Philosophy of Science

This new study provides a refreshing look at the issue of exceptions and shows that much of the problem stems from a failure to recognize at least two kinds of exception-ridden law: ceteris paribus la

This book is a critical survey of and guidebook to the literature on biological functions. It ties in with current debates and developments, and at the same time, it looks back on the state of discour

This work breaks new ground by carefully distinguishing the concepts of belief, confirmation, and evidence and then integrating them into a better understanding of personal and scientific epistemologi

The essays contained in this collection represent an attempt by scholars from Canada, Germany and Mexico to come to grips with the innovative work of the American philosopher and anthropologist, Lawre

Sacred Science is an analysis of post-war discourses concerning health and illness. These discourses are an attempt to grasp the meaning of health in our modern human condition, and as such they provi

The ideal of higher humanism challenges our modern civilization and its diminished image of the human being. A critique of the ideologies of "bourgeois humanism" provides a pathway toward the renascen

The Theory of Social Pulsation is a new social theory elaborated from the social phenomenology and philosophy of sciences’ standpoint. It represents an innovative interpretation of social phenomena po

This book explores the life of Galileo Galilei through a philosophical and scientific lens, utilizing an innovative hermeneutic perspective that places his work in the wider context of early modern he

This volume discusses some crucial ideas of the founders of the analytic philosophy: Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, or the ‘golden trio’. The book shows how these ‘old’ ideas

Patrick Aidan Heelan’s The Observable offers the reader a completely articulated development of his 1965 philosophy of quantum physics, Quantum Mechanics and Objectivity.

A suite of questions concerning fundamentality lies at the heart of contemporary metaphysics. The relation of grounding, thought to connect the more to the less fundamental, sits at the heart of those debates in turn. Since most contemporary metaphysicians embrace the doctrine of physicalism and thus hold that reality is fundamentally physical, a natural question is how physics can inform the current debates over fundamentality and grounding. This Element introduces the reader to the concept of grounding and some of the key issues that animate contemporary debates around it, such as the question of whether grounding is 'unified' or 'plural' and whether there exists a fundamental level of reality. It moves on to show how resources from physics can help point the way towards their answers - thus furthering the case for a naturalistic approach to even the most fundamental of questions in metaphysics.

This Element explores the Bayesian approach to the logic and epistemology of scientific reasoning. Section 1 introduces the probability calculus as an appealing generalization of classical logic for uncertain reasoning. Section 2 explores some of the vast terrain of Bayesian epistemology. Three epistemological postulates suggested by Thomas Bayes in his seminal work guide the exploration. This section discusses modern developments and defenses of these postulates as well as some important criticisms and complications that lie in wait for the Bayesian epistemologist. Section 3 applies the formal tools and principles of the first two sections to a handful of topics in the epistemology of scientific reasoning: confirmation, explanatory reasoning, evidential diversity and robustness analysis, hypothesis competition, and Ockham's Razor.