Hermeneutics and Science The discovered paradigmatic, historical characteristics of scientific knowledge, and the role of rhetoric, interpretation and contextuality enabled us to use similar arguments in natural sciences too. Different hermeneutical-phenomenological approaches to perception, experiments, methods, discovery and justification and the genesis of science are presented.

" The task of this book is to illuminate the connections among these three classes.Transformation in the Writing is the most ambitious to date, because, as Wolff points out in the beginning, it contains writings that "fall quite obviously into three classes: autobiographical; sociology of knowledge, sociology, poetry, phenomenology, hermeneutics, critical theory; and our time and its sociological analysis. Transformation in the Writing. Kurt Wolff has written principally in two veins (in English) for the last fifty years, 1) on sociology, epistemology (sociology of knowledge) and the philosophy of sociology; and 2) on the relevance of his formulation of "surrender and catch" to human experience, particularly in its cogni­ tive forms.

Audience: Due to the broad variety of approaches the book contains important contributions both for philosophers, philosophers of science, logicians and for scientists working in the field of language and AI. The prominent issues which are addressed in this book concern the direction of time, the reality of tenses, the objectivity of becoming, the existence in time, and the logical structures of reasoning about time. It contains 18 previously unpublished papers, written by philosophers from various European countries, as well as a large introduction about the history and the main situation in the respective fields today.Perspectives on Time The papers have been written based on different approaches, partly depending on whether the authors subscribe to an A-theory or a B-theory of time.

The priorities of theoretical physicists remain with the puzzles and the cranking at hand: Quantum Field Theory (QFT) and "creation and annihilation" physics, solid state physics, - to mention only a few research areas - command the attention of those working on the research frontiers. The frustration in attracting the at­ tention of the working physicists on this problem is vividly described in Carnap's (1978) account on the reception of his ideas and efforts at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Prin­ ceton where he worked on the Two Essays on Entropy; it al­ most amounted, he thought, to a conspiracy of silence. Thermodynamics is taken for granted and is thought to be an almost depleted research area.

Among his fields of expertise are the emergence of writing, early Babylonian mathe­ matics, the history of arithmetic, the relationship between pure and applied mathematics, the theory and methods of mathematics instruction, the tran­ sition from preclassical to classical mechanics, and the history and theory of relativity. In any event it will explain why representatives of both these institutions join in an effort to introduce Peter Damerow's writings to an English speaking audi­ ence..

The main intention of this book is to bring together contributions from biology, cognitive science, and the humanities for a joint exploration of some of the main contemporary notions dealing with the understanding of origins in life,mind and society.

Heinrich Hertz, as the con­ summate experimentalist of 19th century technique and as brilliant clarifying critic of physical theory of his time, achieved one of the fulfilments but at the same time opened one of the transition points of classical physics.

Wallace translates the logical treatises contained in that manuscript and makes them intelligible to the modern reader.Hard as it is to believe, what is possibly Galileo's most important Latin manuscript was not transcribed for the National Edition of his works and so has remained hidden from scholars for centuries.

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Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof This volume is presented as a companion study to my translation of Galileo's MS 27, Galileo's Logical Treatises, which contains Galileo's appropriated questions on Aristotle's Posterior Analytics - a work only recently transcribed from the Latin autograph. Two major manuscript studies have advanced the cause of scholarship on Galileo within the past two decades. Part of the problem stems from the fragmentary nature of the manuscript in which it is preserved, part from the contents of the teaching itself, which requires a considerable propadeutic for its comprehension. Its purpose is to acquaint an English-reading audience with the teaching in those treatises.

The Structure and Growth of Scientific Knowledge For our part, we wish to point to some among them: (1) an interactive articulation of subjective and objective factors of both problems and theories in the course of scientific development; (2) a striking contrast between the explanatory power of a scientific theory and its 'resolving power', i.

Both camps look for roots, but view them with different lenses and presupposi tions. Textbook Ontology 1. Biographical Sketch 3.

Critical Rationalism, the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Most contributors use Agassi's ideas as a springboard to engage in debate on issues, or offer a contribution in an area that interests him.

. Indeed, there is part of a letter by James Clerk Maxwell to Loschmidt from this period which runs: "I am very pleased over the outstanding work of your student; in England experi­ mental physics is much neglected.2 But already he had done important work on thermal equilibrium which helped generalize Maxwell's distribution law.

In fact, it was the most fundamental mathematical discipline during the seventeenth century, and for Descartes a key notion which may have led to his novel mathematics of algebraic analysis. Especially, it shows what the concept of "mathesis universalis" meant before and during the period of Descartes and how it influenced the young Descartes..

