight into the younger Schopenhauer, it is also a significant document in the history of optics and colour theory.

This book presents a collection of authoritative contributions on the concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy. It is structured in the form of a thematic atlas: each section is accompanied by relevant elementary logic maps that reproduce in a "spatial" form the directionalities (arguments and/or discourses) reported on in the text. The book is divided into three main sections, the first of which covers phenomenology and the perception of time by analyzing the works of Bergson, Husserl, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Guattari and Derrida. The second section focuses on the language and conceptualization of time, examining the works of Cassirer, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Lacan, Ricoeur and Foucault, while the last section addresses the science and logic of time as they appear in the works of Guillaume, Einstein, Reichenbach, Prigogine and Barbour. The purpose of the book is threefold: to provide readers with a comprehensive overview of the concept of time in early twentieth-century philosophy; to show how conceptual reasoning can be supported by accompanying linguistic and spatial representations; and to stimulate novel research in the humanistic field concerning the complex role of graphic representations in the comprehension of concepts.

This book systematically creates a general descriptive theory of scientific change that explains the mechanics of changes in both scientific theories and the methods of their assessment. It was once believed that, while scientific theories change through time, their change itself is governed by a fixed method of science. Nowadays we know that there is no such thing as an unchangeable method of science; the criteria employed by scientists in theory evaluation also change through time. But if that is so, how and why do theories and methods change? Are there any general laws that govern this process, or is the choice of theories and methods completely arbitrary and random? Contrary to the widespread opinion, the book argues that scientific change is indeed a law-governed process and that there can be a general descriptive theory of scientific change. It does so by first presenting meta-theoretical issues, divided into chapters on the scope, possibility and assessment of theory of scientific change. It then builds a theory about the general laws that govern the process of scientific change, and goes into detail about the axioms and theorems of the theory.

Sudduth provides a critical exploration of classical empirical arguments for survival arguments that purport to show that data collected from ostensibly paranormal phenomena constitute good evidence for the survival of the self after death. Utilizing the conceptual tools of formal epistemology, he argues that classical arguments are unsuccessful.

This original work contains the first detailed account of the natural philosophy of Robert Hooke (1635-1703), leading figure of the early Royal Society. From celestial mechanics to microscopy, from optics to geology and biology, Hooke's contributions to the Scientific Revolution proved decisive. Focusing separately on partial aspects of Hooke's works, scholars have hitherto failed to see the unifying idea of the natural philosophy underlying them. Some of his unpublished papers have passed almost unnoticed. Hooke pursued the foundation of a real, mechanical and experimental philosophy, and this book is an attempt to reconstruct it. The book includes a selection of Hooke's unpublished papers. Readers will discover a study of the new science through the works of one of the most known protagonists. Challenging the current views on the scientific life of restoration England, this book sheds new light on the circulation of Baconian ideals and the mechanical philosophy in the early Royal Society. This book is a must-read to anybody interested in Hooke, early modern science or Restoration history.

Paul Abela presents a powerful, experience-sensitive form of realism about the relation between mind and world, based on an innovative interpretation of Kant. Abela breaks with tradition in taking seriously Kant's claim that his Transcendental Idealism yields a form of empirical realism, and giving a realist analysis of major themes of the Critique of Pure Reason. Abela's blending of Kantian scholarship with contemporary epistemology offers a new way of resolving philosophical debates about realism.

Disease is everywhere. Everyone experiences disease, everyone knows somebody who is, or has been diseased, and disease-related stories hit the headlines on a regular basis. Many important issues in the philosophy of disease, however, have received remarkably little attention from philosophical thinkers. This book examines a number of important debates in the philosophy of medicine, including 'what is disease?', and the roles and viability of concepts of causation, in clinical medicine and epidemiology. Where much of the existing literature targets conceptual analyses of health and disease, this book provides the reader with an insight into these debates, and develops plausible alternative accounts. The author explores a range of related subjects, discussing a host of interesting philosophical questions within clinical medicine, pathology and epidemiology. In the second part of the book, the author examines the concepts of causation employed by clinicians and pathologists, how one should classify diseases, and whether the epidemiologist's models for inferring the causes of disease are all they're cracked up to be.

