Philosophy of Science An Historical Anthology

by McGrew, Timothy; Alspector-Kelly, Marc; Allhoff, Fritz

• ISBN13: 9781405175432
• ISBN10: 1405175435
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-05-04
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell

Summary

Philosophers of science ask various questions regarding the structures and aims of scientific reasoning, whether as practiced or as they should be. Despite the status that these inquiries realized in the 20th century, they have long traditions. Scientists since antiquity have investigated, not just the natural order that is their primary subject matter, but also the nature of scientific inquiry itself. Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology represents primary source material from throughout this tradition, as well as extensive commentary reflecting upon those materials. By combining excerpts from key historical writings with insightful running commentary by experts, this distinctive new volume points out the common strands running through some 2,500 years of scientific and philosophical debate. Beginning with the Ancient Greeks, Part 1 begins by examining the roots of ancient and medieval philosophy of science before proceeding to the Scientific Revolution, with extensive coverage of scientists like Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton as well as classic modern philosophers like Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Part 1 concludes with a generous survey of 19th and early 20th century philosophers and scientists such as Herschel, Lyell, Darwin, Peirce and Einstein. Part 2 covers the 20th-century philosophy of science, first laying out the foundations of logical positivism and the emergence of the "received view" and then tracing challenges to the received view and the impact of that downfall on issues in contemporary philosophy of science, such as confirmation and observation, methodology, and realism. Unmatched in breadth and depth, and offering extensive and accessible commentary, Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology is a comprehensive work that will take the reader on a grand tour of the philosophy of science from antiquity to the modern age.

Author Biography

Timothy McGrew is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Philosophy at Western Michigan University.

Marc Alspector-Kelly is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Michigan University.

Fritz Allhoff is Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Mallinson Institute for Science Education, and Director of the History and Philosophy of Science Workgroup at Western Michigan University.

Table of Contents

List of Figures

Notes on Editors

Personal Acknowledgments

Text Acknowledgments

Introduction

Unit 1 The Ancient and Medieval Periods

Atoms and Empty Space

Letter to Herodotus: Epicurus

The Paradoxes of Motion: Zeno

PlatoÆs Cosmology: Plato

The Structure and Motion of the Heavenly Spheres: Aristotle

Change, Natures, and Causes: Aristotle

Scientific Inference and the Knowledge of Essential Natures: Aristotle

The Cosmos and the Shape and Size of the Earth: Aristotle

The Divisions of Nature and the Divisions of Knowledge: Aristotle

On Methods of Inference: Philodemus

The Explanatory Power of Atomism: Lucretius

The Earth: Its Size, Shape, and Immobility

The Weaknesses of Hypotheses: Proclus

Projectile Motion

Free Fall

Against the Reality of Epicycles and Eccentrics

Impetus and its Applications

The Possibility of a Rotating Earth

Unit 2 The Scientific Revolution

The Nature and Grounds of the Copernican System

The Unsigned Letter

The Motion of the Earth

The New Star

A Man Ahead of His Time

On Arguments about a Moving Earth

Eight Minutes of Arc

Tradition and Experience

A Moving Earth Is More Probable Than the Alternative

The Ship and the Tower

The Copernican View Vindicated

The "Corpuscular" Philosophy

Successful Hypotheses and High Probability

Inductive Methodology

Space, Time, and the Elements of Physics

Four Rules of Reasoning

General Scholium

The System of the World

Unit 3 The Modern Period

The Inductive Method

Rules for the Discovery of Scientific Truth

Rationalism and Scientific Method

Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits

The Principle of Least Action

Space, Time, and Symmetry

The Problem of Induction

The Nature of Cause and Effect

The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science

Unit 4 Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

The Nature of Scientific Explanation

Determinism, Ignorance, and Probability

Hypotheses, Data, and Crucial Experiments

An Empiricist Account of Scientific Discovery

Against Pure Empiricism

The Causes Behind the Phenomena

Catastrophist Geology

Uniformitarian Geology

The Explanatory Scope of the Evolutionary Hypothesis

Induction as a Self-Correcting Process

The Nature of Abduction

The Role of Hypotheses in Physical Theory

Against Crucial Experiments

On the Method of Theoretical Physics

Introduction

Unit 5 Positivism and the Received View

Theory and Observation

Scientific Explanation

Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology

The Pragmatic Vindication of Induction

Dissolving the Problem of Induction

Unit 6 After the Received View

Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance

The Raven Paradox

Two Dogmas of Empiricism

The New Riddle of Induction

What Theories Are Not

On Observation

The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities

Unit 7 After the Received View

Science: Conjectures and Refutations

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Science and Pseudoscience

Unit 8 After the Received View: Explanation

Counterexamples to the D-N and I-S Models of Explanation

The Statistical Relevance Model of Explanation

Why Ask, "Why"?

Explanatory Unification

Unit 9 After the Received View: The Realism Debate

The Current Status of Scientific Realism

A Confutation of Convergent Realism

Constructive Empiricism

The Natural Ontological Attitude

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