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

Having examined previous volumes of the Boston Studies series devoted to different countries, and having discussed the best way to present contemporary research in France, we have arrived at a careful selection of 15 participants, including the organizers.

This timely book offers a wide-ranging study of the thesis that scientific theories are systematically "underdetermined" by the data they account for.

This volume features forty-two essays written in honor of Joseph Agassi. It explores the work and legacy of this influential philosopher, an exciting and challenging advocate of critical rationalism. Throughout six decades of stupendous intellectual activity, Agassi called attention to rationality as the very starting point of every notable philosophical way of life.The essays present Agassi's own views on critical rationalism. They also develop and expand upon his work in new and provocative ways. The authors include Agassi's most notable pupils, friends, and colleagues. Overall, their contributions challenge the received view on a variety of issues concerning science, religion, and education.Readers will find well-reasoned arguments on such topics as the secular problem of evil, religion and critical thinking, liberal democratic educational communities, democracy and constitutionalism, and capitalism at a crossroad.

This volume collects reflections on the role of philosophy in case studies in the history of science.

This volume covers a wide range of topics in the most recent debates in the philosophy of mathematics, and is dedicated to how semantic, epistemological, ontological and logical issues interact in the attempt to give a satisfactory picture of mathematical knowledge.The essays collected here explore the semantic and epistemic problems raised by different kinds of mathematical objects, by their characterization in terms of axiomatic theories, and by the objectivity of both pure and applied mathematics. They investigate controversial aspects of contemporary theories such as neo-logicist abstractionism, structuralism, or multiversism about sets, by discussing different conceptions of mathematical realism and rival relativistic views on the mathematical universe. They consider fundamental philosophical notions such as set, cardinal number, truth, ground, finiteness and infinity, examining how their informal conceptions can best be captured in formal theories.The philosophy of mathematics is an extremely lively field of inquiry, with extensive reaches in disciplines such as logic and philosophy of logic, semantics, ontology, epistemology, cognitive sciences, as well as history and philosophy of mathematics and science. By bringing together well-known scholars and younger researchers, the essays in this collection - prompted by the meetings of the Italian Network for the Philosophy of Mathematics (FilMat) - show how much valuable research is currently being pursued in this area, and how many roads ahead are still open for promising solutions to long-standing philosophical concerns.Promoted by the Italian Network for the Philosophy of Mathematics - FilMat

This book begins with an observation: At the time when empiricism arose and slowly established itself, the word itself had not yet been coined. It is a story of integration, appropriation and transformation more than one of mere opposition. We asked twelve authors to explore these fascinating new facets of empiricisms.

The book offers a collection of essays on various aspects of Leibniz's scientific thought, written by historians of science and world-leading experts on Leibniz. All of them have special care in framing Leibniz's work in historical context, and sometimes offer wider historical perspectives that go much beyond Leibniz's researches.

The book focuses in particular on the diverse sources of uncertainty, the different kinds of uncertainty that there are, and the diverse ways in which these uncertainties are (or could be) addressed.

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).

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;

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.