Philosophy of Science The Key Thinkers [Hardcover]

All the great philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to the present day have been philosophers of science. However, this book concentrates on modern philosophy of science, starting in the nineteenth century and offering coverage of all the leading thinkers in the field including Whewell, Mill, Reichenbach, Carnap, Popper, Feyerabend, Putnam, van Fraassen, Bloor, Latour, Hacking, Cartwright and many more. Crucially the book demonstrates how the ideas and arguments of these key thinkers have contributed to our understanding of such central issues as experience and necessity, conventionalism, logical empiricism, induction and falsification, the sociology of science, and realism. Ideal for undergraduate students, the book lays the necessary foundations for a complete and thorough understanding of this fascinating subject.

James Robert Brown is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto, Canada. His previous publications includeThe Rational and the Social(Routledge, 1989),Smoke and Mirrors: How Science
Reflects Reality(Routledge, 1994),Philosophy of Mathematics(Routledge, Second Edition 2008) andThe Laboratory of the Mind(Routledge, Second Edition 2009),Who Rules in Science: A Guide to the Wars(Harvard 2001), andPlatonism, Naturalism, and Mathematical Knowledge(Routledge 2011).

Acknowledgements \ Notes on Contributors \Preface\ 1. Introduction James Robert Brown \ 2. Experience and Necessity:TheWhewell and Mill Debate Laura Snyder \ 3. Conventionalism: Poincar?, Duhem,Reichenbach Torsten Wilholt \ 4. The ViennaCircle: Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Otto Neurath Friedrich Stadler \ 5. Carl G. Hempel: Logical Empiricist Martin Curd \ 6. Anti-Inductivism as Worldview: The Philosophy of Karl PopperSteveFuller \ 7. Historical Approaches: Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyerabend MartinCarrier \ 8. The Contingency of the Causal Nexus: Ghazali and Modern Science Arun Bala \ 9.Sociology ofScience: Bloor, Collins, Latour l#(