From Lucretius throwing a spear beyond the boundary of the universe to Einstein racing against a beam of light, thought experiments stand as a fascinating challenge to the necessity of data in the empirical sciences. Are these experiments, conducted uniquely in our imagination, simply rhetorical devices or communication tools or are they an essential part of scientific practice? This volume surveys the current state of the debate and explores new avenues of research into the epistemology of thought experiments.

From facial recognition—capable of checking us onto flights or identifying undocumented residents—to automated decision systems that inform everything from who gets loans to who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search. Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. By understanding the trajectory of data—where it has been and where it might yet go—Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.

Hilary Putnam is one of the world s leading philosophers. His highly original and often provocative ideas have set the agenda for a variety of debates in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His now famous philosophical thought experiments, such as the Twin earth and the brains in the vat have become part of the established canon in philosophy and cognitive science.

Reading Putnam is an outstanding overview and assessment of Hilary Putnam s work by a team of international contributors, and includes replies by Putnam himself. Divided into clear sections, it contains chapters on key aspects of Putnam s large body of writing, including:

• Scientific realism and the changes that Putnam s thought has undergone on this topic

• analyticity and ontology, including the important interconnections between the views of Putnam and Quine

• Putnam s arguments concerning externalist views of meaning and reference, questions of conceptual relativity, and his preoccupation with ethics through a denial of the fact value dichotomy

• Putnam s developing views on perception.

Offering an excellent survey of Putnam s work, "Reading Putnam" is essential for those studying philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy.

Hilary Putnam is one of the world s leading philosophers. His highly original and often provocative ideas have set the agenda for a variety of debates in philosophy of science, philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. His now famous philosophical thought experiments, such as the Twin earth and the brains in the vat have become part of the established canon in philosophy and cognitive science.

Reading Putnam is an outstanding overview and assessment of Hilary Putnam s work by a team of international contributors, and includes replies by Putnam himself. Divided into clear sections, it contains chapters on key aspects of Putnam s large body of writing, including:

• Scientific realism and the changes that Putnam s thought has undergone on this topic

• analyticity and ontology, including the important interconnections between the views of Putnam and Quine

• Putnam s arguments concerning externalist views of meaning and reference, questions of conceptual relativity, and his preoccupation with ethics through a denial of the fact value dichotomy

• Putnam s developing views on perception.

Offering an excellent survey of Putnam s work, "Reading Putnam" is essential for those studying philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science, as well as for anyone interested in contemporary philosophy.

This exciting book examines how human tissues and cells are being exchanged, commodified and commercialized by new health technologies. Through a discussion of emergent global tissue economies' the author explores the social dynamics of innovation in the fields of tissue engineering and stem cell science. The book explores how regenerative medicine configures and conceptualizes bodies and argues that the development of regenerative medicine is a feminist issue. In Regenerating Bodies, Kent critically examines the transformative potential of regenerative medicine and whether it represents a paradigm shift from more traditional forms of biomedicine. The book shows that users of these technologies are gendered and women's bodies are enrolled in the production of them in particular ways. So what is the value of a feminist bioethics for thinking about the ethical issues at stake? Drawing on extensive qualitative field research, Kent examines the issues around donation, procurement, banking and engineering of human tissues, and presents an analysis of the regulatory and policy debates surrounding these practices within Europe and the UK. The book considers the claims that regenerative medicine represents exciting possibilities for treating the diseases of ageing bodies, critically assessing what kind of futures are embodied in tissue and cell based therapies. It will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students within the social sciences, in health technology studies, bioethics, feminist studies, and gender and health studies.

A fascinating and comprehensive history, this book explores the most important transformation in twentieth century economics: the creation of econometrics. Containing fresh archival material that has not been published before and taking Ragnar Frisch as the narrator, Francisco Louca discusses both the keys events - the establishment of the Econometric Society, the Cowles Commission and the journal Econometrica - and the major players - economists like Wesley Mitchell, mathematicians like John von Neumann and statisticians like Karl Pearson - in history that shaped the development of econometrics. He discusses the evolution of their thought, detailing the debates, the quarrels and the interrogations that crystallized their work and even offers a conclusion of sorts, suggesting that some of the more influential thinkers abandoned econometrics or became critical of its development. International in scope and appeal, The Years of High Econometrics is an excellent accompaniment for students taking courses on probability, econometric methods and the history of economic thought.

