Philosophically, there is a book which was a tremendous experience for me: Eino Kaila's hychology of the Person ality _ His thesis that man lives strictly according to his needs - negative and positive - was shattering to me, but terribly true. And I built on this ground. Ingmar Bergman J 1. This introductory essay is neither intended to be a full presentation nor to be a critical evaluation of the contributions to philosophy made by Eino Kaila. Kaila's work will speak to the reader through the four papers here published in English translation from the German. They belong in the tra dition of...

This volume is dedicated to Mario Bunge in honor of his sixtieth birthday. Mario Bunge is a philosopher of great repute, whose enormous output includes dozens of books in several languages, which will culminate with his Treatise on Basic Philosophy projected in seven volumes, four of which have already appeared Reidel, I 974ff. ]. He is known for his works on research methods, the foundations of physics, biology, the social sciences, the diverse applications of mathematical methods and of systems analysis, and more. Bunge stands for exact philosophy, classical liberal social philosophy,...

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...

The philosophical writings of Otto Neurath, and their central themes, have been described many times, by Carnap in his authobiographical essay, by Ayer and Morris and Kraft decades ago, by Haller and Hegselmann and Nemeth and others in recent years. How extraordinary Neurath's insights were, even when they perhaps were more to be seen as conjectures, aperfus, philosophical hypotheses, tools to be taken up and used in the practical workshop of life; and how prescient he was. A few examples may be helpful: (1) Neurath's 1912 lecture on the conceptual critique of the idea of a pleasure maximum ...

To celebrate Adolf Griinbaum's sixtieth birthday by offering him this bouquet of essays written for this purpose was the happy task of an autonomous Editorial Committee: Wesley C. Salmon, Nicholas Rescher, Larry Laudan, Carl G. Hempel, and Robert S. Cohen. To present the book within the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science was altogether fitting and natural, for Griinbaum has' been friend and supporter of philosophy of science at Boston University for twenty-five years, and unofficial godfather to the Boston Colloquium. To regret that we could not include contributions from all his...

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,...

Within the last ten years, the interest of historians and philosophers of science in the epistemological writings of the Polish medical microbiologist Ludwik Fleck (1896-1961), who had up to then been almost completely unknown, has advanced with great strides. His main writings on epistemological questions were published in the mid-1930's, but they remained almost unnoticed. Today, however, one may rightly call Fleck a 'classical' figure both of episte- mology and of the historical sociology of science, one whose works are comparable with Popper's Logic of Scientific Discovery or Merton's...

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

The Law of Causality and its Limits was the principal philosophical work of the physicist turned philosopher, Philipp Frank. Born in Vienna on March 20, 1884, Frank died in Cambridge, Massachusetts on July 21, 1966. He received his doctorate in 1907 at the University of Vienna in theoretical physics, having studied under Ludwig Boltzmann; his sub sequent research in physics and mathematics was represented by more than 60 scientific papers. Moreover his great success as teacher and expositor was recognized throughout the scientific world with publication of his collaborative Die...