Books in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science series

" At another place, Kapitza meditates on the roles played by instinct, imagination, audacity, experiment, and hard work in the develop ment of science, and for a moment seems to despair at understanding the dogged arguments of great scientists: "Einstein loved to refer to God when there was no more sensible argument!"

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.

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.

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 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.

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 comprehensive volume marks a new standard in scholarship in the emerging field of the philosophy of chemistry. Philosophers, chemists, and historians of science ask some fundamental questions about the relationship between philosophy and chemistry.

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.

This volume explores the reorganisation of knowledge taking place in the course of Galileo's research process extending over a period of more than thirty years, pursued within a network of exchanges with his contemporaries, and documented by a vast collection of research notes.

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.

After his failure to replace metaphysics by a linguistic approach, Ludwig Boltzmann came to identify the philosophy of science with methodology which, in turn, he considered to be part of science itself, and thus not part of philosophy at all.

Observability and Scientific Realism It is commonly thought that the birth of modern natural science was made possible by an intellectual shift from a mainly abstract and specuJative conception of the world to a carefully elaborated image based on observations.

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

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.

Featuring contributions from leading experts, this book represents the first collection of essays on the topic of art and science in the analytic tradition of philosophy. The volume offers a very different and welcome approach to study.

Papers from a Sesquicentennial Conference

It features unique resources for students of the philosophy and history of quantum mechanics and the Copenhagen Interpretation, cognitive theory and the psychology of perception, the history and philosophy of art, and the pragmatic and historical relationships between religion and science.

Since the Niels Bohr centenary of 1985 there has been an astonishing international surge of scholarly analyses of Bohr's philosophy.

An understanding of developments in Arabic mathematics between the IXth and XVth century is vital to a full appreciation of the history of classical mathematics.

We are often told that quantum phenomena demand radical revisions of our scientific world view and that no physical theory describing well defined objects, such as particles described by their positions, evolving in a well defined way, let alone deterministically, can account for such phenomena.

Wolfgang Spohn is one of the most distinguished analytic philosophers in Germany. His work covers a huge range including epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. This collection presents 15 of his most important essays on theoretical philosophy.

This book exhibits deep philosophical quandaries and intricacies of the historical development of science lying behind a simple item of common sense in modern science: the composition of water as H2O. It offers a unique new advocacy for pluralism in science.

This book is unusual in many respects. Zilberman's legacy still awaits its true discovery and this book is a second installment to it after The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought (Kluwer, 1988). A prophetic leap to largely uncharted territories, this book could be of considerable interest for experts and novices in the field of analogy alike.

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.

, by an observer, already seems to violate the fundamental requirement which Maturana and Varela posit for the characterization of such system- namely, that they are autonomous, self-referring and self-constructing closed systems - in short, autopoietic systems in their terms.