Philosophy of Science: The Key Thinkers - Hardcover

As a discipline, the philosophy of science is as old as philosophy itself. Philosophy of Science: The Key Thinkers offers a comprehensive historical overview of this fascinating field. Twelve specially commissioned essays introduce and explore the contributions of those philosophers who have shaped the subject and the central issues and arguments therein. 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 include The Rational and the Social (Routledge, 1989), Smoke and Mirrors: How Science Reflects Reality (Routledge, 1994), Philosophy of Mathematics (Routledge, Second Edition 2008) and The Laboratory of the Mind (Routledge, Second Edition 2009).