With forty-four newly commissioned articles from an international cast of leading scholars, The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science traces the network of connections among literature, science, technology, mathematics, and medicine. Divided into three main sections, this volume: links diverse literatures to scientific disciplines from Artificial Intelligence to Thermodynamics surveys current theoretical and disciplinary approaches from Animal Studies to Semiotics traces the history and culture of literature and science from Greece and Rome to Postmodernism. Ranging from classical origins and modern revolutions to current developments in cultural science studies and the posthumanities, this indispensible volume offers a comprehensive resource for undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers. With authoritative, accessible, and succinct treatments of the sciences in their literary dimensions and cultural frameworks, here is the essential guide to this vibrant area of study.

Engaging with the question of the extent to which the so-called human, economic or social sciences are actually sciences, this book moves away from the search for a criterion or definition that will allow us to sharply distinguish the scientific from the non-scientific. Instead, the book favours the pursuit of clarity with regard to the various enterprises undertaken by human beings, with a view to dissolving the felt need for such a demarcation. In other words, Read pursues a 'therapeutic' approach to the issue of the status and nature of these subjects. Discussing the work of Kuhn, Winch and Wittgenstein in relation to fundamental question of methodology, 'Wittgenstein among the Sciences' undertakes an examination of the nature of (natural) science itself, in the light of which a series of successive cases of putatively scientific disciplines are analysed. A novel and significant contribution to social science methodology and the philosophy of science and 'the human sciences', this book will be of interest to social scientists and philosophers, as well as to psychiatrists, economists and cognitive scientists.

A passionate, highly accessible clarion call to a world dangerously threatened by irrational superstitions of all kinds. 'Truly a book for our time' Steven Pinker 'In Sweden's public square, Christer Sturmark has done as much as anyone to uphold reason and humane critical thinking' Richard Dawkins 'As lucid and illuminating as it is warm and inspiring' Rebecca Goldstein In country after country, conspiracy theories and religious dogmas that once seemed to have been overtaken by enlightened thought are helping to lift authoritarian leaders into power. The effects are being felt by women, ethnic minorities, teachers, scientists and students - and by the environment, the ultimate victim of climate change denial. We need clear thinking now more than ever. Christer Sturmark is a crusading secular humanist as well as a Swedish publisher and entrepreneur, and The Flame of Reason is his manifesto for a better world. It provides a set of simple tools for clear thinking in the face of populist dogmas, anti-science attitudes and pseudo-philosophy, and suggestions for how we can move towards a new enlightenment. From truth to Quantum Physics, moral philosophy to the Myers-Briggs test, Sturmark offers a passionate defence of rational thought, science, tolerance and pluralism; a warm and engaging guide for anyone who wants to better navigate the modern world. Translated by and co-written with Douglas Hofstadter, celebrated cognitive scientist, physicist and author of Godel, Escher, Bach.

Philosophy begins with wonder, according to Plato and Aristotle. Yet Plato and Aristotle did not expand a great deal on what precisely wonder is. Does this fact alone not raise curiosity in us as to why this passion or concept is important? What is wonder's role in science, philosophy, or theology except to end thinking or theorizing as soon as one begins? The primary purpose of this book is to show how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century developments in natural theology, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and the philosophy of science resulted in a complex history of the passion of wonder-a history in which the elements of continuation, criticism, and reformulation are equally present. Philosophy Begins in Wonder provides the first historical overview of wonder and changes the way we see early modern Europe. It is intended for readers who are curious-who wonder-about how modern philosophy and science were born. The book is for scholars and educated readers alike.

Dramatic and controversial changes in the funding of science over the past two decades, towards its increasing commercialization, have stimulated a huge literature trying to set out an "economics of science." Whether broadly in favour or against these changes, the vast majority of these frameworks employ ahistorical analyses that cannot conceptualise, let alone address, the questions of "why have these changes occurred?" and "why now?" Nor, therefore, can they offer much insight into the crucial question of future trends. Given the growing importance of science and innovation in an age of both a globalizing knowledge-based economy (itself in crisis) and enormous challenges that demand scientific and technological responses, these are significant gaps in our understanding of important contemporary social processes.

