The articles in this volume have been first presented during an international Conference organised by the Greek Society for the History of Science and Technology in June 1990 at Corfu. The Society was founded in 1989 and planned to hold a series of meetings to impress upon an audience comprised mainly by Greek students and scholars, the point that history of science is an autonomous discipline with its own plurality of approaches developed over the years as a result of long discussions and disputes within the community of historians of science. The Conference took place at a time when more and more people came to realise that the future of the Greek Universities and Research Centres depends not only on the progress of the institutional reforms, but also very crucially on the establishment of new and modern subject areas. Though there have been significant steps towards such a direction in the physical sciences, mathematics and engineering, the situation in the so-called humanities has been, at best, confusing. Political expediencies of the post war years and ideological commitments to a glorious, yet very distant past, paralysed the development of the humanities and constrained them within a framework which could not allow much more than a philological approach.

God and Gaia explores the overlap between traditional religious cosmologies and the scientific Gaia theory of James Lovelock. It argues that a Gaian approach to the ecological crisis involves rebalancing human and more-than-human influences on Earth by reviving the ecological agency of local and indigenous human communities, and of nonhuman beings. Present-day human ecological influences on Earth have been growing at pace since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, when modern humans adopted a machine cosmology in which humans are the sole intelligent agency. The resultant imbalance between human and Earthly agencies is degrading the species diversity of ecosystems, causing local climate changes, and threatens to destabilise the Earth as a System. Across eight chapters this ambitious text engages with traditional cosmologies from the Indian Vedas and classical Greece to Medieval Christianity, with case material from Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and Great Britain. It discusses concepts such as deep time and ancestral time, the ethics of genetic engineering of foods and viruses, and holistic ecological management. Northcott argues that an ontological turn that honours the differential agency of indigenous humans and other kind, and that draws on sacred traditions, will make it is possible to repair the destabilising impacts of contemporary human activities on the Earth System and its constituent ecosystems. This book will be of considerable interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, history, and cultural and religious studies.

The sciences are too important to be left exclusively to scientists, and indeed they have not been. The structure of scientific knowledge, the role of the sciences in society, the appropriate social contexts for the pursuit of scientific inquiry, have long been matters for reflection and debate about the sciences carried on both within academe and outside it. Even within the universities this reflection has not been the property of any single discipline. Philosophy might have been first in the field, but history and the social sciences have also entered the fray. For the latter, new problems came to the fore, since reflection on the sciences is, in the case of the social sciences, necessarily also reflection on themselves as sciences. Reflection on the natural sciences and self-reflection by the social sciences came to be dominated in the 1960s by the term 'positivism'. At the time when this word had been invented, the sciences were flourishing; their social and material environment had become increasingly favourable to scientific progress, and the sciences were pointing the way to an optimistic future. In the later twentieth century, however, 'positivism' came to be a word used more frequently by those less sure of nineteenth century certainties. In both sociology and philosophy, 'positivism' was now something to be rejected, and, symbolizing the collapse of an earlier consensus, it became itself the shibboleth of a new dissensus, as different groups of reflective thinkers, in rejecting 'positivism', rejected something different, and often rejected each other.

This book explores an evolutionary theory of scientific knowledge, and provides the basis for a new linguistic approach to methodology.Including an original essay by the late Thomas Kuhn, this volume takes inspiration from his work in history and the philosophy of sciences. The authors highlight the critical importance of the relationship between the process of learning a language and translation, and use this to examine scientific language and interpretation. They also analyse the relationship between grammatical structure and theoretical communication in science and apply their findings to the rhetoric of Smith and Keynes. They assess the pragmatical dimension of language in the construction of knowledge, and examine its role in explaining economic behaviour and in interpreting the relationship between economics and philosophy. Finally, the authors analyse the relationship between incommensurable standards and translation from the point of view of the logical structure of lexicon, and examine the traditional theme of the 'unity of science' across the whole spectrum of humanities and the social sciences.

The book addresses a number of recent topics at the crossroad of philosophy and cognitive science, taking advantage of both the western and the eastern perspectives and conceptions that emerged and were discussed at the PCS2011 Conference recently held in Guangzhou. The ever growing cultural exchange between academics and intellectual belonging to different cultures is reverberated by the juxtaposition of papers, which aim at investigating new facets of crucial problems in philosophy: the role of models in science and the fictional approach; chance seeking dynamics and how affordances work; abductive cognition; visualization in science; the cognitive structure of scientific theories; scientific representation; mathematical representation in science; model-based reasoning; analogical reasoning; moral cognition; cognitive niches and evolution.

