This monograph is unique in its kind, giving as it does an independent and self-contained introduction to the eight prominent verisimilitude proposals that make up the verisimilitude literature after the breakdown of Popper's definition in 1974. The author brings them together by comparing the ways in which they order propositional formulae. Using this method, he shows that the distinction of content and likeness definitions partitions the entire field of investigation. In addition, it is shown that the weak content definitions can be strengthened by incorporating considerations of similarity between possible worlds. The resulting refined verisimilitude definition has many desirable properties. For instance, it is the first qualitative proposal that evades the problem of truth-value dependence. In addition, in chapter five the often discussed and misunderstood problem of "language dependency" is solved. The book will be of interest to those working in the fields of logic, epistemology, philosophy of science, and (computational) linguistics.

This is a concise introductory textbook for a one semester course in the history and philosophy of mathematics. It is written for mathematics majors, philosophy students, history of science students and secondary school mathematics teachers. The only prerequisite is a solid command of pre-calculus mathematics. It is shorter than the standard textbooks in that area and thus more accessible to students who have trouble coping with vast amounts of reading. Furthermore, there are many detailed explanations of the important mathematical procedures actually used by famous mathematicians, giving more mathematically talented students a greater opportunity to learn the history and philosophy by way of problem solving. Several important philosophical topics are pursued throughout the text, giving the student an opportunity to come to a full and consistent knowledge of their development. These topics include infinity, the nature of motion, and Platonism. This book offers, in fewer pages, a deep penetration into the key mathematical and philosophical aspects of the history of mathematics.

The Economics of Scientific Knowledge demonstrates how contemporary economic theories, such as rational choice theory, public choice theory, game theory, and neo-institutionalist economics can be successfully applied to resolve the issues currently existing in science studies and science and technology policy. Yanfei Shi criticizes the sociology of scientific knowledge and the traditional philosophy of science for their failures in justifying science as a rational enterprise. From an economic perspective, he explains why scientific enterprise as a public good is possible if individual scientists are self-interested and presents a new and convincing story of how scientific knowledge is produced in the contemporary society. With professional experience as a policy analyst, Yanfei Shi's economic perspective on scientists and their behaviors, and his institutional analysis will have great implications to the current discussions on science and innovation policy issues. Scholars and students in the fields of economics, philosophy and sociology as well as scientists, administrators and policy analysts will find this book a welcome addition to the literature of the increasingly important field of science studies.

This volume, honoring the renowned historian of science, Allen G Debus, explores ideas of science - experiences of nature' - from within a historiographical tradition that Debus has done much to define. As his work shows, the sciences do not develop exclusively as a result of a progressive and inexorable logic of discovery. A wide variety of extra-scientific factors, deriving from changing intellectual contexts and differing social millieus, play crucial roles in the overall development of scientific thought. These essays represent case studies in a broad range of scientific settings - from sixteenth-century astronomy and medicine, through nineteenth-century biology and mathematics, to the social sciences in the twentieth-century - that show the impact of both social settings and the cross-fertilization of ideas on the formation of science. Aimed at a general audience interested in the history of science, this book closes with Debus's personal perspective on the development of the field. Audience: This book will appeal especially to historians of science, of chemistry, and of medicine.

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.

This book explores the complexity of two philosophical traditions, extending from their origins to the current developments in neopragmatism. Chapters deal with the first encounters of these traditions and beyond, looking at metaphysics and the Vienna circle as well as semantics and the principle of tolerance. There is a general consensus that North-American (neo-)pragmatism and European Logical Empiricism were converging philosophical traditions, especially after the forced migration of the European Philosophers. But readers will discover a pluralist image of this relation and interaction with an obvious family resemblance. This work clarifies and specifies the common features and differences of these currents since the beginning of their mutual scientific communication in the 19th century. The book draws on collaboration between authors and philosophers from Vienna, Tubingen, and Helsinki, and their networks. It will appeal to philosophers, scholars in the history of philosophy, philosophers of science, pragmatists and beyond.