This book argues that the fundamental underlying problem in all cases is the ontological shallowness of these theories, which can only be remedied by attention to ontological presuppositions. Conversely, a critical realist approach affords the integration of a realist political economy into the analysis of the economics of science that does afford explicit attention to these crucial questions; a cultural political economy of research and innovation (CPERI). Accordingly, the book sets out an introduction to the existing literature on the economics of science together with novel discussion of the field from a critical realist perspective. In arguing thus across levels of abstraction, however, the book also explores how concerted engagement with substantive social enquiry and theoretical debate develops and strengthens critical realism as a philosophical project, rather than simply applying it.

Divided into two volumes, in this first volume the book explores the top and tail of the argument, regarding substantive and philosophical aspects. Starting with substantive illustrations, we explore the social challenges associated with the contemporary commercialization of science and the movement towards a knowledge-based bio-economy. Having shown the explanatory benefits of assuming a realist political economy perspective, the book then turns to the task of reconstructing and justifying that theoretical perspective. True to the overall argument regarding attention to ontological presuppositions, this starts with critical realism 's critique of mainstream economics but also develops critical realism itself towards what may be called a transcendental constructivism .

The most comprehensive collection of essays on Descartes' scientific writings ever published, this volume offers a detailed reassessment of Descartes' scientific work and its bearing on his philosophy. The 35 essays, written by some of the world's leading scholars, cover topics as diverse as optics, cosmology and medicine, and will be of vital interest to all historians of philosophy or science.

Dramatic and controversial changes in the funding of science over the past two decades, towards its increasing commercialization, have stimulated a huge literature trying to set out an "economics of science". Whether broadly in favour or against these changes, the vast majority of these frameworks employ ahistorical analyses that cannot conceptualise, let alone address, the questions of "why have these changes occurred?" and "why now?" Nor, therefore, can they offer much insight into the crucial question of future trends. Given the growing importance of science and innovation in an age of both a globalizing knowledge-based economy (itself in crisis) and enormous challenges that demand scientific and technological responses, these are significant gaps in our understanding of important contemporary social processes. This book argues that the fundamental underlying problem in all cases is the ontological shallowness of these theories, which can only be remedied by attention to ontological presuppositions. Conversely, a critical realist approach affords the integration of a realist political economy into the analysis of the economics of science that does afford explicit attention to these crucial questions; a 'cultural political economy of research and innovation' (CPERI). Accordingly, the book sets out an introduction to the existing literature on the economics of science together with novel discussion of the field from a critical realist perspective. In arguing thus across levels of abstraction, however, the book also explores how concerted engagement with substantive social enquiry and theoretical debate develops and strengthens critical realism as a philosophical project, rather than simply 'applying' it. Divided into two volumes, in this first volume the book explores the 'top' and 'tail' of the argument, regarding substantive and philosophical aspects. Starting with substantive illustrations, we explore the social challenges associated with the contemporary commercialization of science and the movement towards a knowledge-based bio-economy. Having shown the explanatory benefits of assuming a realist political economy perspective, the book then turns to the task of reconstructing and justifying that theoretical perspective. True to the overall argument regarding attention to ontological presuppositions, this starts with critical realism's critique of mainstream economics but also develops critical realism itself towards what may be called a 'transcendental constructivism'.

This timely book explores technological innovation as a concept, dissecting its emergence, development and use. Benoit Godin offers an exciting new historiography of the subject, arguing that the study of innovation originates not from scholars but from practitioners of innovation. Godin looks to engineers, managers, consultants and policymakers as the instigators of our current understanding of technological innovation. Offering a conceptual history of the subject, Part I considers the many iterations of innovation - as an science applied, outcome, process and system - to track and analyse the changing discourses surrounding technological innovation. In Part II, the author turns to historic and contemporary innovation policy to illustrate the critical role that practitioners have had in formulating and strategizing policy. Effectively rewriting the historiography of the topic, this book is critical reading for scholars of innovation studies, sociology and the history of science and technology. Students will benefit from Godin's pioneering approach to the subject and policymakers will also find value in the book's unique insight into innovation.

From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the Actuality of Enlightenment is the second of three books elaborating Roy Bhaskar 's new philosophy of metaReality, which appeared in rapid succession in 2002.

With a new introduction from Mervyn Hartwick, this book contains some of the original transcripts and the questions and answers they provoked, from a variety of lecture and workshop tours Roy Bhaskar presented for Indian audiences before this book was first published. Because of the spontaneous and informal nature of these talks and discussions, this book continues to provide the most immediate and accessible introduction to Roy Bhaskar's philosophy as it charts his intellectual journey.

