In 1655, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes claimed he had solved the centuries-old problem of "squaring of the circle" (constructing a square equal in area to a given circle). With a scathing rebuttal to Hobbes's claims, the mathematician John Wallis began one of the longest and most intense intellectual disputes of all time. "Squaring the Circle" is a detailed account of this controversy, from the core mathematics to the broader philosophical, political, and religious issues at stake.
Hobbes believed that by recasting geometry in a materialist mold, he could solve any geometric problem and...

Chaos theory has captured scientific and popular attention. What began as the discovery of randomness in simple physical systems has become a widespread fascination with "chaotic" models of everything from business cycles to brainwaves to heart attacks. But what exactly does this explosion of new research into chaotic phenomena mean for our understanding of the world? In this timely book, Stephen Kellert takes the first sustained look at the broad intellectual and philosophical questions raised by recent advances in chaos theory its implications for science as a source of knowledge and for...

A history of population ecology which traces two generations of science and scientists from the opening of the 20th century through 1970. Kingsland chronicles the careers of key figures and the field's theoretical, empirical and institutional development, with attention paid to tensions between the descriptive studies of field biologists and later mathematical models. This text debates the rise of the new natural history and examines the ecology's future as a large-scale scientific enterprize.

We may learn from our mistakes, but Deborah Mayo argues that, where experimental knowledge is concerned, we haven't begun to learn enough. "Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge" launches a vigorous critique of the subjective Bayesian view of statistical inference, and proposes Mayo's own error-statistical approach as a more robust framework for the epistemology of experiment. Mayo genuinely addresses the needs of researchers who work with statistical analysis, and simultaneously engages the basic philosophical problems of objectivity and rationality.
Mayo has long argued for an...

Morphology the study of form is often regarded as a failed science that made only limited contributions to our understanding of the living world. Challenging this view, Lynn Nyhart argues that morphology was integral to the life sciences of the nineteenth century. Biology Takes Form traces the development of morphological research in German universities and illuminates significant institutional and intellectual changes in nineteenth-century German biology.
Although there were neither professors of morphology nor a morphologists' society, morphologists achieved influence by...

Economics today cannot predict the likely outcome of specific events any better than it could in the time of Adam Smith. This is Alexander Rosenberg's controversial challenge to the scientific status of economics. Rosenberg explains that the defining characteristic of "any" science is predictive improvability the capacity to create more precise forecasts by evaluating the success of earlier predictions and he forcefully argues that because economics has not been able to increase its predictive power for over two centuries, it is not a science."

In a provocative reassessment of one of the quintessential figures of early modern science, Rose-Mary Sargent explores Robert Boyle's philosophy of experiment, a central aspect of his life and work that became a model for mid- to late seventeenth-century natural philosophers and for many who followed them.
Sargent examines the philosophical, legal, experimental, and religious traditions among them English common law, alchemy, medicine, and Christianity that played a part in shaping Boyle's experimental thought and practice. The roots of his philosophy in his early life and education, in...

Kenneth F. Schaffner compares the practice of biological and medical research and shows how traditional topics in philosophy of science such as the nature of theories and of explanation can illuminate the life sciences. While Schaffner pays some attention to the conceptual questions of evolutionary biology, his chief focus is on the examples that immunology, human genetics, neuroscience, and internal medicine provide for examinations of the way scientists develop, examine, test, and apply theories.
Although traditional philosophy of science has regarded scientific discovery the questions...

A. Bowdoin Van Riper provides an account of how Victorian scientists raised and resolved the question of human antiquity. During the early part of the 19th century, scientists divided the history of the earth into a series of former worlds, populated by mammoths and other prehistoric animals, and a modern world, in which humans lived. According to this view, the human race was no older than 6000 years. The discovery of tools with mammoth bones, however, prompted a group of British geologists to argue in 1859 that the origin of humankind dated back to prehistoric times.