With this third edition of Nelson Goodman's The Structure of Appear ance, we are pleased to make available once more one of the most in fluential and important works in the philosophy of our times. Professor Geoffrey Hellman's introduction gives a sustained analysis and appreciation of the major themes and the thrust of the book, as well as an account of the ways in which many of Goodman's problems and projects have been picked up and developed by others. Hellman also suggests how The Structure of Appearance introduces issues which Goodman later continues in his essays and in the Languages of Art. There remains the task of understanding Good man's project as a whole; to see the deep continuities of his thought, as it ranges from logic to epistemology, to science and art; to see it therefore as a complex yet coherent theory of human cognition and practice. What we can only hope to suggest, in this note, is the b. road Significance of Goodman's apparently technical work for philosophers, scientists and humanists. One may say of Nelson Goodman that his bite is worse than his bark. Behind what appears as a cool and methodical analysis of the conditions of the construction of systems, there lurks a radical and disturbing thesis: that the world is, in itself, no more one way than another, nor are we. It depends on the ways in which we take it, and on what we do."

What is the relationship between scientific research and ethics? Some think that science should be free from ethical and political considerations. Biomedical Research and Beyond argues that ethical guidance is essential for all forms of inquiry, including biomedical and scientific research. By addressing some of the most controversial questions of biomedical research, such as embryonic research, animal research, and genetic enhancement research, the author argues for a rich moral framework for the ethics of inquiry, based on the ideal of human flourishing. He then looks at other areas of inquiry, such as journalistic ethics, and military investigation, to see how similar they are to the ethics of scientific research. Finally, he looks at the virtues that must play a role in any life that is devoted to research and inquiry as a vocational commitment.

Patrick Suppes is a philosopher and scientist whose contributions range over probability and statistics, mathematical and experimental psychology, the foundations of physics, education theory, the philosophy of language, measurement theory, and the philosophy of science. He has also been a pioneer in the area of computer assisted instruction. In each of these areas, Suppes has provided seminal ideas that in some cases led to shaping the direction of research in the field. The papers contained in this collection were commissioned with the mandate of advancing research in their respective fields rather than retrospectively surveying the contributions that Suppes himself has made. The authors form an interesting mixture of researchers in both formal philosophy of science and science itself all of whom have been inspired by his ideas. To maintain the spirit of constructive dialogue that characterizes Suppes's intellectual style, he has written individual responses to each article. In Volume 1: Probability and Probabilistic Causality, nineteen distinguished philosophers and scientists focus their attention on probabilistic issues. In Part I the contributors explore axiomatic representations of probability theory including qualitative and interval valued probabilities as well as traditional point valued probabilities. Belief structures and the dynamics of belief are also treated in detail. In Part II the rapidly growing field of probabilistic causation is assessed from both formal and empirical viewpoints. For probability theorists, statisticians, economists, philosophers of science, psychologists and those interested in the foundations of mathematical social science. In Volume 2: Philosophy of Physics, Theory Structure, and Measurement Theory, fifteen distinguished philosophers and scientists cover a wide variety of topics. Part III covers issues in quantum theory, geometry, classical mechanics, and computational physics. Part IV explores Suppes's well known set-theoretic account of scientific theories which has served him well throughout his career. Suppes's contributions to measurement theory have been widely used in mathematical psychology and elsewhere, and this material is the subject of Part V. For physicists, logicians, workers in mathematical social sicence, and philosophers of science. In Volume 3: Philosophy of Language and Logic, Learning and Action Theory, fourteen distinguished philosophers and scientists explore issues in the philosophy of language, logic, and philosophical psychology. Suppes's suggestions that quantum theory requires a rethinking of classical logic form a particularly sharp account of that controversial thesis, and Part VI deals with this issue together with topics in the philosophy of language and logic, including relational grammars and anaphora. Part VII deals with issues in psychology, action theory, and robotics, while Part VIII concludes with a general survey of Suppes's views in the philosophy of science. A comprehensive chronological and topical bibliography of Suppes's writings is included in this volume. For philosophers of language, theoretical linguists, logicians, workers in mathematical social sciences, and philosophers of science.

