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

This volume addresses the question of time from the perspective of the time of nature. The book first explores the experience of time and its relation to time in nature in a set of chapters that bring together what human experience and physics enable metaphysicians, logicians and scientists to say about time.

In addition, coverage also looks at the explanatory role of mathematics and the philosophical relevance of mathematical explanation. The book will appeal to a broad mathematical and philosophical audience.

The first section is concerned with the emergence and expansion of a form of mechanical knowledge defined by us as pre-classical mechanics. The definition purports to the period roughly between the 15th and the 17th century, before classical mechanics was formulated as a coherent and comprehensive mechanical theory in the sequel of Newton's work.

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.

This book focuses on a key issue today: the role of values in technology, with special emphasis on ethical values. This topic involves the analysis of internal values in technology (as they affect objectives, processes, and outcomes) and the study of external values in technology (social, cultural, economic, ecological, etc.).

This book focuses on sciences in the universities of Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the chapters in it provide an overview, mostly from the point of view of the history of science, of the different ways universities dealt with the institutionalization of science teaching and research.

This volume considers contingency as a historical category resulting from the combination of various intellectual elements - epistemological, philosophical, material, as well as theological and, broadly speaking, intellectual.

This highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities.

By taking the brilliant career of Danish physicist-philosopher Hans Christian Orsted as their organizing theme, leading international philosophers and historians of science reveal illuminating new perspectives on the intellectual map of Europe in the age of revolution and romanticism.

In this time when the traditional role of reason in the Western thought is being undermined, Popper's non-foundationist model of reason brings the Enlightenment message into a new perspective.

This volume is put together in honor of a distinguished historian of science, Kostas Gavroglu, whose work has won international acclaim, and has been pivotal in establishing the discipline of history of science in Greece, its consolidation in other countries of the European Periphery, and the constructive dialogue of these emerging communities with an extended community of international scholars.The papers in the volume reflect Gavroglüs broad range of intellectual interests and touch upon significant themes in recent history and philosophy of science. They include topics in the history of modern physical sciences, science and technology in the European periphery, integrated history and philosophy of science, historiographical considerations, and intersections with the history of mathematics, technology and contemporary issues. They are authored by eminent scholars whose academic and personal trajectories crossed with Gavroglüs. The book will interest historians and philosophers of science and technology alike, as well as science studies scholars, and generally readers interested in the role of the sciences in the past in various geographical contexts.

This volume follows the successful book, which has helped to introduce and spread the Philosophy of Chemistry to a wider audience of philosophers, historians, science educators as well as chemists, physicists and biologists.

This book is a study of the scientific revolution as a movement of amateur science. It also shows what was missing in the scientific organization of science and why it gave way to professional science in stages.

The volume addresses the following disciplines: higher education, history and sociology of science, philosophy of science, history of medicine, public administration, policy studies, Jewish studies, and economics.

This book brings together a broad spectrum of authors, both from inside and from outside Cuba, who describe the development of Cuba's scientific system from the colonial period to the present.

This co-edited volume compares Chinese and Western experiences of engineering, technology, and development. Part III focuses on engineering, ethics, and society, with chapters on engineering education and practice in China and the West.

This book presents a collection of studies by Romanian philosophers, addressing foundational issues currently debated in contemporary philosophy of science. The book is useful to those interested in the philosophy of real science, but also to those interested in Romanian philosophy.

This book examines the textual, social, cultural, practical and institutional environments to which the expression "teaching and learning contexts" refers.

In this book, Kaufmann develops a general theory of knowledge of the social sciences in his role as a cross-border commuter between Husserl's phenomenology, Kelsen's pure theory of law and the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle.

This highly multidisciplinary collection discusses an increasingly important topic among scholars in science and technology studies: objectivity in science. Topics addressed in the book include the nature and value of scientific objectivity, the history of objectivity, and objectivity in scientific journals and communities.

This volume is put together in honor of a distinguished historian of science, Kostas Gavroglu, whose work has won international acclaim, and has been pivotal in establishing the discipline of history of science in Greece, its consolidation in other countries of the European Periphery, and the constructive dialogue of these emerging communities with an extended community of international scholars.The papers in the volume reflect Gavroglu's broad range of intellectual interests and touch upon significant themes in recent history and philosophy of science. They include topics in the history of modern physical sciences, science and technology in the European periphery, integrated history and philosophy of science, historiographical considerations, and intersections with the history of mathematics, technology and contemporary issues. They are authored by eminent scholars whose academic and personal trajectories crossed with Gavroglu's. The book will interest historians and philosophers of science and technology alike, as well as science studies scholars, and generally readers interested in the role of the sciences in the past in various geographical contexts.

This volume explores questions about conceptual change from both scientific and philosophical viewpoints by analyzing the recent history of evolutionary developmental biology.

This volume follows the successful book, which has helped to introduce and spread the Philosophy of Chemistry to a wider audience of philosophers, historians, science educators as well as chemists, physicists and biologists.

This book brings together young researchers from a variety of fields within mathematics, philosophy and logic.

In accordance with the former, mathematics is assigned an active and even shaping role in the sciences, but at the same time, employing mathematics as a tool is taken to be independent from the possible mathematical structure of the objects under consideration.

This book explores how physicists, astronomers, chemists, and historians in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employed ¿epistemic virtues¿ such as accuracy, objectivity, and intellectual courage. In doing so, it takes the first step in providing an integrated history of the sciences and humanities. It assists in addressing such questions as:What kind of perspective would enable us to compare organic chemists in their labs with paleographers in the Vatican Archives, or anthropologists on a field trip with mathematicians poring over their formulas?While the concept of epistemic virtues has previously been discussed, primarily in the contexts of the history and philosophy of science, this volume is the first to enlist the concept in bridging the gap between the histories of the sciences and the humanities. Chapters research whether epistemic virtues can serve as a tool to transcend the institutional disciplinary boundaries and thus help to attain a ¿post-disciplinary¿ historiography of modern knowledge. Readers will gain a contextualization of epistemic virtues in time and space as the book shows that scholars themselves often spoke in terms of virtue and vice about their tasks and accomplishments.  This collection of essays opens up new perspectives on questions, discourses, and practices shared across the disciplines, even at a time when the neo-Kantian distinction between sciences and humanities enjoyed its greatest authority. Scholars including historians of science and of the humanities, intellectual historians, virtue epistemologists, and philosophers of science will all find this book of particular interest and value.

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