This user-friendly text covers key issues in the philosophy of science in an accessible and philosophically serious way. It will prove valuable to students studying philosophy of science as well as science students.
Prize-winning author Alex Rosenberg explores the philosophical problems that science raises by its very nature and method. He skilfully demonstrates that scientific explanation, laws, causation, theory, models, evidence, reductionism, probability, teleology, realism and instrumentalism actually pose the same questions that Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, Kant and their...

We can't avoid the persistent questions about the meaning of life--and the nature of reality. But science is the only means of answering them. So declares philosopher Alex Rosenberg in this bracing, surprisingly sanguine take on a world without god. The science that makes us nonbelievers, he demonstrates, tells us the nature of reality, the purpose of everything, the difference between right and wrong, how the mind works, even the direction of human history.

Is life a purely physical process? What is human nature? Which of our traits is essential to us? Exploring concepts, such as supervenience; the controversies about genocentrism and genetic determinism, the authors lay out the broad terms in which we should assess the impact of biology on human capacities, social institutions, and ethical values.

Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg's updated and substantially revised Third Edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving together lucid explanations and clear analyses, the volume is a much-used, thematically oriented introduction to the field. New features of the Third Edition include more coverage of the history of the philosophy of science, more fully developed material on the metaphysics of causal and physical necessity, more background on the contrast between empiricism...

Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg's updated and substantially revised Third Edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving together lucid explanations and clear analyses, the volume is a much-used, thematically oriented introduction to the field.

New features of the Third Edition include more coverage of the history of the philosophy of science, more fully developed material on the metaphysics of causal and physical necessity, more...