The talks recorded here have retianed an immediate local but also deeply universal interest. From Science to Emancipation provides an indepensible resource for all students of philosophy and the human sciences.

From Science to Emancipation: Alienation and the Actuality of Enlightenment is the second of three books elaborating Roy Bhaskar 's new philosophy of metaReality, which appeared in rapid succession in 2002.

With a new introduction from Mervyn Hartwick, this book contains some of the original transcripts and the questions and answers they provoked, from a variety of lecture and workshop tours Roy Bhaskar presented for Indian audiences before this book was first published. Because of the spontaneous and informal nature of these talks and discussions, this book continues to provide the most immediate and accessible introduction to Roy Bhaskar's philosophy as it charts his intellectual journey.

The talks recorded here have retianed an immediate local but also deeply universal interest. From Science to Emancipation provides an indepensible resource for all students of philosophy and the human sciences.

Drawing on the empirical findings generated by researchers in science studies, and adopting Kropotkin's concept of anarchism as one of the social sciences, Red, Black, and Objective expounds and develops an anarchist account of science as a social construction and social institution. Restivo's account is at once normative, analytical, organizational, and policy oriented, in particular with respect to education. With attention to the social practices and discourse of science, this book engages with the works of Feyerabend and Nietzsche, as well as philosophers and historians of objectivity to ground an anarchistic sociology of science. Marx and Durkheim figure prominently in this account as precursors of the contemporary science studies perspective on the perennial question, "What is science?" The result is an approach to understanding the science-and-society nexus that is at once an extension of Restivo's earlier work and a novel adaptation of the anarchist agenda. Red, Black, and Objective is an exploration by one of the founders of the science studies movement of questions in theory, practice, values, and policy. As such, it will appeal to those with interests in science and technology studies, social theory, and sociology and philosophy of science and technology.

Imagining, forecasting and predicting the future is an inextricable and increasingly important part of the present. States, organizations and individuals almost continuously have to make decisions about future actions, financial investments or technological innovation, without much knowledge of what will exactly happen in the future. Science and technology play a crucial role in this collective attempt to make sense of the future. Technological developments such as nanotechnology, robotics or solar energy largely shape how we dream and think about the future, while economic forecasts, gene tests or climate change projections help us to make images of what may possibly occur in the future. This book provides one of the first interdisciplinary assessments of how scientific and technological imaginations matter in the formation of human, ecological and societal futures. Rooted in different disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, and science and technology studies, it explores how various actors such as scientists, companies or states imagine the future to be and act upon that imagination. Bringing together case studies from different regions around the globe, including the electrification of German car infrastructure, or genetically modified crops in India, Imagined Futures in Science, Technology and Society shows how science and technology create novel forms of imagination, thereby opening horizons toward alternative futures. By developing central aspects of the current debate on how scientific imagination and future-making interact, this timely volume provides a fresh look at the complex interrelationships between science, technology and society. This book will be of interest to postgraduate students interested in Science and Technology Studies, History and Philosophy of Science, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, Political Sciences, Future Studies and Literary Sciences.

This book addresses the unprecedented convergence between the digital and the corporeal in the life sciences and turns to Foucault's biopolitics in order to understand how life is being turned into a technological object. It examines a wide range of bioscientific knowledge practices that allow life to be known through codes that can be shared (copied), owned (claimed, and managed) and optimised (remade through codes based on standard language and biotech engineering visions). The book's approach is captured in the title, which refers to 'the biopolitical'. The authors argue that through discussions of political theories of sovereignty and related geopolitical conceptions of nature and society, we can understand how crucially important it is that life is constantly unsettling and disrupting the established and familiar ordering of the material world and the related ways of thinking and acting politically. The biopolitical dynamics involved are conceptualised as the 'metacode of life', which refers to the shifting configurations of living materiality and the merging of conventional boundaries between the natural and artificial, the living and non-living. The result is a globalising world in which the need for an alternative has become a core part of its political and legal instability, and the authors identify a number of possible alternative platforms to understand life and the living as framed by the 'metacodes' of life. This book will appeal to scholars of science and technology studies, as well as scholars of the sociology, philosophy, and anthropology of science, who are seeking to understand social and technical heterogeneity as a characteristic of the life sciences.