Chapters "Turing and Free Will: A New Take on an Old Debate" and "Turing and the History of Computer Music" are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Scientific realism is at the core of the contemporary philosophical debate on science. This book analyzes new versions of scientific realism. It makes explicit the advantages of scientific realism over alternatives and antagonists, contributes to deciding which of the new approaches better meets the descriptive and the prescriptive criteria, and expands the philosophico-methodological field to take in new topics and disciplines.

Metaphysics has often held that laws of nature, if legitimate, must be time-independent. Yet mounting evidence from the foundations of science suggests that this constraint may be obsolete. This book provides arguments against this atemporality conjecture, which it locates both in metaphysics and in the philosophy of science, drawing on developments in a range of fields, from the foundations of physics to the philosophy of finance. It then seeks to excavate an alternative philosophical lineage which reconciles time-dependent laws with determinism, converging in the thought of Immanuel Kant.

This book offers a close and rigorous examination of the arguments for and against scientific realism and introduces key positions in the scientific realism/antirealism debate, which is one of the central debates in contemporary philosophy of science. On the one hand, scientific realists argue that we have good reasons to believe that our best scientific theories are approximately true because, if they were not even approximately true, they would not be able to explain and predict natural phenomena with such impressive accuracy. On the other hand, antirealists argue that the success of science does not warrant belief in the approximate truth of our best scientific theories. This is because the history of science is a graveyard of theories that were once successful but were later discarded. The author eventually settles on a middle-ground position between scientific realism and antirealism called "relative realism".

Interdisciplinarity has seemingly become a paradigm for modern and meaningful research. Clearly, the interdisciplinary modus of deliberation enables to unfold relevant but quite different disciplinary perspectives to the reflection of broader scientific questions or societal problems. However, whether the comprehensive results of interdisciplinary reflection prove to be valid or to be acceptable in trans-disciplinary terms depends upon certain preconditions, which have to be fulfilled for securing scientific quality and social trust in advisory contexts. The present book is written by experts and practitioners of interdisciplinary research and policy advice. It analyses topical and methodological approaches towards interdisciplinarity, starting with the current role of scientific research in society. The volume continues with contributions to the issues of knowledge and acting and to trans-disciplinary deliberation. The final conclusions address the scientific system as substantial actor itself as well as the relevant research and education politics.

This book explores the prospects of rivaling ontological and epistemic interpretations of quantum mechanics (QM). It concludes with a suggestion for how to interpret QM from an epistemological point of view and with a Kantian touch. It thus refines, extends, and combines existing approaches in a similar direction. The author first looks at current, hotly debated ontological interpretations. These include hidden variables-approaches, Bohmian mechanics, collapse interpretations, and the many worlds interpretation. He demonstrates why none of these ontological interpretations can claim to be the clear winner amongst its rivals. Next, coverage explores the possibility of interpreting QM in terms of knowledge but without the assumption of hidden variables. It examines QBism as well as Healey's pragmatist view. The author finds both interpretations or programs appealing, but still wanting in certain respects. As a result, he then goes on to advance a genuine proposal as to how to interpret QM from the perspective of an internal realism in the sense of Putnam and Kant. The book also includes two philosophical interludes. One details the notions of probability and realism. The other highlights the connections between the notions of locality, causality, and reality in the context of violations of Bell-type inequalities.

What would it mean to apply quantum theory, without restriction and without involving any notion of measurement and state reduction, to the whole universe? What would realism about the quantum state then imply? This book brings together an illustrious team of philosophers and physicists to debate these questions. The contributors broadly agree on the need, or aspiration, for a realist theory that unites micro- and macro-worlds. But they disagree on what this implies. Some argue that if unitary quantum evolution has unrestricted application, and if the quantum state is taken to be something physically real, then this universe emerges from the quantum state as one of countless others, constantly branching in time, all of which are real. The result, they argue, is many worlds quantum theory, also known as the Everett interpretation of quantum mechanics. No other realist interpretation of unitary quantum theory has ever been found. Others argue in reply that this picture of many worlds is in no sense inherent to quantum theory, or fails to make physical sense, or is scientifically inadequate. The stuff of these worlds, what they are made of, is never adequately explained, nor are the worlds precisely defined; ordinary ideas about time and identity over time are compromised; no satisfactory role or substitute for probability can be found in many worlds theories; they can't explain experimental data; anyway, there are attractive realist alternatives to many worlds. Twenty original essays, accompanied by commentaries and discussions, examine these claims and counterclaims in depth. They consider questions of ontology - the existence of worlds; probability - whether and how probability can be related to the branching structure of the quantum state; alternatives to many worlds - whether there are one-world realist interpretations of quantum theory that leave quantum dynamics unchanged; and open questions even given many worlds, including the multiverse concept as it has arisen elsewhere in modern cosmology. A comprehensive introduction lays out the main arguments of the book, which provides a state-of-the-art guide to many worlds quantum theory and its problems.