This volume is presented in honour of Heinz Post, who founded a distinc tive and distinguished school of philosophy of science at Chelsea College, University of London. The 'Chelsea tradition' in philosophy of science takes the content of science seriously, as exemplified by the papers presented here. The unifying theme of this work is that of 'Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics', after the title of a classic and seminal paper by Heinz Post, published in 1971, which is reproduced in this volume with the kind permission of the editors and publishers of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science. Described by Paul Feyerabend in Against Method as "brilliant" and " . . . a partial antidote against the view which I try to defend" (1975, p. 61, fn. 17), this paper, peppered with illustrative examples from the history of science, brings to the fore some of Heinz Post's central concerns: the heuristic criteria used by scientists in constructing their theories, the intertheoretic relationships which these criteria reflect and, in particular, the nature of the correspondence that holds between a theory and its predecessors (and its suc cessors). The appearance of this volume more than twenty years later is an indica tion of the fruitfulness of Post's contribution: philosophers of science continue to explore the issues raised in his 1971 paper."

Aristotle's "Meterology Book 4" provides an account of the formation of minerals, metals and other homogeneous stuffs. In doing so, this text argues, it offers us fresh and important insights into Aristotle's conception of matter. The 15,000 pages of the ancient Greek commentators on Aristotle, written mainly between 200 and 600 AD, constitute the largest corpus of extant Greek philosophical writing not translated into English or other European languages. This is a new series of translations, planned in 60 volumes which fills an important gap in the history of European thought.

The larger project of which this volume forms part is an attempt to craft a coherent doctrine of divine eternity and God's relationship to time. Central to this project is the integration of the concerns of theology with the concept of time in relativity theory. This volume provides an accessible and philosophically informed examination of the concept of time in relativity, the ultimate aim being the achievement of a tenable theological synthesis.

A compact survey, at the elementary level, of some of the most important concepts of mathematics. Attention is paid to their technical features, historical development and broader philosophical significance. Each of the various branches of mathematics is discussed separately, but their interdependence is emphasised throughout. Certain topics - such as Greek mathematics, abstract algebra, set theory, geometry and the philosophy of mathematics - are discussed in detail. Appendices outline from scratch the proofs of two of the most celebrated limitative results of mathematics: the insolubility of the problem of doubling the cube and trisecting an arbitrary angle, and the GAdel incompleteness theorems. Additional appendices contain brief accounts of smooth infinitesimal analysis - a new approach to the use of infinitesimals in the calculus - and of the philosophical thought of the great 20th century mathematician Hermann Weyl. Readership: Students and teachers of mathematics, science and philosophy. The greater part of the book can be read and enjoyed by anyone possessing a good high school mathematics background.

Philanthropies funded by the Rockefeller family have been prominent in the social history of the twentieth century for their involvement in medicine and applied science. This book provides the first detailed study of their relatively brief but nonetheless influential foray into the field of mathematics. The careers of a generation of pathbreakers in modern mathematics, such as S.Banach, B.L.van der Waerden and Andre Weil, were decisively affected by their becoming fellows of the Rockefeller-funded International Education Board in the 1920s. To help promote cooperation between physics and mathematics Rockefeller funds supported the erection of the new Mathematical Institute in Gottingen between 1926 and 1929, while the rise of probability and mathematical statistics owes much to the creation of the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris by American philanthropy at about the same time. This account draws upon the documented evaluation processes behind these personal and institutional involvements of philanthropies. It not only sheds light on important events in the history of mathematics and physics of the 20th century but also analyzes the comparative developments of mathematics in Europe and the United States. Several of the documents are given in their entirety as significant witnesses to the gradual shift of the centre of world mathematics to the USA. This shift was strengthened by the Nazi purge of German and European mathematics after 1933 to which the Rockefeller Foundation reacted with emergency programs that subsequently contributed to the American war effort. The general historical and political background of the events discussed in this book is the mixture of competition and cooperation between the various European countries and the USA after World War I, and the consequences of the Nazi dictatorship after 1933. Ideological positions of both the philanthropists and mathematicians mattered heavily in that process. Cultural bias in the selection of fellows and of disciplines supported, and the economic predominance of American philanthropy, led among other things to a restriction of the programs to Europe and America, to an uneven consideration of European candidates, and to preferences for Americans. Political self-isolation of the Soviet Union contributed to an increasing alienation of that important mathematical culture from Western mathematics. By focussing on a number of national cultures the investigation aims to represent a step toward a true inter-cultural comparison in mathematics."

