Realism is an enlightening story, a tale which enriches our experience and makes it more intelligible. Yet this wonderful picture of humanity's best efforts at knowledge has been badly bruised by numerous critics. James Robert Brown in Smoke and Mirrors fights back against figures such as Richard Rorty, Bruno Latour, Michael Ruse and Hilary Putnam who have attacked realist accounts of science. But this volume is not wholly devoted to combating Rorty and others who blow smoke in our eyes; the second half is concerned with arguing that there are some amazing ways in which science...
Realism is an enlightening story, a tale which enriches our experience and makes it more intelligible. Yet this wonderful picture of humanity's best e...
Realism is an enlightening story, a tale which enriches our experience and makes it more intelligible. Yet this wonderful picture of humanity's best efforts at knowledge has been badly bruised by numerous critics. James Robert Brown in Smoke and Mirrors fights back against figures such as Richard Rorty, Bruno Latour, Michael Ruse and Hilary Putnam who have attacked realist accounts of science. But this volume is not wholly devoted to combating Rorty and others who blow smoke in our eyes; the second half is concerned with arguing that there are some amazing ways in which science...
Realism is an enlightening story, a tale which enriches our experience and makes it more intelligible. Yet this wonderful picture of humanity's best e...
Philosophy of Mathematics is an excellent introductory text. This student friendly book discusses the great philosophers and the importance of mathematics to their thought. It includes the following topics: * the mathematical image * platonism * picture-proofs * applied mathematics * Hilbert and Godel * knots and nations * definitions * picture-proofs and Wittgenstein * computation, proof and conjecture. The book is ideal for courses on philosophy of mathematics and logic.
Philosophy of Mathematics is an excellent introductory text. This student friendly book discusses the great philosophers and the importance o...
What if something as seemingly academic as the so-called science wars were to determine how we live?
This eye-opening book reveals how little we've understood about the ongoing pitched battles between the sciences and the humanities--and how much may be at stake. James Brown's starting point is C. P. Snow's famous book, Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, which set the terms for the current debates. But that little book did much more than identify two new, opposing cultures, Brown contends: It also claimed that scientists are better qualified than nonscientists to...
What if something as seemingly academic as the so-called science wars were to determine how we live?
The best philosophy of science during the last generation has been highly historical; and the best history of science, highly philosophical. No one has better exemplified this intimate relationship between history and philosophy than has Robert E. Butts in his work. Through- out his numerous writings, science, its philosophy, and its history have been treated as a seamless web. The result has been a body of work that is sensitive in its conception, ambitious in its scope, and illuminat- ing in its execution. Not only has his work opened new paths of inquiry, but his enthusiasm for the...
The best philosophy of science during the last generation has been highly historical; and the best history of science, highly philosophical. No one ha...
All the great philosophers from Plato and Aristotleto the present day have been philosophers of science. However, this bookconcentrates on modern philosophy of science, starting in the nineteenthcentury and offering coverage of all the leading thinkers in the fieldincluding Whewell, Mill, Reichenbach, Carnap, Popper, Feyerabend, Putnam, van Fraassen, Bloor, Latour, Hacking, Cartwright and many more. Crucially the book demonstrates howthe ideas and arguments of these key thinkers have contributed to ourunderstanding of such central issues as experience and necessity, conventionalism,...
All the great philosophers from Plato and Aristotleto the present day have been philosophers of science. However, this bookconcentrates on moder...
This remarkable collaboration between a mathematical physicist and a philosopher of science is concerned with foundational and conceptual issues in seismology. Their aim is to present mathematical, physical, and philosophical topics in a clear way and to clarify them when this is possible. They provide an extensive philosophical discussion of the methods of science and show how seismology fits in. They explain with care and precision the basic structure of seismology, which is built on classical continuum mechanics. Not only do they explain how various models work in seismology, but they...
This remarkable collaboration between a mathematical physicist and a philosopher of science is concerned with foundational and conceptual issues in se...
James Robert Brown Melanie Frappier Letitia Meynell
From Lucretius throwing a spear beyond the boundary of the universe to Einstein racing against a beam of light, thought experiments stand as a fascinating challenge to the necessity of data in the empirical sciences. Are these experiments, conducted uniquely in our imagination, simply rhetorical devices or communication tools or are they an essential part of scientific practice? This volume surveys the current state of the debate and explores new avenues of research into the epistemology of thought experiments.
From Lucretius throwing a spear beyond the boundary of the universe to Einstein racing against a beam of light, thought experiments stand as a fascina...
