Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology

Notes on Editors

Personal Acknowledgments

Text Acknowledgments

Part I

Introduction

Unit 1 The Ancient and Medieval Periods

1.1 Atoms and Empty Space: Diogenes Laertius

1.2 Letter to Herodotus: Epicurus

1.3 The Paradoxes of Motion: Zeno

1.4 Plato’s Cosmology: Plato

1.5 The Structure and Motion of the Heavenly Spheres: Aristotle

1.6 Change, Natures, and Causes: Aristotle

1.7 Scientific Inference and the Knowledge of Essential Natures: Aristotle

1.8 The Cosmos and the Shape and Size of the Earth: Aristotle

1.9 The Divisions of Nature and the Divisions of Knowledge: Aristotle

1.10 On Methods of Inference: Philodemus

1.11 The Explanatory Power of Atomism: Lucretius

1.12 The Earth: Its Size, Shape, and Immobility: Claudius Ptolemy

1.13 The Weaknesses of Hypotheses: Proclus

1.14 Projectile Motion: John Philoponus

1.15 Free Fall: John Philoponus

1.16 Against the Reality of Epicycles and Eccentrics: Moses Maimonides

1.17 Impetus and its Applications: Jean Buridan

1.18 The Possibility of a Rotating Earth: Nicole Oresme

Unit 2 The Scientific Revolution

2.1 The Nature and Grounds of the Copernican System: Georg Joachim Rheticus

2.2 The Unsigned Letter: Andreas Osiander

2.3 The Motion of the Earth: Nicholas Copernicus

2.4 The New Star: Tycho Brahe

2.5 A Man Ahead of His Time: Johannes Kepler

2.6 On Arguments about a Moving Earth: Johannes Kepler

2.7 Eight Minutes of Arc: Johannes Kepler

2.8 Tradition and Experience: Galileo Galilei

2.9 A Moving Earth Is More Probable Than the Alternative: Galileo Galilei

2.10 The Ship and the Tower: Galileo Galilei

2.11 The Copernican View Vindicated: Galileo Galilei

2.12 The "Corpuscular" Philosophy: Robert Boyle

2.13 Successful Hypotheses and High Probability: Christiaan Huygens

2.14 Inductive Methodology: Isaac Newton

2.15 Space, Time, and the Elements of Physics: Isaac Newton

2.16 Four Rules of Reasoning: Isaac Newton

2.17 General Scholium: Isaac Newton

2.18 The System of the World: Isaac Newton

Unit 3 The Modern Period

3.1 The Inductive Method: Francis Bacon

3.2 Rules for the Discovery of Scientific Truth: René Descartes

3.3 Rationalism and Scientific Method: René Descartes

3.4 Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits: John Locke

3.5 The Principle of Least Action: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

3.6 Space, Time, and Symmetry: Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz

3.7 The Problem of Induction: David Hume

3.8 The Nature of Cause and Effect: David Hume

3.9 The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science: Immanuel Kant

Unit 4 Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

4.1 The Nature of Scientific Explanation: Antoine Lavoisier

4.2 Determinism, Ignorance, and Probability: Pierre-Simon Laplace

4.3 Hypotheses, Data, and Crucial Experiments: John Herschel

4.4 An Empiricist Account of Scientific Discovery: John Stuart Mill

4.5 Against Pure Empiricism: William Whewell

4.6 The Causes Behind the Phenomena: William Whewell

4.7 Catastrophist Geology: Georges Cuvier

4.8 Uniformitarian Geology: Charles Lyell

4.9 The Explanatory Scope of the Evolutionary Hypothesis: Charles Darwin

4.10 Induction as a Self-Correcting Process: Charles Sanders Peirce

4.11 The Nature of Abduction: Charles Sanders Peirce

4.12 The Role of Hypotheses in Physical Theory: Henri Poincaré

4.13 Against Crucial Experiments: Pierre Duhem

4.14 On the Method of Theoretical Physics: Albert Einstein

Part II

Introduction

Unit 5 Positivism and the Received View

5.1 Theory and Observation: Rudolf Carnap

5.2 Scientific Explanation: Carl Hempel

5.3 Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology: Rudolf Carnap

5.4 The Pragmatic Vindication of Induction: Hans Reichenbach

5.5 Dissolving the Problem of Induction: Peter Strawson

Unit 6 After the Received View: Confirmation and Observation

6.1 Empiricist Criteria of Cognitive Significance: Problems and Changes: Carl Hempel

6.2 The Raven Paradox: Carl Hempel

6.3 Two Dogmas of Empiricism: W. V. O. Quine

6.4 The New Riddle of Induction: Nelson Goodman

6.5 What Theories Are Not: Hilary Putnam

6.6 On Observation: N. R. Hanson

6.7 The Ontological Status of Theoretical Entities: Grover Maxwell

Unit 7 After the Received View: Methodology

7.1 Science: Conjectures and Refutations: Karl Popper

7.2 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions: Thomas Kuhn

7.3 Science and Pseudoscience: Imre Lakatos

Unit 8 After the Received View: Explanation

8.1 Counterexamples to the D-N and I-S Models of Explanation: Wesley Salmon

8.2 The Statistical Relevance Model of Explanation: Wesley Salmon

8.3 Why Ask, "Why"?: Wesley Salmon

8.4 Explanatory Unification: Philip Kitcher

Unit 9 After the Received View: The Realism Debate

9.1 The Current Status of Scientific Realism: Richard N. Boyd

9.2 A Confutation of Convergent Realism: Larry Laudan

9.3 Constructive Empiricism: Bas van Fraassen

9.4 The Natural Ontological Attitude: Arthur Fine