In this book the author analyzes the work of physicists, mathematicians, biologists, historians, and philosophers in order to discover the principles that underlie their various ways of knowing and in terms of which they describe the ...

This paper offers an intellectual history of the scientific realism debate during the twentieth century. The telling of the tale will explain the philosophical significance and the prospects of the scientific realism debate, through the major turns it went through. The emphasis will be on the relations between empiricism and scientific realism and on the swing from metaphysics-hostile to metaphysics-friendly versions of realism.

Philosophy of science emerged as a distinctive part of philosophy in the twentieth century. It set its own agenda, the systematic study of the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of science, and acquired its own professional structure, departments and journals. Its defining moment was the meeting (and the clash) of two courses of events: the breakdown of the Kantian philosophical tradition and the crisis in the sciences and mathematics in the beginning of the century. The emergence of the new Frege-Russell logic, (...) the arithmetisation of geometry and the collapse of classical mechanics called into question the neat Kantian scheme of synthetic a priori principles. But the thought that some a priori (framework) principles should be in place in order for science to be possible had still had a strong grip on the thinkers of the European continent. A heated intellectual debate started concerning the status of these a priori principles. The view that dominated the scene after the dust had settled was that the required framework principles were conventions. The seed of this thought was found in Poincaré’s writings, but in the hands of the Logical Positivists, it was fertilised with Frege’s conception of analyticity and Hilbert’s conception of implicit definitions. The consolidation of modern physics lent credence to the view that a priori principles can be revised; hence, a new conception of relativised a priori emerged. The linguistic turn in philosophy re-oriented the subject-matter of philosophical thinking about science to the language of science. Formal-logical methods and conceptual analysis were taken to be the privileged philosophical tools. Not only, it was thought, do they clarify and perhaps solve (or dissolve) traditional philosophical problems; they also make philosophy rigorous and set it apart from empirical science. In the 1930s, philosophy of science became the logic of science; it became synonymous to anti-psychologism, anti-historicism and anti-naturalism.. (shrink)

"Cassirer employs his remarkable gift of lucidity to explain the major ideas and intellectual issues that emerged in the course of nineteenth century scientific and historical thinking. The translators have done an excellent job in reproducing his clarity in English. There is no better place for an intelligent reader to find out, with a minimum of technical language, what was really happening during the great intellectual movement between the age of Newton and our own."—_New York Times._.

This classic work in the philosophy of physical science is an incisive and readable account of the scientific method. Pierre Duhem was one of the great figures in French science, a devoted teacher, and a distinguished scholar of the history and philosophy of science. This book represents his most mature thought on a wide range of topics.

Kant was centrally concerned with issues in the philosophy of natural science throughout his career. The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science presents his most mature reflections on these themes in the context of both his 'critical' philosophy, presented in the Critique of Pure Reason, and the natural science of his time. This volume presents a new translation, by Michael Friedman, which is especially clear and accurate. There are explanatory notes indicating some of the main connections between the argument of the (...) Metaphysical Foundations and the first Critique - as well as parallel connections to Newton's Principia. The volume is completed by an historical and philosophical introduction and a guide to further reading. (shrink)

In this double-volume work, a great modern philosopher propounds a system of thought in which Einstein's theory of relativity represents only the latest (albeit the most radical) fulfillment of the motives inherent to mathematics and the physical sciences. In the course of its exposition, it touches upon such topics as the concept of number, space and time, geometry, and energy; Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry; traditional logic and scientific method; mechanism and motion; Mayer's methodology of natural science; Richter's definite proportions; relational (...) concepts and the activity of the ego; Einstein's relativity and "reality"; and the philosophical concept of truth and its role in relativity theory. 1923 edition. (shrink)

For the second edition, the translation has been completely rewritten and the commentary has been thoroughly revised in the light of recent scholarship.

Philosophy of science emerged as a distinctive part of philosophy in the twentieth century. Its defining moment was the meeting (and the clash) of two courses of events: the breakdown of the Kantian philosophical tradition and the crisis in the sciences and mathematics in the beginning of the century. But what we now call philosophy of science has a rich intellectual history that goes back to the ancient Greeks. It is intimately connected with the efforts made by many thinkers to (...) come to terms with the distinctive kind of knowledge (episteme; scientia) that science offers. Though science proper was distinguished from natural philosophy only in the nineteenth century, the philosophy of natural philosophy has had almost the very same agenda that current philosophy of science has. (shrink)