Abstract
This book successfully achieves to serve two different purposes. On the one hand, it is
a readable physics-based introduction into the philosophy of science, written in an
informal and accessible style. The author, himself a professor of physics at the
University of Notre Dame and active in the philosophy of science for almost twenty
years, carefully develops his metatheoretical arguments on a solid basis provided by
an extensive survey along the lines of the historical development of physics. On the
other hand, this book supplies one long argument for Cushing´s own attitude in the
philosophy of science. While former studies of the author, from which this book draws
in part, focused each on one special episode in the history of science, this book gathers
case material from many different parts of physics and epochs. The main goal of this
book is ”to impress upon the reader the essential and ineliminable role that
philosophical considerations have played in the actual practice of science” (p. xv)