Normativity has long been conceived as more properly pertaining to the domain of thought than to the domain of nature. This conception goes back to Kant and still figures prominently in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of mind and ethics. By offering a collection of new essays by leading scholars in early modern philosophy and specialists in contemporary philosophy, this volume goes beyond the point where nature and normativity came apart, and challenges the well-established opposition between these all too neatly separated realms. It examines how the mind's embeddedness in nature can be conceived as a starting point for uncovering the links between naturally and conventionally determined standards governing an agent's epistemic and moral engagement with the world. The original essays are grouped in two parts. The first part focuses on specific aspects of theories of perception, thought formation and judgment. It gestures towards an account of normativity that regards linguistic conventions and natural constraints as jointly setting the scene for the mind's ability to conceptualise its experiences. The second part of the book asks what the norms of desirable epistemic and moral practices are. Key to this approach is an examination of human beings as parts of nature, who act as natural causes and are determined by their sensibilities and sentiments. Each part concludes with a chapter that integrates features of the historical debate into the contemporary context.

Were one to characterize the aims of this book ambitiously, it could be said to sketch the philosophical foundations or underpinnings of the scientific world view or, better, of the scientific conception of the world. In any case, it develops a comprehensive philosophical view, one which takes science seri ously as the best method for getting to know the ontological aspects of the world. This view is a kind of scientific realism - causal internal realism, as it is dubbed in the book. This brand of realism is "tough" in matters of ontology but "soft" in matters of semantics and epistemology. An ancestor of the book was published in Finnish under the title Tiede, toiminta ja todellisuus (Gaudeamus, 1983). That book is a shortish undergraduate-level monograph. However, as some research-level chapters have been added, the present book is perhaps best regarded as suited for more advanced readers. I completed the book while my stay at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as a Visiting Professor under the Exchange Program between the Universities of Wisconsin and Helsinki. I gratefully acknowledge this support. I also wish to thank Juhani Saalo and Martti Kuokkanen for comments on the manuscript and for editorial help. Dr Matti Sintonen translated the Finnish ancestor of this book into English, to be used as a partial basis for this work. His translation was supported by a grant from Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden edistamisvarat. Finally, and as usual, I wish to thank Mrs."

Thisbook explores the meaning and import of neurophenomenology and the philosophy of enactive or embodied cognition for psychology. It introduces the psychologist to an experiential, non-reductive, holistic, theoretical, and practical framework that integrates the approaches of natural and human science to consciousness. In integrating phenomenology with cognitive science, neurophenomenology provides a bridge between the natural and human sciences that opens an interdisciplinary dialogue on the nature of awareness, the ontological primacy of experience, the perception of the observer, and the mind-brain relationship, which will shape the future of psychological theory, research, and practice.

The various efforts to develop a Marxist philosophy of science in the one time 'socialist' countries were casualties of the Cold War. Even those who were in no way Marxists, and those who were undogmatic in their Marxisms, now confront a new world. All the more harsh is it for those who worked within the framework imposed upon professional philosophy by the official ideology. Here in this book, we are concerned with some 31 colleagues from the late German Democratic Republic, representative in their scholarship of the achievements of a curiously creative while dismayingly repressive period. The literature published in the GDR was blossoming, certainly in the final decade, but it developed within a totalitarian regime where personal careers either advanced or faltered through the private protection or denunciation of mentors. We will never know how many good minds did not enter the field of philosophy in the first place due to their prudent judgments that there was a virtual requirement that the candidate join the Socialist Unity (i.e. Communist) Party. Among those who started careers and were sidetracked, the record is now beginning to be revealed; and for the rest, the price of 'doing philosophy' was mostly silence in the face of harassments the likes of which make academic politics in the West seem child's play."

The papers presented here derive from the 4th International Confe:--ence on History and Philosophy of Science held in Blacksburg, Virginia, U. S. A. , November 2-6, 1982. The Conference was sponsored by the I nternational Union of History and Philosophy of Science and Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech). Particular thanks go to L. Jonathan Cohen, Secretary of the Union, as well as to Dean Henry Bauer of the College of Arts & Sciences, Wilfred Jewkes and the Center for Programs in the Humanities, Arthur Donovan and the Center for the Study of Science in Society and the Department of Philoso- phy and Religion at Virginia Tech. Not only did they come through with the necessat"y funds, but they were all always ready with a helping hand when things got confusing. Two additional groups of individuals require a special note of thanks. First, considerable appreciation is due the mem- bers of the Joint Commission of the I nternational Union of History and Philosophy of Science: Maurice Crosland, Risto Hilpinen and Vladimir Kirsanov. They were more than gen- erous in thei r advice and co-operation. The Local Organizing Committee (Kenneth Alpern, Roger Ariew, Arthur Donovan, Larry Laudan, Ann La Berge, Duncan Porter, Eleonore Stump and Dennis Welch) not only demon- strated efficiency and insured a pleasant stay for' all participants, but also went out of their way on numerous occasions to make everyone feel at home.

