The Philosophy Of Historical Case Studies

While economic and other social science expertise is indispensable for successful public policy-making regarding global climate change, social scientists face trade-offs between the scientific credibility, policy-relevance, and legitimacy of their policy advice. From a philosophical perspective, this book systematically addresses these trade-offs and other crucial challenges facing the integrated economic assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The core idea is to scientifically explore the various practical implications of alternative climate policy pathways in an interdisciplinary manner, together with diverse stakeholders.

Part II considers relationships between the history and philosophy of engineering, and includes a general argument for the necessity of dialogue between history and philosophy. Part III focuses on engineering, ethics, and society, with chapters on engineering education and practice in China and the West. The volume as a whole marks a new stage in the emergence of the philosophy of engineering as a new regionalization of philosophy.

While the concept of epistemic virtues has previously been discussed, primarily in the contexts of the history and philosophy of science, this volume is the first to enlist the concept in bridging the gap between the histories of the sciences and the humanities.

Its aim is to provide some insights about the nature of time on the basis of the different uses of the concept of time in natural sciences. Presenting a dialogue between philosophy and science, it features a collection of papers that investigate the representation, modeling and understanding of time as they appear in physics, biology, geology and paleontology. Time of Nature and the Nature of Time It asks questions such as: whether or not the notions of time in the various sciences are reducible to the same physical time, what status should be given to timescale differences, or what are the specific epistemic issues raised by past facts in natural sciences..

The book first explores the experience of time and its relation to time in nature in a set of chapters that bring together what human experience and physics enable metaphysicians, logicians and scientists to say about time. Next, it studies time in physics, including some puzzling paradoxes about time raised by the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. In the process, it offers a new approach to the issue of time that will appeal to a wide range of readers: philosophers and historians of science, metaphysicians and natural scientists - be they scholars, advanced students or readers from an educated general audience.