Philosophy of science

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 - 1913) was one of the late nineteenth century's most potent intellectual forces.

From the sheep, dog, and cockerel that were sent aloft in Montgolfier's balloon, to Galvani's frog's legs, Dolly the Sheep, the finches of the Galapagos, and even imaginary cats and simulated life forms, Pavlov's Dogs and Schrodinger's Cat explores the fascinating history of the role of living things in science.

In Embodied Minds in Action, Robert Hanna and Michelle Maiese work out a unified treatment of three fundamental philosophical problems: the mind-body problem, the problem of mental causation, and the problem of action.

John Cottingham explores central areas of Descartes's rich and wide-ranging philosophical system, including his accounts of thought and language, of freedom and action, of our relationship to the animal domain, and of human morality and the conduct of life.

Our lives, states of health, relationships, behaviour, experiences of the natural world, and the technologies that shape our contemporary existence are subject to a superfluity of competing, multi-faceted and sometimes incompatible explanations.

Special relativity provides the foundations of our knowledge of space and time.

'The god wanted everything to be good, marred by as little imperfection as possible.

The great biologist Louis Pasteur suppressed 'awkward' data because it didn't support the case he was making.

Gauge theories have provided our most successful representations of the fundamental forces of nature.

It is tempting to think that, if a person's beliefs are coherent, they are also likely to be true.

Can quantum particles be regarded as individuals, just like books, tables and people?

Every Thing Must Go argues that the only kind of metaphysics that can contribute to objective knowledge is one based specifically on contemporary science as it really is, and not on philosophers' a priori intuitions, common sense, or simplifications of science.

Many philosophers these days consider themselves naturalists, but it's doubtful any two of them intend the same position by the term.

Probabilistic models have much to offer to philosophy.

Mark Wilson presents a highly original and broad-ranging investigation of the way we get to grips with the world conceptually, and the way that philosophical problems commonly arise from this.

Descartes is commonly read as the paradigm defender of substance dualism, a theory caricatured by Ryle as the 'dogma of the ghost in the machine'.

Modern physics has revealed the universe as a much stranger place than we could have imagined.

Quantum mechanics - central not only to physics, but also to chemistry, materials science, and other fields - is notoriously abstract and difficult.

Nature's Metaphysics argues that a satisfactory philosophy of science requires a metaphysics that is based on the understanding that natural properties are essentially dispositional.

What is 'the void'?

How do scientific conjectures become laws?

Thirteen specially written essays discuss topics from the work of Bas C.

What fundamental account of the world is implicit in physical theory?

Margarita Diaz-Andreu offers an innovative history of archaeology during the nineteenth century, encompassing all its fields from the origins of humanity to the medieval period, and all areas of the world.

Finding Time for the Old Stone Age explores a century of colourful debate over the age of our earliest ancestors.

This book is a historical account of how natural philosophers and scientists have endeavoured to understand the universe at large, first in a mythical and later in a scientific context.

A collection of essays by experts in the field, exploring how nature works at every level to produce more complex and highly organized objects, systems, and organisms from much simpler components, and how our increasing understanding of this universal phenomenon of emergence can lead us to a deeper and richer appreciation of who we are as human beings and of our relationship to God.

This book presents the life and personality, the scientific and philosophical work of Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the great scientists who marked the passage from 19th- to 20th-Century physics.

Quantum physics is often perceived as a weird and abstract theory, which physicists must use in order to make correct predictions.

Physics in Oxford, 1839-1939 offers a challenging new interpretation of pre-war physics at the University of Oxford, which was far more dynamic than most historians and physicists have been prepared to believe.

This book gives an analysis of Hertz's posthumously published Principles of Mechanics in its philosophical, physical and mathematical context.

The book Modeling Reality covers a wide range of fascinating subjects, accessible to anyone who wants to learn about the use of computer modeling to solve a diverse range of problems, but who does not possess a specialized training in mathematics or computer science.

A History of Mathematics: From Mesopotamia to Modernity covers the evolution of mathematics through time and across the major Eastern and Western civilizations.

'The consciousness of knowing little, need not beget a distrust of that which he does not know.

'When Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from troubled dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous insect .

David Papineau presents a controversial view of human reason, portraying it as a normal part of the natural world, and drawing on the empirical sciences to illuminate its workings.

Much of the modern period was dominated by a `reductionist' theory of science.

Holography exploded on the scientific world in 1964, but its slow fuse had been burning much longer.

This edited volume, aimed at both students and researchers in philosophy, mathematics and history of science, highlights leading developments in the overlapping areas of philosophy and the history of modern mathematics.

Bernard Bolzano (1781-1848, Prague) was a remarkable thinker and reformer far ahead of his time in many areas, including philosophy, theology, ethics, politics, logic, and mathematics.

Epicureanism is commonly associated with a carefree view of life and the pursuit of pleasures, particularly the pleasures of the table.

The Human Sciences address problems in nature and society that often require coordinated approaches of several scientific disciplines and scholarly research, embracing the social and biological sciences, and history.

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Physics brings together cutting-edge writing by more than twenty leading authorities on the history of physics from the seventeenth century to the present day.

In The Structure of the World, Steven French articulates and defends the bold claim that there are no objects.

The idea of elegance in science is not necessarily a familiar one, but it is an important one.

The idea of elegance in science is not necessarily a familiar one, but it is an important one.

Peter Anstey presents a thorough and innovative study of John Locke's views on the method and content of natural philosophy.

A certain kind of talk is ubiquitous among both philosophers and so-called "e;ordinary people"e;: talk of one phenomenon generating or giving rise to another, or talk of one phenomenon being based in or constructed from another.

This book is about how big is the universe and how small are quarks, and what are the sizes of dozens of things between these two extremes.

This book is about how big is the universe and how small are quarks, and what are the sizes of dozens of things between these two extremes.