Product Description: This vital study offers a new interpretation of Hume's famous "Of Miracles," which notoriously argues against the possibility of miracles. By situating Hume's popular argument in the context of the 18th century debate on miracles, Earman shows Hume's argument to be largely unoriginal and chiefly without merit where it is original...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The inaugural volume of the series, devoted to the work of philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, encompasses the philosophical problems of space, time, and cosmology, the nature of scientific methodology, and the foundations of psychoanalysis. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Almost from its inception, Einstein's general theory of relativity was known to sanction spacetime models harboring singularities. Until the 1960s, however, spacetime singularities were thought to be artifacts of the idealizations of the models...read more

Product Description: The inaugural volume of the Pitt-Konstanz series, devoted to the work of philosopher Adolf Grünbaum, encompasses the philosophical problems of space, time, and cosmology, the nature of scientific methodology, and the foundations of psychoanalysis.

These provocative essays by leading philosophers of science exemplify and illuminate the contemporary uncertainty and excitement in this changing field. The papers are rich in new perspectives, and their far-reaching criticisms challenge arguments long prevalent in classic philosophical problems of induction, empiricism, and realism. By turns empirical or analytic, historical or programmatic, confessional or argumentative, the authors' arguments both describe and demonstrate the fact that philosophy of science is in a ferment more intense than at any time since the heyday of logical positivism seventy years ago.

The title of this work is to be taken seriously: it is a small book for teaching students to read the language of determinism. Some prior knowledge of college-level mathematics and physics is presupposed, but otherwise the book is suitable for use in an advanced undergraduate or beginning graduate course in the philosophy of science. While writing I had in mind primarily a philosophical audience, but I hope that students and colleagues from the sciences will also find the treatment of scientific issues of interest. Though modest in not trying to reach beyond an introductory level of analysis, the work is decidedly immodest in trying to change a number of misimpressions that pervade the philosophical literature. For example, when told that classical physics is not the place to look for clean and unproblematic examples of determinism, most philosophers react with a mixture of disbelief and incomprehension. The misconcep­ tions on which that reaction is based can and must be changed.

Product Description: Testing Scientific Theories was first published in 1984. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions...read more