Science is popularly understood as being an ideal of impartial algorithmic objectivity that provides us with a realistic description of the world down to the last detail. The essays collected in this book -- written by some of the leading experts in the field -- challenge this popular image right at its heart, taking as their starting point that science trades not only in truth, but in fiction, too. With case studies that range from physics to economics and to biology, Fictions in Science reveals that fictions are as ubiquitous in scientific narratives and practice as they are in any other human endeavor, including literature and art. Of course scientific activity, most prominently in the formal sciences, employs logically precise algorithmic thinking. However, the key to the predictive and technological success of the empirical sciences might well lie elsewhere -- perhaps even in scientists' extraordinary creative imagination instead. As these essays demonstrate, within the bounds of what is empirically possible, a scientist's capacity for invention and creative thinking matches that of any writer or artist.

This volume contains ten new essays focused on the exploration and articulation of a narrative that considers the notion of order within medieval and modern philosophy-its various kinds (natural, moral, divine, and human), the different ways in which each is conceived, and the diverse dependency relations that are thought to obtain among them. Descartes, with the help of others, brought about an important shift in what was understood by the order of nature by placing laws of nature at the foundation of his natural philosophy. Vigorous debate then ensued about the proper formulation of the laws of nature and the moral law, about whether such laws can be justified, and if so, how-through some aspect of the divine order or through human beings-and about what consequences these laws have for human beings and the moral and divine orders. That is, philosophers of the period were thinking through what the order of nature consists in and how to understand its relations to the divine, human, and moral orders. No two major philosophers in the modern period took exactly the same stance on these issues, but these issues are clearly central to their thought. The Divine Order, the Human Order, and the Order of Nature is devoted to investigating their positions from a vantage point that has the potential to combine metaphysical, epistemological, scientific, and moral considerations into a single narrative.

The Metaphysics of Science provides a clear, well-founded conception of modern science, according to which its core consists of particular metaphysical principles. On this view, both the empirical and the theoretical aspects of science are the result of the attempt to apply these metaphysical principles to reality. There is a flexibility in the application of the principles, however, so that, in their scientific guise, they may come to be reformed over time through scientific revolutions.This approach to modern science provides a unified conception of the enterprise, explaining such of its various aspects as the principle of induction, the nature of scientific knowledge and scientific reduction, the fundamental difference between the natural and social sciences, and the role of essentialism with respect to natural kinds. Furthermore, it provides a resolution of the long-standing debate between empiricism and realism.

It is fast becoming a cliche that scientific discovery is being rediscovered. For two philosophical generations (that of the Founders and that of the Followers of the logical positivist and logical empiricist movements), discovery had been consigned to the domain of the intractable, the ineffable, the inscrutable. The philosophy of science was focused on the so-called context of justification as its proper domain. More recently, as the exclusivity of the logical reconstruc tion program in philosophy of science came under question, and as the critique of justification developed within the framework of logical and epistemological analysis, the old question of scientific discovery, which had been put on the back burner, began to emerge once again. Emphasis on the relation of the history of science to the philosophy of science, and attention to the question of theory change and theory replacement, also served to legitimate a new concern with the origins of scientific change to be found within discovery and invention. How welcome then to see what a wide range of issues and what a broad representation of philosophers and historians of science have been brought together in the present two volumes of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science For what these volumes achieve, in effect, is the continuation of a tradition which had once been strong in the philosophy of science - namely, that tradition which addressed the question of scientific discovery as a central question in the understanding of science."

This is the first English translation of Causalite' et Lois de La Nature, and is an important contribution to the theory of causation. Max Kistler reconstructs a unified concept of causation that is general enough to adequately deal with both elementary physical processes, and the macroscopic level of phenomena we encounter in everyday life. This book will be of great interest to philosophers of science and metaphysics, and also to students and scholars of philosophy of mind where concepts of causation and law play a prominent role. Contents1. What is a Causal Relation? 2. Laws of Nature and Universal Generalisations 3. Applicability Conditions and the Concept of "Strict Law" 4. Consequences 5. The Nomological Theory of Causation and Causal Responsibility 6. Efficacious Properties and the Instantiation of Laws 7. Causal Responsibility and its Applications Conclusion.

impossible triangle, after apprehension of the perceptively given mode of being of that 'object', the visual system assumes that all three sides touch on all three sides, whereas this happens on only one side. In fact, the sides touch only optically, because they are separate in depth. In Meinong's words, Penrose's triangle has been inserted in an 'objective', or in what we would today call a "cognitive schema." Re-examination of the Graz school's theory, as said, sheds light on several problems concerning the theory of perception, and, as Luccio points out in his contribution to this book, it helps to eliminate a number of over-simplistic commonplaces, such as the identification of the cognitivist notion of 'top down' with Wertheimer's 'von oben unten', and of 'bottom up' with his 'von unten nach oben'. In fact, neither Hochberg's and Gregory's 'concept-driven' perception nor Gibson's 'data-driven' perception coincide with the original conception of the Gestalt.