This title was first published in 2000: This book addresses issues which are central in the philosophy of science, exploring a large and relevant literature. It should be of broad interest in the philosophy of science community." Professor Peter Lipton, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, UK. How can the complexities of understanding science be dealt with as a whole? Is philosophical realism still a defensible philosophical position? Exploring such fundamental questions, this book claims that science ought to be understood in terms of universal practices and that such an understanding supports an attractive version of scientific realism. Holism is attracting renewed scholarly attention but is still loosely used in a range of different contexts, from semantics to medicine. This book presents a detailed philosophical analysis of holism, concentrating on two complementary aspects of holism - cognitive and social - to investigate its relevance to science studies. Bridging the gap between analytical, historical and sociological accounts of science, Caruana draws together results from recent research by Davidson, Dummett, Quine, Wright and others, on Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Demonstrating that holism, both cognitive and social, is not only essential for a full understanding of science but also compatible with a particular version of scientific realism, this book presents important new perspectives for the philosophers of science and scholars of the history of science in particular. Louis Caruana is Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy of Science and Nature at the Gregorian University, Rome, Italy.

This book examines the birth of the scientific understanding of motion. It investigates which logical tools and methodological principles had to be in place to give a consistent account of motion, and which mathematical notions were introduced to gain control over conceptual problems of motion. It shows how the idea of motion raised two fundamental problems in the 5th and 4th century BCE: bringing together being and non-being, and bringing together time and space. The first problem leads to the exclusion of motion from the realm of rational investigation in Parmenides, the second to Zeno's paradoxes of motion. Methodological and logical developments reacting to these puzzles are shown to be present implicitly in the atomists, and explicitly in Plato who also employs mathematical structures to make motion intelligible. With Aristotle we finally see the first outline of the fundamental framework with which we conceptualise motion today.

Although scientific models and simulations differ in numerous ways, they are similar in so far as they are posing essentially philosophical problems about the nature of representation. This collection is designed to bring together some of the best work on the nature of representation being done by both established senior philosophers of science and younger researchers. Most of the pieces, while appealing to existing traditions of scientific representation, explore new types of questions, such as: how understanding can be developed within computational science; how the format of representations matters for their use, be it for the purpose of research or education; how the concepts of emergence and supervenience can be further analyzed by taking into account computational science; or how the emphasis upon tractability--a particularly important issue in computational science--sheds new light on the philosophical analysis of scientific reasoning.

The Star and the Whole: Gian-Carlo Rota on Mathematics and Phenomenology, authored by Fabrizio Palombi, is the first book to study Rota's philosophical reflection. Rota (1932-1999) was a leading figure in contemporary mathematics and an outstanding philosopher, inspired by phenomenology, who made fundamental contributions to combinatorial analysis, and trained several generations of mathematicians in his long career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

The first chapter of the book reconstructs Rota's cultural biography and examines his philosophical style, his criticisms of analytical philosophy, and his reflection on Heidegger's thought. The second chapter presents a general picture of Rota's re-elaboration of phenomenology examined in the light of the Husserlian notion of Fundierung. This chapter also illustrates how the star-shape becomes a powerful instrument for understanding the properties of Husserl's mereology and the critique of objectivism. The third chapter is a theoretical reflection on the nature of mathematical entities, and the fourth examines the complex relation of mathematical research with technological applicability and scientific progress. The foreword of the text is written by Robert Sokolowski.

This title was first published in 2002.Science and humanity are usually seen as very different: the sciences of nature aim at explanations whereas the sciences of man seek meaning and understanding. This book shows how these contrasting descriptions fail to fit into a modern philosophical account of the sciences and the arts. Presenting some of the major ideas within the philosophy of science on facts, explanation, interpretation, methods, laws, and theories, Jan Faye compares various approaches, including his own. Arguing that the sciences of nature and the sciences of man share a common practice of acquiring knowledge, this book offers a unique introduction to key aspects in the philosophy of science.

This title was first published in 2003:This book explores the problem of realism, both metaphysical and scientific. Renowned specialists in the field - including Michael Devitt, David Papineau, Mark Sainsbury and Wesley Salmon - contribute new essays that shed new light on the main topics in the current realism/antirealism debate. Discussing a wide range of issues related to realism, both in metaphysics and in the philosophy of science, they address more specific questions including those concerning metaphysical realism, scientific realism, the relations between epistemology and ontology, causation, dispositions and personal identity, and the relations between science and common sense. Presenting a comprehensive overview of the problem of realism, as well as in-depth discussion of particular topics, this book offers valuable insights for both students and researchers in the field. It can also be used in undergraduate and graduate courses of philosophy.