The idea for this issue arose during a gathering of scholars to com memorate the hundredth anniversary of Moritz Schlick (1882-1936), the philosopher from Germany whose influence gave Austria its most characteristic philosophical voice between the two world wars. He was cut off, tragically, in his prime and while he escaped the exile that awaited most of those who thought like him, he was unable (sadly for philosophy) to continue to steer their thoughts in his own direction and he even lost some of the credit for work already done. Thus it seemed to some of his former pupils and to others more remote from him in the tra dition that a small collection of papers throwing light on his especial con tribution and on the extent to which it is still active or still needed today was a requirement of justice no less than of piety. Tscha Hung, a mem ber of the Vienna Circle and since director of the Institute for Western Philosophy at Peking University, was the chief mover here. Also among the contributors, Ludovico Geymonat (Professor at Milan) was a visitor to the Circle and a friend of Schlick. Henrich Melzer and Joseph Schlichter were Viennese pupils of Schlick's. The former died in the war of 1939-45, the latter is still prominent in the cultural and educational life of Israel."

Conversations on the Edge of Apocalypse is a collection of interviews with some of the leading thinkers of our time about the future of the human race, and the mystery of consciousness, from scientific, philosophical and spiritual perspectives. It explores such topics as the future evolution of technology and consciousness, the relationship between science and religion, ecology and human values, altered states of consciousness, the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life, psychic phenomena, life after death, and the fate of the human race. Included are contributions from Noam Chomsky,Deepak Chopra, George Carlin, Ram Dass and Rupert Sheldrake. Part scientific exploration and part philosophical speculation, Conversations on the Edge of Apocalypse is a valuable and entertaining resource for our species' survival.

This monograph investigates the development of hydrostatics as a science. In the process, it sheds new light on the nature of science and its origins in the Scientific Revolution. Readers will come to see that the history of hydrostatics reveals subtle ways in which the science of the seventeenth century differed from previous periods. The key, the author argues, is the new insights into the concept of pressure that emerged during the Scientific Revolution. This came about due to contributions from such figures as Simon Stevin, Pascal, Boyle and Newton. The author compares their work with Galileo and Descartes, neither of whom grasped the need for a new conception of pressure. As a result, their contributions to hydrostatics were unproductive. The story ends with Newton insofar as his version of hydrostatics set the subject on its modern course. He articulated a technical notion of pressure that was up to the task. Newton compared the mathematical way in hydrostatics and the experimental way, and sided with the former. The subtleties that lie behind Newton's position throws light on the way in which developments in seventeenth-century science simultaneously involved mathematization and experimentation. This book serves as an example of the degree of conceptual change that new sciences often require. It will be of interest to those involved in the study of history and philosophy of science. It will also appeal to physicists as well as interested general readers.

One of the most basic problems in the philosophy of science involves determining the extent to which nature is governed by laws. This volume presents a wide-ranging overview of the contemporary debate and includes some of its foremost participants. It begins with an extensive introduction describing the historical, logical and philosophical background of the problems dealt with in the essays. Among the topics treated in the essays is the relationship between laws of nature and causal laws as well as the role of ceteris paribus clauses in scientific explanations. Traditionally, the problem of the unity of science was intimately connected to the problem of understanding the unity of nature. This fourth volume of Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science tackles these problems as part of our consideration of the most fundamental aspects of scientific understanding.

In June 1975, the distinguished Harvard entomologist Edward O. Wilson published a truly huge book entitled, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. In this book, drawing on both fact and theory, Wilson tried to present a com prehensive overview of the rapidly growing subject of 'sociobiology', the study of the biological nature and foundations of animal behaviour, more precisely animal social behaviour. Although, as the title rather implies, Wilson was more surveying and synthesising than developing new material, he com pensated by giving the most thorough and inclusive treatment possible, beginning in the animal world with the most simple of forms, and progressing via insects, lower invertebrates, mammals and primates, right up to and in cluding our own species, Homo sapiens. Initial reaction to the book was very favourable, but before the year was out it came under withering attack from a group of radical scientists in the Boston area, who styled themselves 'The Science for the People Sociobiology Study Group'. Criticism, of course, is what every academic gets (and needs ); but, for two reasons, this attack was particularly unpleasant. First, not only were Wilson's ideas attacked, but he himself was smeared by being linked with the most reactionary of political thinkers, including the Nazis."

