Product Description: This provocative, focused, and succinct new text addresses two issues integral to the study of the philosophy of science: the rationality of science and the realism question. Students are invited to think deeply about salient issues as they explore collections of cases and examples, beginning by considering the founding document of modern science, Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, and including discussions of other key readings such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions...read more

Product Description: The Software of the Universe introduces the history and philosophy of the concept of 'laws of nature' addressing both philosophers and scientists with an interest in the methodological and philosophical issues raised by their disciplines...read more

Documents the achievements, current challenges, and status of women in more than 130 countries, addressing women's issues ranging from education to violence.

Product Description: This study examines the foundations of the European modernity in relation to the Hermetic tradition and its cosmological approach to life and knowledge. The symmetry of Dante, medicine of Paracelsus and science of Goethe form the background for this investigation of the modernist regime - its truth and method, pure and applied, its science of vivisection and technology of obsolescence...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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The development of modern science and its increasing impact on our life and culture is one of the great stories of our time. Coming to understand that story and coming to terms with the institution of modern science should be an important part of the education of every student.In The Many Faces of Science, Leslie Stevenson and Henry Byerly masterfully and painlessly provide the basic information and the philosophical reflection students need to gain such understanding. Making good use of case study methods, the authors introduce us to dozens of figures from the history of science, highlighting both heroes and villains. Providing an elementary sketch of the development of science through the lives of its practitioners, Stevenson and Byerly bring the story alive through the examination of the often mixed motives of scientists, as well as the conflicting values people bring to science and to their perceptions of its impact on society. They also explore the relationship between scientific practice and political and economic power.Brief, accessible, and rich in anecdotes, personal asides, and keen insight, The Many Faces of Science is the ideal interdisciplinary introduction for nonscientists in courses on science studies, science and society, and science and human values. It will also prove useful as supplementary reading in courses on science in philosophy, sociology, and political science.

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Product Description: The classification of knowledge is a recurring theme in Islamic scholarship. Successive generations of Muslim scholars, from al-Kindi in the ninth century to Shah Waliallah of Delhi in the eighteenth century, have devoted considerable efforts to the exposition of this theme...read more

Product Description: This collection of essays is unparalleled in the depth of its coverage of all facets of Galileo's work. A particular feature of the volume is the treatment of Galileo's relationship with the Church. It will be of particular interest to philosophers, historians of science, cultural historians and those in religious studies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The theory of nonlinear, complex systems has become by now a proven problem-solving approach in the natural sciences. And it is now also recognized that many if not most of our social, ecological, economical and political problems are essentially of a global, complex and nonlinear nature...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of modern science and early capitalism...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Having traced the origins and growth of scientific rationalism from Theogony through Ptolemy in the previous volume, Volume II begins with the fourteenth century critique of Aristotle's mechanics and ends with the development of quantum mechanics...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: A.C. Crombie sees the history of Western Science as the history of a vision and an argument, initiated by the ancient Greeks in their search for principles at once of nature and of argument itself. This scientific vision explored and controlled by argument, and the diversification of both vision and argument by scientific experience and by interaction with the wider contexts of intellectual culture, constitute the long history of European scientific thought...read more

Product Description: This is an analytical introduction to key historical and philosophical moments in the history of science, in twenty-two sections, written by a remarkably accomplished collection of authors at the forefronts of the disci plines of history and philosophy of science.

Product Description: More than any other discipline, science has shaped the modern view of the world. The purpose of this two volume study is to recount how this came to be. Beginning with a depiction of primitive forms of mentality, Volume I, Theogony through Ptolemy, traces the contributions of the Presocratics and Plato to the sustained growth of scientific rationalism, culminating in Aristotle's organismic cosmology...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This volume brings together eleven essays by the distinguished philosopher of science, Peter Achinstein. The unifying theme is the nature of the philosophical problems surrounding the postulation of unobservable entities such as light waves, molecules, and electrons...read more

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Product Description: It is widely felt outside Marxist circles that, whatever the economic and political value of Marxist teaching, its incursion into the field of science is unwarranted. This is most strongly felt in relation to natural science, but it extends also to the social sciences in so far as these tend to imitate in their techniques the methods of natural science...read more

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Product Description: Seven essays explore issues of scientific methodology in various episodes of science from Newtonian physics of the 17th and 18th century to quantum mechanics in the 20th. Addressed to scholars of the history and philosophy of science, but also accessible to general readers...read more