The first comprehensive philosophical introduction to risk Includes lots of additional features: text boxes, chapter summaries, study questions, review questions Most books cover either the science or ethics of risk: ours does both Packed with examples such as the nuclear industry, the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and risk in health and medicine Explains philosophical concepts and paradoxes about risk, such as Pascal's Wager and the Monte Carlo simulation

This book is intended as an exposition of a particular theory of time in the sense of an interrelated set of attempted solutions to philosophical problems about it. Generally speaking there are two views about time held by philosophers and some scientists interested in philosophical issues. The first called the A-theory (after McTaggart's expression A-determinations for the properties of being past, present or future) is often thought to be closer to our commonsense view of time or to the concept of time presupposed by ordinary language. It includes at least the following theses, (a) Logic ought really to include tensed quantifiers for existence on one of its important usages means, present existence. More generally, we can't reduce all tensed locutions to tenseless ones. (b) The distinction between past, present and future is an objective one. It is not, for example, dependent on our consciousness of change; some A-theorists hold also, that the distinction, in effect, is an absolute one.

Vibratory Modernism is a collection of original essays that will enable scholars and students to explore how vibrations provided a means of bridging science and art - two fields that became increasingly separate over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book demonstrates the vital role played by vibrations in the fields of physics, physiology, spiritualism, and by new vibratory technologies, in helping to shape the way modernist art was made and viewed. The chapters are placed into three connecting parts focusing on literature, the visual arts and theatre, each part highlighting the diverse ways in which writers, artists and performers engaged with the fascinating world of vibrations.

As Europe moves toward 1992 and full economic unity, and as Eastern Europe tries to find its way in the new economic order, the United States hesitates. Will the new European economic order be good for the U.S. or not? Such a question is exacerbated by world-wide changes in the technological order, most evident in Japan's new techno-economic power. As might be expected, philosophers have been slow to come to grips with such issues, and lack of interest is compounded by different philosophical styles in different parts of the world. What this volume addresses is more a matter of conflicting styles than a substantive confrontation with the real-world issues. But there is some attempt to be concrete. The symposium on Ivan Illich - with contributions from philosophers and social critics at the Penns- vania State University, where Illich has taught for several years - may suggest the old cliche of Old World vs. New World. Illich's fulminations against technology are often dismissed by Americans as old-world-style prophecy, while Illich seems largely unknown in his native Europe. But Albert Borgmann, born in Germany though now settled in the U.S., shows that this old dichotomy is difficult to maintain in our technological world. Borgmann's focus is on urgent technological problems that have become almost painfully evident in both Europe and America.

Modern physical science is constituted by specialized scientific fields rooted in experimental laboratory work and in rational and mathematical representations. Contemporary scientific explanation is rigorously differentiated from religious interpretation, although, to be sure, scientists sometimes do the philosophical work of interpreting the metaphysics of space, time, and matter. However, it is rare that either theologians or philosophers convincingly claim that they are doing the scientific work of physical scientists and mathematicians. The rigidity of these divisions and differentiations is relatively new. Modern physical science was invented slowly and gradually through interactions of the aims and contents of mathematics, theology, and natural philosophy since the seventeenth century. In essays ranging in focus from seventeenth-century interpretations of heavenly comets to twentieth-century explanations of tracks in bubble chambers, ten historians of science demonstrate metaphysical and theological threads continuing to underpin the epistemology and practice of the physical sciences and mathematics, even while they became disciplinary specialties during the last three centuries. The volume is prefaced by tributes to Erwin N. Hiebert, whose teaching and scholarship have addressed and inspired attention to these issues.