The concept of observability of entities in physical science is typically analyzed in terms of the nature and significance of a dichotomy between observables and unobservables. In this book, however, this categorization is resisted and observability is analyzed in a descriptive way in terms of the information which one can receive through interaction with objects in the world. The account of interaction and the transfer of information is done using applicable scientific theories. In this way the question of observability of scientific entities is put to science itself. Several examples are presented which show how this interaction-information account of observability is done. It is demonstrated that observability has many dimensions which are in general orthogonal. The epistemic significance of these dimensions is explained. This study is intended primarily as a method for understanding problems of observability rather than as a solution to those problems. The important issue of scientific realism and its relation to observability, however, demands attention. Hence, the implication of the interaction-information account for realism is drawn in terms of the epistemic significance of the dimensions of observability. This amounts to specifying what it is about good observations that make them objective evidence for scientific theories.

This book explores the evolving nature of objectivity in the history of science and its implications for science education. It is generally considered that objectivity, certainty, truth, universality, the scientific method and the accumulation of experimental data characterize both science and science education. Such universal values associated with science may be challenged while studying controversies in their original historical context. The scientific enterprise is not characterized by objectivity or the scientific method, but rather controversies, alternative interpretations of data, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Although objectivity is not synonymous with truth or certainty, it has eclipsed other epistemic virtues and to be objective is often used as a synonym for scientific. Recent scholarship in history and philosophy of science has shown that it is not the experimental data (Baconian orgy of quantification) but rather the diversity / plurality in a scientific discipline that contributes toward understanding objectivity. History of science shows that objectivity and subjectivity can be considered as the two poles of a continuum and this dualism leads to a conflict in understanding the evolving nature of objectivity. The history of objectivity is nothing less than the history of science itself and the evolving and varying forms of objectivity does not mean that one replaced the other in a sequence but rather each form supplements the others. This book is remarkable for its insistence that the philosophy of science, and in particular that discipline's analysis of objectivity as the supposed hallmark of the scientific method, is of direct value to teachers of science. Meticulously, yet in a most readable way, Mansoor Niaz looks at the way objectivity has been dealt with over the years in influential educational journals and in textbooks; it's fascinating how certain perspectives fade, while basic questions show no sign of going away. There are few books that take both philosophy and education seriously - this one does! Roald Hoffmann, Cornell University, chemist, writer and Nobel Laureate in Chemistry

Einstein often expressed the sentiment that "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility," and that science is the means through which we comprehend it. However, nearly every one - including scientists - agrees that the concepts of modem physics are quite incomprehensible: They are both unintelligible to the educated lay-person and to the scientific community itself, where there is much dispute over the interpretation of even (and especially) the most basic concepts. There is, of course, almost universal agreement that modem science quite adequately accounts for and predicts events, i. e., that its calculations work better than those of classical physics; yet the concepts of science are supposed to be descriptive of 'the world' as well - they should enable us to comprehend it. So, it is asked, and needs tobe"asked: Has modem physics failed in an important respect? It failed with me as a physics student. I came to physics, as with most naIve students, out of a desire to know what the world is really like; in particular, to understand Einstein's conception of it. I thought I had grasped the concepts in classical mechanics, but with electrodynamics confusion set in and only increased with relativity and quantum mechanics. At that point I began even to doubt whether I had really understood the basic concepts of classical mechanics."

This book explores the nature of factual inference in adjudication. The book should be useful to students of law in Continental Europe as well as to students of Anglo-American law. While a good many countries do not use the sorts of rules of evidence found in the Anglo-American legal tradition, their procedural systems nevertheless frequently use a variety of rules and principles to regulate and structure the acquisition, presentation, and evalu ation of evidence. In this sense, almost all legal systems have a law of proof. This book should also be useful to scholars in fields other than law. While the papers focus on inference in adjudication, they deal with a wide variety of issues that are important in disciplines such as the philosophy of science, statistics, and psychology. For example, there is extensive discussion of the role of generalizations and hypotheses in inference and of the significance of the fact that the actors who evaluate data also in some sense constitute the data that they evaluate. Furthermore, explanations of the manner in which some legal systems structure fact-finding processes may highlight features of inferential processes that have yet to be adequately tackled by scholars in fields other than law."