Philosophy of science

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What is 'the void'?

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

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.

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

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

In the follow-up to his acclaimed Science in the Looking Glass, Brian Davies discusses deep problems about our place in the world, using a minimum of technical jargon.

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.

What is science?

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

What does realism about the quantum state imply?

Peter Byrne tells the story of Hugh Everett III (1930-1982), whose "e;many worlds"e; theory of multiple universes has had a profound impact on physics and philosophy.

What is 'nothing'?

There have long been controversies about how it is that minds can fit into a physical universe.

Brian Skyrms presents a fascinating exploration of how fundamental signals are to our world.

Material objects persist through time and survive change.

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Not everything is black and white.

We live an information-soaked existence - information pours into our lives through television, radio, books, and of course, the Internet.

Some philosophers think physical explanations stand on their own: what happens, happens because things have the properties they do.

Daniel Garber presents an illuminating study of Leibniz's conception of the physical world.

What is 'nothing'?

Oxford Handbooks offer authoritative and up-to-date surveys of original research in a particular subject area.

In 1859 Darwin described a deceptively simple mechanism that he called "e;natural selection,"e; a combination of variation, inheritance, and reproductive success.

In recent decades, the analysis of causal relations has become a topic of central importance in analytic philosophy.

John T.

In his challenging new book Rein Taagepera argues that society needs more from social sciences than they have delivered.

As the study of time has flourished in the physical and human sciences, the philosophy of time has come into its own as a lively and diverse area of academic research.

Contemporary philosophy of mathematics offers us an embarrassment of riches.

Geoffrey Lloyd engages in a wide-ranging exploration of what we can learn from the study of ancient civilisations that is relevant to fundamental problems, both intellectual and moral, that we still face today.

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.