The last decades have seen major reformations in the philosophy and history of science. What has been called 'post-positivist' philosophy of science has introduced radically new concerns with historical, social, and valuative components of scientific thought in the natural sciences, and has raised up the demons of relativism, subjectivism and sociologism to haunt the once- calm precincts of objectivity and realism. Though these disturbances intruded upon what had seemed to be the logically well-ordered domain of the philoso- phy of the natural sciences, they were no news to the social...

These essays on the conceptual understanding of modern physics strike directly at some of the principal difficulties faced by contemporary philos- ophers of physical science. Moreover, they reverberate to earlier and classical struggles with those difficulties. Each of these essays may be seen as both a commentary on our predecessors and an original analytic interpretation. They come from work of the past decade, most from meetings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, and they demonstrate again how problematic the fundamentals of our understanding of nature still are. The...

This selection of papers that were presented (or nearly so ) to the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science during the seventies fairly re- presents some of the most disturbing issues of scientific knowledge in these years. To the distant observer, it may seem that the defense of rational standards, objective reference, methodical self-correction, even the distin- guishing of the foolish from the sensible and the truth-seeking from the ideological, has nearly collapsed. In fact, the defense may be seen to have shifted; the knowledge business came under scrutiny decades ago and,...

The Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science began 2S years ago as an interdisciplinary, interuniversity collaboration of friends and colleagues in philosophy, logic, the natural sciences and the social sciences, psychology, religious studies, arts and literature, and often the celebrated man-in-the- street. Boston University came to be the home base. Within a few years, pro- ceedings were seen to be candidates for publication, first suggested by Gerald Holton for the journal Synthese within the Synthese Library, both from the D. Reidel Publishing Company of Dordrecht, then and now in...

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...

Proceedings of the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science, 1962-1964

In three volumes, a distinguished group of scholars from a variety of disciplines in the natural and social sciences, the humanities and the arts contribute essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen, on the occasion of his 70th birthday. The range of the essays, as well as their originality, and their critical and historical depth, pay tribute to the extraordinary scope of Professor Cohen's intellectual interests, as a scientist-philosopher and a humanist, and also to his engagement in the world of social and political practice.
The essays presented in Physics, Philosophy, and the...

The essays in this Festschrift are celebrations of the human mind in its manifold expressions - philosophical, scientific, historical, aesthetic, political - and in its various modes - analytical, systematic, critical, imaginative, constructive. They are offered to Robert S. Cohen on the occasion of his 70th birthday, in acknowledgment of his own extra- ordinary participation in the life of the mind, and of his unfailing encouragement and facilitation of the participation of others. It is fitting that these volumes should appear in the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, the series...

The last decades have seen major reformations in the philosophy and history of science. What has been called 'post-positivist' philosophy of science has introduced radically new concerns with historical, social, and valuative components of scientific thought in the natural sciences, and has raised up the demons of relativism, subjectivism and sociologism to haunt the once- calm precincts of objectivity and realism. Though these disturbances intruded upon what had seemed to be the logically well-ordered domain of the philoso- phy of the natural sciences, they were no news to the social...

This 1977 text establishes Feuerbach as much more than a transitional figure between Hegel and Marx or an influence on important later developments.