Shortly after completing Scientific Progress, I read Rom Harre's The Principles of Scientific Thinking, in which the concept of theory is even more clearly delineated than in Campbell, being directly con­ nected to the notion of a model - as it was in my book.

Colouring Textiles is an attempt to provide a new cross-cultural comparative approach to the art of dyeing and printing with natural dyestuffs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Through a sort of anatomic dissection, the book explores the study and cultivation of dye-plants in botanical gardens and plantations, and the tacit values hidden in dyeing workshops, factories, laboratories, or national and international exhibitions.

The last decades have seen major reformations in the philosophy and history of science. Epistemology, Methodology, and the Social Sciences 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 sciences.

a partial antidote against the view which I try to defend" (1975, p. The unifying theme of this work is that of 'Correspondence, Invariance and Heuristics', after the title of a classic and seminal paper by Heinz Post, published in 1971, which is reproduced in this volume with the kind permission of the editors and publishers of Studies in History and Philosophy of Science.

Bergmann, received their doctoral degrees in theoretical physics from the University of Prague.

Burtt, Historian and Philosopher Burtt's pioneering study of the scientific revolution has proved to prophetic in its rejection of both scientism and positivism. Published in 1924, Burtt's book continues to be read in educated circles and remains both the rose and the thorn on university reading lists, raising skeptical questions about science methods and science knowledge just as it did seventy-five years ago. From his politics of conscience after World War I on through the Cold War Burtt is shown to be a man of unparalleled integrity, whose relentless search for philosophic understanding drove his more quixotic philosophical quests and steered his personal life, including its tragic dimension, toward simple virtue.

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.The Concept of Scientific Law in the Philosophy of Science and Epistemology Finally, he provides concepts for scientific laws expressing how a certain cause, due to the quantity and quality of its capacities, generates the quantitative and qualitative determinations of its manifestations. While contemporary philosophy of science deals only with the former, the author provides the concept for the reconstruction of scientific laws, where the knowledge of the phenomena enables one to grasp the quantity of their cause. He then provides the concepts for scientific laws dealing with the relation of the quantity and quality of the cause underlying phenomena to the quality and quantity of its capacities.

g.with new insights concerning the issue of a `physicalistic' language in the arguments of Neurath, Carnap and Wittgenstein; with the notion of `elementary logic'; and with rational and non-rational elements in the history of science. with Cartesian notions of mechanism in the philosophy of biology; with the language and logic of science - e. Cohen) focus on philosophical and historical issues in contemporary physics: on the origins and conceptual foundations of quantum mechanics, on the reception and understanding of Bohr's and Einstein's work, on the emergence of quantum electrodynamics, and on some of the sharp philosophical and scientific issues that arise in current scientific practice (e.

The present historiographical case-study considers this debate in the light of an analysis of texts by Albert himself, as well as other important authors, such as Bacon, Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, Witelo, Campanus of Novara, and others, which shows how widespread the general concept of the influence of the stars and other astrological ideas to be found in the Speculum were.. Most of the scientific ideas of the Middle Ages were based on principles derived from the notion of celestial influence and its consequences.

This book is a historical-epistemological study of one of the most consequential breakthroughs in the history of celestial mechanics: Robert Hooke's (1635-1703) proposal to "compoun[d] the celestial motions of the planets of a direct motion by the tangent & an attractive motion towards a centrat body" (Newton, The Correspondence li, 297.

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Much of Duhem's work as a professional scientist was closely related to the newly emerging discipline of physical chemistry. Having developed his historical account from distinctions drawn from the atomists and Aristotelians of antiquity, he places his own views of chemical combination squarely within the Aristotelian tradition.

According to Agassi, science is an integral part of culture, and both scientism and relativism ignore the cultural value of science.In Science and Culture, Joseph Agassi addresses scientism and relativism, two false philosophies that divorce science from culture in general and from tradition in particular. This work helps break the isolation of science from the rest of culture by promoting popular science and reasonable history of science.

Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory, the first volume of a two-volume book collection on Nietzsche and the Sciences, ranges from reviews of Nietzsche and the wide variety of epistemic traditions - not only pre-Socratic, but Cartesian, Leibnizian, Kantian, and post-Kantian -through essays on Nietzsche's critique of knowledge via his critique of grammar and modern culture, and culminates in an extended section on the dynamic of Nietzsche's critical philosophy seen from the perspective of Habermas and critical theory. Nietzsche, Theories of Knowledge, and Critical Theory.