Science / Philosophy & Social Aspects

Total 34 results found.

Shifting Standards

Shifting Standards

Experiments in Particle Physics in the Twentieth Century

Allan Franklin provides an overview of notable experiments in particle physics. Using papers published in Physical Review, the journal of the American Physical Society, as his basis, Franklin details the experiments themselves, their data collection, the events witnessed, and the interpretation of results. From these papers, he distills the dramatic changes to particle physics experimentation from 1894 through 2009.

Scientific Understanding

Scientific Understanding

Philosophical Perspectives

Examines the essential role of understanding in the scientific process, through three key topics: understanding and explanation, understanding and models, and understanding in scientific practice.

On Leibniz

On Leibniz

Expanded Edition

On Leibniz examines many aspects of Leibniz’s work and life. This expanded edition adds new chapters that explore Leibniz’s revolutionary deciphering machine; his theoretical interest in cryptography and its ties to algebra; his thoughts on eternal recurrence theory; his rebuttal of the thesis of improvability in the world and cosmos; and an overview of American scholarship on Leibniz.

Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science

Scientific Models in Philosophy of Science

A comprehensive philosophical analysis of the use of scientific models in historic and contemporary contexts.

The World Observed/The World Conceived

The World Observed/The World Conceived

Provides an innovative analysis of the nature and interplay of observation and conceptualization. Radder shows that observation is always conceptually interpreted, and concepts affect the way observational processes are conducted in the first place.

Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses

Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses

Spinoza and Young Wittgenstein Converse on Immanence and Its Logic

More than 250 years separate the publication of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In Peeling Potatoes or Grinding Lenses, Aristides Baltas contends that these works bear a striking similarity based on the idea of “radical immanence.” He analyzes the structure and content of each treatise, the authors’ intentions, the limitations and possibilities afforded by scientific discovery in their respective eras, their radical opposition to prevailing philosophical views, and draws out the particulars, as well as the implications, of the arresting match between the two.

Science Transformed?

Science Transformed?

Debating Claims of an Epochal Break

Advancements in computing, instrumentation, robotics, digital imaging, and simulation modeling have changed science into a technology-driven institution. Government, industry, and society increasingly exert their influence over science, raising questions of values and objectivity. These and other profound changes have led many to speculate that we are in the midst of an epochal break in scientific history. This edited volume presents an in-depth examination of these issues from philosophical, historical, social, and cultural perspectives. It offers arguments both for and against the epochal break thesis.

The Will To Create

The Will To Create

Goethe’s Philosophy of Nature

Better known as a poet and dramatist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was also a learned philosopher and natural scientist. Astrida Orle Tantillo offers the first comprehensive analysis of his natural philosophy, which she contends is rooted in creativity.

Logical Empiricism

Logical Empiricism

Historical and Contemporary Perspectives

This collection of essays reexamines the origins of logical empiricism and offers fresh insights into its relationship to contemporary philosophy of science.

World Changes

World Changes

Thomas Kuhn and the Nature of Science

Prominent philosophers analyze the work of Thomas Kuhn, including his monumental study The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, from a broad perspective, comparing earlier logical empiricism and logical positivism with the new philosophy inspired by Kuhn in the early 1960s.

Cognitive Economy

Cognitive Economy

The Economic Dimension of the Theory of Knowledge

Nicholas Rescher outlines a general theory for the cost-effective use of intellectual resources, and discusses the requirements of cooperation, communication, cognitive importance, cognitive economy, and then applies his model to several case studies.

Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal

Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal

Douglas challenges the traditional value-free ideal, and proposes a new ideal for values in science. She argues that the distinction between junk science and sound science lies in the roles values play at key points throughout science, and that constraining those roles is central to protecting the integrity and objectivity of science.

Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy

Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy

Gregor Mendel’s “Experiments in Plant-Hybridization,” presented in 1865, became the foundation of modern genetics. Did his research follow the rigors of real scientific inquiry, or was Mendel’s data too good to be true-the product of doctored statistics? In this book, leading experts present their conclusions on the legendary controversy surrounding the challenge to Mendel’s findings by British statistician and biologist R. A. Fisher. In 1936, Fisher suggested that Mendel’s data could have been falsified in order to support his expectations.This volume includes an overview of the controversy; the original papers of Mendel and Fisher; four of the most important papers on the debate; and new updates, by the authors, of the latter four papers, making this book the definitive last word on the subject.

No Easy Answers

No Easy Answers

Science and the Pursuit of Knowledge

Offers an accurate picture of science through the examination of nontechnical case studies which illustrate the various roles that experiment plays in science. Examines both sucessful and unsucessful experiments to show how scientists use experimental evidence and critical discussion to expand our knowlege of the natural world.

Four Decades of Scientific Explanation

Four Decades of Scientific Explanation

First published in 1989, this book presents and analyzes the dramatic changes in philosophical conceptions of scientific explanation after the landmark 1948 essayStudies in the Logic of Explanation by Carl Hempel and Paul Oppenheim.

Total 34 results found.