Australia and New Zealand boast an active community of scholars working in the field of history, philosophy and social studies of science. Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Seien ce aims to provide a distinctive publication of essays on a connected outlet for their work. Each volume comprises a group theme, edited by an Australian or a New Zealander with special expertise in that particular area. In each volume, a majority of the contributors is from Australia or New Zealand. Contributions from elsewhere are by no means ruled out, however, and are indeed actively encouraged...

Causation and Laws of Nature is a collection of articles which represents current research on the metaphysics of causation and laws of nature, mostly by authors working in or active in the Australasian region. The book provides an overview of current work on the theory of causation, including counterfactual, singularist, nomological and causal process approaches. It also covers work on the nature of laws of nature, with special emphasis on the scientific essentialist theory that laws of nature are, at base, the fundamental dispositions or capacities of natural kinds of things....

This volume brings together ten original, thematically-related papers, written by prominent figures in the philosophy of science in Australasia and elsewhere. The contributed papers are focused on two fundamental issues in contemporary philosophy of science, the status of scientific realism and the relationship between science and commonsense. The contemporary scientific realism debate turns on the viability of the claims that science aims at truth and that we can justifiably believe that science has achieved or approximated this aim. Several papers in the collection constitute original...

Only in fairly recent years has History and Philosophy of Science been recognized - though not always under that name - as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour. Previously, in the Australasian region as elsewhere, those few individuals working within this broad area of inquiry found their base, both intellectually and socially, where they could. In fact, the institutionali- zation of History and Philosophy of Science began comparatively early in Australia. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne immediately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other...

"Cartesian Empiricisms "considers the role Cartesians played in the acceptance of experiment in natural philosophy during the seventeenth century. It aims to correct a partial image of Cartesian philosophers as paradigmatic system builders who failed to meet challenges posed by the new science's innovative methods. Studies in this volume argue that far from being strangers to experiment, many Cartesians used and integrated it into their natural philosophies. Chapter 1 reviews the historiographies of early modern philosophy, science, and Cartesianism and their recent critiques. The first part...

The institutionalization of History and Philosophy of Science as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour began comparatively early - though not always under that name - in the Australasian region. An initial lecturing appointment was made at the University of Melbourne immediately after the Second World War, in 1946, and other appointments followed as the subject underwent an expansion during the 1950s and 1960s similar to that which took place in other parts of the world. Today there are major Departments at the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales and the University of...

Walter Charleton is an intriguing character--he flits through the diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, the correspondence of Margaret Cavendish, and his texts appear in the libraries of better-known contemporaries. We catch sight of him 1 conversing with Pepys about teeth, arguing with Inigo Jones about the origin of 2 Stonehenge, being lampooned in contemporary satire, stealing from the Royal Society, and embarrassing himself in anatomical procedures. While extremely active in a broad range of Royal Society investigations, his main discovery there seems to have been that tadpoles turned into frogs....

One of the hallmarks of the modern world has been the stunning rise of the natural sciences. The exponential expansion of scientific knowledge and the accompanying technology that so impact on our daily lives are truly remarkable. But what is often taken for granted is the enviable epistemic-credit rating of scientific knowledge: science is authoritative, science inspires confidence, science is right. Yet it has not always been so. In the seventeenth century the situation was markedly different: competing sources of authority, shifting disciplinary boundaries, emerging modes of experimental...

The aim of this book is to explore and understand the activities undertaken by the Florentine Accademia del Cimento, one of Europe's first scientific societies. The Cimento operated for ten years, between 1657 and 1667, and during that time performed many experiments and observations in physics and astronomy, rivalling the achievements of the Royal Society of London and the Parisian Academie Royale des Sciences. This book will attempt to sift through the ava- able primary evidence, as well as secondary accounts of the Cimento's activities, in order to examine the intellectual concerns that...