Bücher der Reihe Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science

This extended new edition offers a multifaceted insight into a period of intellectual history in the West in which the balance between speculative theories and experiential science was reset. As is well known, the interrelationship between philosophy and science underwent a profound change in the early modern period, in the course of which the sciences freed themselves from the conceptual framework of traditional metaphysics. The contributions of the volume focus on the eighteenth century, the critical and quite contradictory final phase of this process. The volume distinguishes itself by tracing this transition process not only in the obvious case of the new mechanics - Newtonianism and analytic mechanics - but also by addressing new speculative philosophies of nature - early modern atomism or imponderable physics - and new metaphysical controversies such as the body-mind problem (Can matter think?) as well as developments in special scientific fields such as cosmology/astronomy and natural history.The volume is written by historians of philosophy and the sciences of the early modern period and is intended primarily for specialists and students in these fields of knowledge. However, it is certainly also interesting and useful for cultural historians working on this period.

The roots of this work lie in my earlier book, Scientific Progress, which first appeared in 1981. One of its topics, the distinction - tween scientific laws and theories, is there treated with reference to the same distinction as drawn by N. R. Campbell in his Physics: The Elements. Shortly after completing Scientific Progress, I read Rom Harré¿s The Principles of Scientific Thinking, in which the concept of theory is even more clearly delineated than in Campbell, being directly connected to the notion of a model ¿ as it was in my book. In subsequent considerations regarding science, Harré¿s work thus - came my main source of inspiration with regard to theories, while Campbell¿s remained my main source with respect to empirical laws. Around the same time I also read William Whewell¿s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences. In this work, Whewell depicts principles as playing a central role in the formation of science, and conceives of them in much the same way as Kant conceives of fundamental synthetic a priori judgements. The idea that science should have principles as a basic element immediately made sense to me, and from that time I have thought of science in terms of laws, theories and principles.

This edited collection casts light on central issues within contemporary philosophy of mathematics such as the realism/anti-realism dispute;

During the 1950's, a vigorous new research program in logic was under taken, and the initial published work -characteristic of most Soviet pub lications in the logic and methodology of the sciences - was a collection of essays, Logical Investigations (Moscow, 1959).

In addition, the book's critical examination helps clear up many of the current misunderstandings about the transmission of the text and the diagrams. These diagrams are not only significant for a reconstruction of the text but can also be considered as a commentary on the text.

While economic and other social science expertise is indispensable for successful public policy-making regarding global climate change, social scientists face trade-offs between the scientific credibility, policy-relevance, and legitimacy of their policy advice.

Gyorgy Tamas works in the philosophy of logic, that difficult interdisciplin ary region wherein the notion of categories is both basic and subtle. This was a in thought and in fact, recurring motive of European thought from the earliest self-aware beginnings, and Tamas knows that history well, as his critical respect demonstrates.

In spite of the recent trend of describing the history of mental illness, mental patients and psychiatric institutions, so far, neurology, epilepsy and epileptic patients have largely remained outside the scope of social historians, historians of medicine and social scientists.

It was not to present Advaita in the light of current problems of the logic of scientific discovery and modern philosophy of language ... Language, to Zilberman, is not a phenomenon of con sciousness but a spontaneously working natural mechanism (like, for instance, 'mind' to some Buddhist philosophers).

Perhaps the most accessible in presenting his central conception of the relationship between modem information theory and the methodology of the sciences is his 1965 paper with Perez, 'On the Role of Information Theory in Certain Scientific Procedures'.

Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings.

Phenomenology (especially Alfred Schutz), the critical Frankfurt school (especially Adorno and Marcuse), sociology (especially Georg Simmel), and existentialism (especially Camus) are tied in together.

Examining the problems faced, and solutions developed by, Harvard philosopher Willard Quine, this volume tracks his career from his early radical empiricism and behaviorism to his development of skeptical doctrines regarding meaning, reference, and science.

This book discusses the impetus-based physics of the Jesuit natural philosopher and mathematician Honore Fabri (1608-1688), and shows how Fabri, contrary to popular conception, reinterpreted medieval concepts to adapt to emerging concepts of modern science.

This book offers a new philosophical interpretation of classical mechanics and the Special Theory of Relativity, in which motions of parts and wholes of physical systems are taken to be fundamental, prior to spacetime, material properties and laws of motion.

Galileo's trial over his theories on the Earth's motion ended with his condemnation by the Inquisition. This book judiciously compares and contrasts that trial and the subsequent controversy over the rightness of that condemnation continuing to our day.

Investigates and reconstructs the practical knowledge Galileo shared during his lifetime. This title includes two case studies that focus on the early modern model of generation of new scientific knowledge based on the conflicting interaction between aspects of practical knowledge and Aristotelian theoretical assumptions.

This comprehensive account of Huckel's career examines his scientific work and his key role in the emergence of quantum chemistry as an independent discipline. It also covers his clash with Linus Pauling over the properties of the benzene molecule.

The author of this book offers a uniquely comprehensive and documented history of theories of the atom from Democritus to the twentieth century. He has drawn on the results of his own scholarly research as well as that of others to produce a challenging work.

Boris Kuznetsov was a scientist among humanists, a philosopher among scientists, a historian for those who look to the future, an optimist in an age of sadness. Kuznetsov was also, in his intelligent and thoughtful way, a Marxist scholar and a practical engineer, a patriotic Russian Jew of the first sixty years of the Soviet Union.

In this book Dr Yehuda Fried and Professor Joseph Agassi - a practicing psychiatrist and a philosopher of science, respectivel- focus on an extreme case of psychosis - paranoia - as an essentially intellectual disorder: that is, as one in which there is a systematic and chronic delusion which is sustained by logical means.

Science and its philosophical self-criticism are especially and deeply united in the effort to understand the biological brain and human behavior, and so it requires no apology to include this collection of clinical studies among Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science.

For protophysics, the fascinating and impressive constructive re-establish ment of the foundations of science by Professor Paul Lorenzen, working with his colleagues and students of the Erlangen School, no task is more central than to.furmulate a theoretical understanding of the practical art of measurement of time.

Costa de Beauregard's scientific career has focused on three domains - special relativity, statistics and irreversibility, and quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, on the other hand, derives from very complicated principles but, since its mathematics is straightforward, people feel they understand it.

In this stimulating study of the logical character of selected fundamental topics of physics, Zinov'ev has written the first, and major, stage of a general semantics of science. the logic of fields and of field propagation; and as logic, logical physics deals with the linguistic expressions of time, space, particle, wave, field, causality, etc.