The cover of Lifeconscious helps to explain its topic in a nutshell. The background shows a cliff face that reveals the catastrophic boundary between two historical epochs. In this case the Valles Caldera super volcanic eruption 1.4 million years ago. The thin boundary line separating the two epochs is plainly visible and provides stark evidence that this is just one of many catastrophes of biblical proportions that life has had to overcome during our Earth's turbulent history. Lifeconscious will reveal how nature can generate New Species through assimilation and not through the tedious genetic mutations that evolution preaches. The inset picture of the Venus of Willendorf harks back to a time when Man was a hunter/gatherer and when Women were still regarded in high esteem as the mysterious providers of human life. Lifeconscious will demonstrate how life is an unending linear transference of species-specific memories from females to their unborn young. It will finally provide answers to the puzzling questions of What is instinct?, How are new species generated? and Why can't evolution explain the existence of living fossils?. novel light.

This book discusses how scientific and other types of cognition make use of models, abduction, and explanatory reasoning in order to produce important or creative changes in theories and concepts. It includes revised contributions presented during the international conference on Model-Based Reasoning (MBR'015), held on June 25-27 in Sestri Levante, Italy. The book is divided into three main parts, the first of which focuses on models, reasoning and representation. It highlights key theoretical concepts from an applied perspective, addressing issues concerning information visualization, experimental methods and design. The second part goes a step further, examining abduction, problem solving and reasoning. The respective contributions analyze different types of reasoning, discussing various concepts of inference and creativity and their relationship with experimental data. In turn, the third part reports on a number of historical, epistemological and technological issues. By analyzing possible contradictions in modern research and describing representative case studies in experimental research, this part aims at fostering new discussions and stimulating new ideas. All in all, the book provides researchers and graduate students in the field of applied philosophy, epistemology, cognitive science and artificial intelligence alike with an authoritative snapshot of current theories and applications of model-based reasoning.

The philosophy of computer science is concerned with issues that arise from reflection upon the nature and practice of the discipline of computer science. This book presents an approach to the subject that is centered upon the notion of computational artefact. It provides an analysis of the things of computer science as technical artefacts. Seeing them in this way enables the application of the analytical tools and concepts from the philosophy of technology to the technical artefacts of computer science. With this conceptual framework the author examines some of the central philosophical concerns of computer science including the foundations of semantics, the logical role of specification, the nature of correctness, computational ontology and abstraction, formal methods, computational epistemology and explanation, the methodology of computer science, and the nature of computation. The book will be of value to philosophers and computer scientists.

This book addresses the mathematical rationality contained in the making of string figures. It does so by using interdisciplinary methods borrowed from anthropology, mathematics, history and philosophy of mathematics. The practice of string figure-making has long been carried out in many societies, and particularly in those of oral tradition. It consists in applying a succession of operations to a string (knotted into a loop), mostly using the fingers and sometimes the feet, the wrists or the mouth. This succession of operations is intended to generate a final figure. The book explores different modes of conceptualization of the practice of string figure-making and analyses various source material through these conceptual tools: it looks at research by mathematicians, as well as ethnographical publications, and personal fieldwork findings in the Chaco, Paraguay, and in the Trobriand Islands, Papua New Guinea, which all give evidence of the rationality that underlies this activity. It concludes that the creation of string figures may be seen as the result of intellectual processes, involving the elaboration of algorithms, and concepts such as operation, sub-procedure, iteration, and transformation.