Three events, which happened all within the same week some ten years ago, set me on the track which the book describes. The first was a reading of Emile Meyerson works in the course of a prolonged research on Einstein's relativity theory, which sent me back to Meyerson's Ident- ity and Reality, where I read and reread the striking chapter on "Ir- rationality". In my earlier researches into the origins of French Conven- tionalism I came to know similar views, all apparently deriving from Emile Boutroux's doctoral thesis of 1874 De fa contingence des lois de la nature and his notes of the 1892-3 course he taught at the Sorbonne De ['idee de fa loi naturelle dans la science et la philosophie contempo- raines. But never before was the full effect of the argument so suddenly clear as when I read Meyerson. On the same week I read, by sheer accident, Ernest Moody's two- parts paper in the JHIof 1951, "Galileo and Avempace". Put near Meyerson's thesis, what Moody argued was a striking confirmation: it was the sheer irrationality of the Platonic tradition, leading from A vem- pace to Galileo, which was the working conceptual force behind the notion of a non-appearing nature, active all the time but always sub- merged, as it is embodied in the concept of void and motion in it.

This is the second volume of Proceedings of the Israel Colloquium for the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science. At the time that this preface is being written, the fourth annual series of lectures within the framework of the Israel Colloquium is already behind us and the fifth is underway. The Israel Colloquium thus has now not only a future to look forward to but also a past which is a source, of pride and pleasure for those who take part in this venture. The Israel Colloquium has, I believe, struck roots in the Israeli scientific and intellectual life, while drawing on the ever-increasing readiness of the international scientific and intellectual community for continuous support. As in the first volume, here too the papers presented, taken together, attempt a threefold representation of science and of the scientific activity: the historical, the social, and the systematic. A novel focal point in this volume is the treatment of some case studies illuminating historical, social, and philosophical aspects of medicine. Another center of gravity here is the Eddington Centennial Symposium which was a main event in the Collo quium activity of the 1982-83 series. This is a fitting place for me to report with sorrow the untimely death in the summer of 1984 of Solly G. Cohen, one of Israel's leading scientists, who is among the contributors to this volume."

Why did the two most influential philosophers in the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, write in such a curious fashion that they confused a whole generation of disciples and created a cottage industry for a second generation in the interpretation of their works? Do those curious writing strategies have a philosophical signif icance? How does philosophical style reflect attitudes to society and politics or bear significance for the social sciences? Is politics one type of human activity among many other independent ones as the classical modem political theorists from Hobbes and Machiavelli onwards have thought, or is it part and parcel of all of the activities into which an animal that speaks enters? How could the latter be elucidated? If politics arises from legitimate disputes about meanings, what does this imply for current cultural debates? for the so-called social sciences? above all, for that cultural conversation which some consider to be the destiny of philosophy in the wake of the demise of foundationalism? These are a few of the most important questions which led me to the critical confrontation and reflections in the essays collected below."

During the academic years 1972-1973 and 1973-1974, an intensive sem inar on the foundations of quantum mechanics met at Stanford on a regular basis. The extensive exploration of ideas in the seminar led to the org ization of a double issue of Synthese concerned with the foundations of quantum mechanics, especially with the role of logic and probability in quantum meChanics. About half of the articles in the volume grew out of this seminar. The remaining articles have been so licited explicitly from individuals who are actively working in the foun dations of quantum mechanics. Seventeen of the twenty-one articles appeared in Volume 29 of Syn these. Four additional articles and a bibliography on -the history and philosophy of quantum mechanics have been added to the present volume. In particular, the articles by Bub, Demopoulos, and Lande, as well as the second article by Zanotti and myself, appear for the first time in the present volume. In preparing the articles for publication I am much indebted to Mrs. Lillian O'Toole, Mrs. Dianne Kanerva, and Mrs. Marguerite Shaw, for their extensive assistance."

New essays in science history ranging across the entire field and related in most instance to the works of Charles Gillispie, one of the field's founders.

Nietzsche, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science, is the second volume of a collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, featuring essays addressing truth, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, with a substantial representation of analytically schooled Nietzsche scholars. This collection offers a dynamic articulation of the differing strengths of Anglo-American analytic and contemporary European approaches to philosophy, with translations from European specialists, notably Carl Friedrich von WeizsAcker, Paul Valadier, and Walther Ch. Zimmerli. This broad collection also features a preface by Alasdair MacIntyre. Contributions explore Nietzsche's contributions to the philosophy of language and epistemology, and include essays on the social history of truth and the historical and cultural analyses of Serres and Baudrillard, as well as new contributions to the philosophy of science, including theological and hermeneutical approaches, history of science, the philosophy of medicine, cognitive science, and technology.