Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science are devoted to symposia, con- gresses, colloquia, monographs and collected papers on the philosophical foundations of the sciences. It is now our pleasure to include A. A. Zi- nov'ev's treatise on complex logic among these volumes. Zinov'ev is one of the most creative of modern Soviet logicians, and at the same time an innovative worker on the methodological foundations of science. More- over, Zinov'ev, although still a developing scholar, has exerted a sub- stantial and stimulating influence upon his colleagues and students in Moscow and within...

Proceedings of the 1972 Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association

The death of Imre Lakatos on February 2, 1974 was a personal and philosophical loss to the worldwide circle of his friends, colleagues and students. This volume reflects the range of his interests in mathematics, logic, politics and especially in the history and methodology of the sciences. Indeed, Lakatos was a man in search of rationality in all of its forms. He thought he had found it in the historical development of scientific knowledge, yet he also saw rationality endangered everywhere. To honor Lakatos is to honor his sharp and aggressive criticism as well as his humane warmth and his...

This is a bold, brilliant, provocative and puzzling work. It demands a radical shift in standpoint, an almost paradoxical posture in which living systems are described in terms of what lies outside the domain of descriptions. Professor Humberto Maturana, with his colleague Francisco Varela, have undertaken the construction of a systematic theoretical biology which attempts to define living systems not as they are objects of observation and description, nor even as in- teracting systems, but as self-contained unities whose only reference is to them- selves. Thus, the standpoint of description...

The role Hans Hahn played in the Vienna Circle has not always been sufficiently appreciated. It was important in several ways. In the ftrst place, Hahn belonged to the trio of the original planners of the Circle. As students at the University of Vienna and throughout the fIrst decade of this century, he and his friends, Philipp Frank and Otto Neurath, met more or less regularly to discuss philosophical questions. When Hahn accepted his fIrSt professorial position, at the University of Czernowitz in the north east of the Austrian empire, and the paths of the three friends parted, they decided...

The work collected in this book represents the results of some intensive recent work on the syntax of natural languages. The authors' differing viewpoints have in common the program of revising current conceptions of syntactic representation so that the role of transformational derivations is reduced or eliminated. The fact that the papers cross-refer to each other a good deal, and that authors assuming quite different fram{: works are aware of each other's results and address themselves to shared problems, is partly the result of a conference on the nature of syntactic representation that...

The Israel Colloquium for the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science presents before you its third volume of proceedings. The philosophy section of the volume has three main foci: the scientific explanation (Hempel and Ben-Menachem, Elster and Dascal); realism in science (Cohen and Zemach) and its implications for the problem of universals (Armstrong and Bar-Elli); and the question of demarcation: the dividing line between science and philosophy (KrUger), as well as the cognitive limits of science (Stent). There is no neat separation in this volume between essays on the history of...

In this volume of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, we present a collection of articles on philosophical issues in contemporary physics. The principal domain of these investigations is quantum physics. There are also articles on questions in classical mechanics (Hooker), and relativity theory (papapetrou and Stachel), as well as a monographic essay in evolutionary epistemology (yilmaz), applying the conceptual and mathematical understanding of special relativistic quantum field theory to set forth a theory of the evolution and adaptation of perceptual structures. Finally, in...

The main intention of this book is to bring together contributions from biology, cognitive science, and the humanities for a joint exploration of some of the main contemporary notions dealing with the understanding of origins in life, mind and society. The question of origin is inseparable from a web of hypotheses that both shape and explain us. Although origin invites examination, it always seems to elude our grasp. Notions have always been produced to interpret the genesis of life, mind, and the social order, and these notions have all remained unstable in the face of theoretical and...

The attribution of the Speculum Astronomiae to Albertus Magnus became a controversial issue only recently, when the great neo-Thomist historian Pierre Mandonnet suggested -- without any antecedents -- that the author was Roger Bacon rather than Albert. Mandonnet's theses were refuted by Lynn Thorndike and have since then been the subject of widespread discussion.
The present historiographical case-study considers this debate in the light of an analysis of texts by Albert himself, as well as other important authors, such as Bacon, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Witelo, Campanus of...