Philosophy & Social Aspects

This work examines the place of science in American politics and society. Dispelling the myth of scientific purity and detachment, Daniel S. Greenberg documents the political processes that underpinned government funding of science from the 1940s to the...

Martin Gardner-"one of the most brilliant men and gracious writers I have ever known," wrote Stephen Jay Gould-is the wittiest, most devastating debunker of scientific fraud and chicanery of our time. In this new book Gardner explores startling...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780750336291Author Panagiotis CharitosFormat HardbackPage Count 927Imprint Institute of Physics PublishingPublisher Institute of Physics Publishing

How analyzing scientific practices can alter debates on the relationship between science and reality Numerous scholarly works focus solely on scientific metaphysics or biological practice, but few attempt to bridge the two subjects. This volume, the...

Science is the most reliable means available for understanding the world around us and our place in it. But, since science draws conclusions based on limited empirical evidence, there is always a chance that a scientific inference will be incorrect. That...

Humanity's physical design flaws have long been apparent--we get hemorrhoids and impacted wisdom teeth, for instance--but do the imperfections extend down to the level of our genes? Inside the Human Genome is the first book to examine the philosophical...

Surveying both historical debates and modern physics, Barry Dainton evaluates the central arguments in a clear and unintimidating way that keeps conceptual issues comprehensible to students with little scientific or mathematical training and makes the...

For forty years, beginning with the publication of the first modern English translation of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Stillman Drake was the most original and productive scholar of Galileo's scientific work. During those years,...

For forty years, beginning with the publication of the first modern English translation of the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Stillman Drake was the most original and productive scholar of Galileo's scientific work of our age. During...

This fascinating book is an investigation of scientific creativity. Following the research pathways of outstanding scientists over the past three centuries, it finds common features in their careers and their landmark discoveries and sheds light on the...

Over the course of human history, the sciences, and biology in particular, have often been manipulated to cause immense human suffering. For example, biology has been used to justify eugenic programs, forced sterilization, human experimentation, and...

Humans, however much we would care to think otherwise, do not represent the fated pinnacle of ape evolution. The diversity of life, from single-celled organisms to multicellular animals and plants, is the result of a long, complex, and highly chancy...

What useful changes has feminism brought to science? Feminists have enjoyed success in their efforts to open many fields to women as participants. But the effects of feminism have not been restricted to altering employment and professional opportunities...

An innovative, multifaceted approach to scientific experiments as designed by and shaped through interaction with the modeling process The role of scientific modeling in mediation between theories and phenomena is a critical topic within the philosophy...

Copernicus, Darwin, & Freud "Why is Darwin less the Copernicus than the Kepler of biology? What are good criteria for scientific revolutions? Shift of perspective? Replacement of paradigms? Reweaving conceptual networks? Explanatory gain? Restructuring...

How Mexican and Latinx hackers apply concepts from coding to their lived experiencesIn Code Work, Hector Beltran examines Mexican and Latinx coders' personal strategies of self-making as they navigate a transnational economy of tech work. Beltran shows...

The biological functions debate is a perennial topic in the philosophy of science. In the first full-length account of the nature and importance of biological functions for many years, Justin Garson presents an innovative new theory, the 'generalized...

What are the features of a good scientific theory? Samuel Schindler's book revisits this classical question in the philosophy of science and develops new answers to it. Theoretical virtues matter not only for choosing theories 'to work with', but also...

Thinking about self-control takes us to the heart of practical decision-making, human agency, motivation, and rational choice. Psychologists, philosophers, and decision theorists have all brought valuable insights and perspectives on how to model...

In this book K. Brad Wray provides a comprehensive survey of the arguments against scientific realism. In addition to presenting logical considerations that undermine the realists' inferences to the likely truth or approximate truth of our theories, he...

In his famous Wager, Blaise Pascal (1623-62) offers the reader an argument that it is rational to strive to believe in God. Philosophical debates about this classic argument have continued until our own times. This volume provides a comprehensive...

Although computation and the science of physical systems would appear to be unrelated, there are a number of ways in which computational and physical concepts can be brought together in ways that illuminate both. This volume examines fundamental...

For decades, cigarette companies helped to promote the impression that there was no scientific consensus concerning the safety of their product. The appearance of controversy, however, was misleading, designed to confuse the public and to protect...

Ockham's razor, the principle of parsimony, states that simpler theories are better than theories that are more complex. It has a history dating back to Aristotle and it plays an important role in current physics, biology, and psychology. The razor also...

From antiquity to the end of the twentieth century, philosophical discussions of understanding remained undeveloped, guided by a 'received view' that takes understanding to be nothing more than knowledge of an explanation. More recently, however, this...

This book provides a unique introduction to the study of relationships between gender and biology, a core part of the feminist science research tradition which emerged nearly half a century ago. Lynn Hankinson Nelson presents an accessible and balanced...

Newcomb's problem is a controversial paradox of decision theory. It is easily explained and easily understood, and there is a strong chance that most of us have actually faced it in some form or other. And yet it has proven as thorny and intractable a...

Carnap, Quine, and Putnam held that in our pursuit of truth we can do no better than to start in the middle, relying on already-established beliefs and inferences and applying our best methods for re-evaluating particular beliefs and inferences and...

Building on the seminal work of Kit Fine in the 1980s, Leon Horsten here develops a new theory of arbitrary entities. He connects this theory to issues and debates in metaphysics, logic, and contemporary philosophy of mathematics, investigating the...

The logician Kurt Goedel (1906-1978) published a paper in 1931 formulating what have come to be known as his 'incompleteness theorems', which prove, among other things, that within any formal system with resources sufficient to code arithmetic, questions...

We often assume that science and myth stand in opposition-with science providing empirically supported truths that replace the false ideas found in traditional mythologies. But the rhetoric of contemporary popular science and related genres tells a...

The most important work by a key figure in German thought, Helmuth Plessner's Levels of Organic Life and the Human, originally published in 1928, appears here for the first time in English, accompanied by a substantial Introduction by J. M. Bernstein,...

Husserl's Missing Technologies looks at the early-twentieth-century "classical" phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, both in the light of the philosophy of science of his time, and retrospectively at his philosophy from a contemporary "postphenomenology." Of...

In a world plagued by disagreement and conflict one might expect that the exact sciences of logic and mathematics would provide a safe harbor. In fact these disciplines are rife with internal divisions between different, often incompatible, systems. Do...

Millions of Americans lack health insurance, and as a result, thousands suffer and die every year. Philosophers have argued that an ideal society would avoid these problems by guaranteeing universalaccess to health insurance,but what about concerns that...

In All Talked Out J.D. Trout exemplifies the power of science in the hands of a philosopher, and the result is a timely and urgent argument about the future of philosophy. Based on his 2013 Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lectures, Trout here presents a novel...

Andrew Cooper presents the first systematic study of Kant's account of natural history. Cooper contends that Kant made a decisive contribution to one of the most explosive and understudied revolutions in the history of science: the addition of time to...

This volume's title stems from an observable and seemingly amusing phenomenon--the placement of fish symbols on the rear of automobiles. There are two kinds: one a fish outline with a cross, exhibited by Christians; the other a fish outline filled with...

From the Atom to Living Systems represents an original historico-epistemological approach to follow the passage, in the microscopic analysis of reality, from the atomic to the molecular to the macromolecular levels and then to the threshold of life...

All people desire to know. We want to not only know what has happened, but also why it happened, how it happened, whether it will happen again, whether it can be made to happen or not happen, and so on. In short, what we want are explanations. Asking and...