Drawing on work of the past decade, this volume brings together articles from the philosophy, history, and sociology of science, and many other branches of the biological sciences. The volume delves into the latest theoretical controversies as well as burning questions of contemporary social importance. The issues considered include the nature of evolutionary theory, biology and ethics, the challenge from religion, and the social implications of biology today (in particular the Human Genome Project).

The anthropological approach is the central focus of this study. Laboratories are looked upon with the innocent eye of the traveller in exotic lands, and the societies found in these places are observed with the objective yet compassionate eye of the visitor from a quite other cultural milieu. There are many surprises that await us if we enter a laboratory in this frame of mind... This study is a realistic enterprise, an attempt to truly represent the social order of life (...) in laboratories and institutes of research, just as they are. By bringing the philosophical issues to the surface as matters not of prejudgement but as matters of concern, Karin Knorr-Cetina has developed the first really positive challenge to the philosophy of science since the days of paradigms and internal definitions of meanings. (shrink)

In this book, Augustine Brannigan provides a critical examination of the major theories which have been devised to account for discoveries and innovations in ...

Hilary Putnam deals in this book with some of the most fundamental persistent problems in philosophy: the nature of truth, knowledge and rationality. His aim is to break down the fixed categories of thought which have always appeared to define and constrain the permissible solutions to these problems.

In this book Professor Holton continues his analysis of how modem science works and what its influences are on our world, with particular emphasis on the role of the thematic elements - those often unconscious presuppositions that guide scientific work to success or failure. The foundation of the book is provided by the author's research on the work of Albert Einstein, which is then contrasted with other styles of research in the advancement of science. The author deals directly with the (...) often unforeseen consequences of the progress of contemporary science, detailing its fruits as well as its burdens. The many questions examined in this work range over a broad spectrum of areas that command the attention of all readers with an interest in understanding the development of modem science. (shrink)

"Provine's thorough and thoroughly admirable examination of Wright's life and influence, which is accompanied by a very useful collection of Wright's papers on evolution, is the best we have for any recent figure in evolutionary biology."—Joe Felsenstein, Nature "In Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology... Provine has produced an intellectual biography which serves to chart in considerable detail both the life and work of one man and the history of evolutionary theory in the middle half of this century. Provine is admirably (...) suited to his task.... The resulting book is clearly a labour of love which will be of great interest to those who have a mature interest in the history of evolutionary theory."-John Durant, ;ITimes Higher Education Supplement;X. (shrink)

The first edition of this book profoundly challenged and divided students of philosophy, sociology, and the history of science when it was published in 1976. In this second edition, Bloor responds in a substantial new Afterword to the heated debates engendered by his book.

Placing Bruno—both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake—in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of Renaissance humanism but of its interplay—and conflict—with magic and occult practices. "Among those who have explored the intellectual world of the sixteenth century no one in England can rival Miss Yates. Wherever she looks, she illuminates. Now she has looked on Bruno. This brilliant book takes time to digest, but it is an intellectual adventure to read it. Historians (...) of ideas, of religion, and of science will study it. Some of them, after reading it, will have to think again.... For Miss Yates has put Bruno, for the first time, in his tradition, and has shown what that tradition was."—Hugh Trevor-Roper, _New Statesman_ "A decisive contribution to the understanding of Giordano Bruno, this book will probably remove a great number of misrepresentations that still plague the tormented figure of the Nolan prophet."—Giorgio de Santillana, _American Historical Review_ "Yates's book is an important addition to our knowledge of Giordano Bruno. But it is even more important, I think, as a step toward understanding the unity of the sixteenth century."—J. Bronowski, _New York Review of Books_. (shrink)

Berkeley's idealism started a revolution in philosophy. As one of the great empiricist thinkers he not only influenced British philosophers from Hume to Russell and the logical positivists in the twentieth century, he also set the scene for the continental idealism of Hegel and even the philosophy of Marx. There has never been such a radical critique of common sense and perception as that given in Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge (1710). His views were met with disfavour, and his response (...) to his critics was the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. This edition of Berkeley's two key works has an introduction which examines and in part defends his arguments for idealism, as well as offering a detailed analytical contents list, extensive philosophical notes, and an index. (shrink)

Taxonomies of living things and the methods used to produce them changed little with the institutionalization of evolutionary thinking in biology. Instead, the relationships expressed in existing taxonomies were merely reinterpreted as the result of evolution, and evolutionary concepts were developed to justify existing methods. I argue that the delay of the Darwinian Revolution in biological taxonomy has resulted partly from a failure to distinguish between two fundamentally different ways of ordering identified by Griffiths : classification and systematization. Classification consists (...) of ordering entities into classes, groups defined by the attributes of their members; in contrast, systematization consists of ordering entities into systems, more inclusive entities whose existence depends on some natural process through which their parts are related. Evolutionary, or phylogenetic, systematics takes evolutionary descent to be the natural process of interest in biological taxonomy. I outline a general framework for a truly phylogenetic systematics and examine some of its consequences. (shrink)

Henri Bergson (1859-1941) is one of the truly great philosophers of the modernist period, and there is currently a major renaissance of interest in his unduly neglected texts and ideas amongst philosophers, literary theorists, and social theorists. Creative Evolution (1907) is the text that made Bergson world-famous in his own lifetime; in it Bergson responds to the challenge presented to our habits of thought by modern evolutionary theory, and attempts to show that the theory of knowledge must have its basis (...) in a theory of life. (shrink)

"Groundbreaking when first published in 1969, this book is now of even greater relevance to make the reader aware of the need to educate the visual sense, a ...

In this systematic study, Professor Achinstein analyzes such concepts as definitions, theories, and models, and contrasts his view with currently held positions that he finds inadequate.

An understanding of the relationship between metaphysics and natural philosophy - or, as we might now say, between philosophy and science - is fundamental to understanding the rise of the "new science" of the seventeenth century. Twentieth-century scholarship on this relationship has been dominated by the thoughbt of Ernst Cassirer, E. A. Burtt, A. N. Whitehead, and Alexandre Koyre. These authors found a common core in the mathematization of nature, which they ascribed to a common Platonic or Pythagorean metaphysical presupposition, (...) on the part of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Descartes, that the book of nature is written in mathematical characters. Taking Burtt as its primary stalking horse, this chapter challenges this view by finding significant differences in the relations to metaphysics of major actors such as those just named. It does this in part by recognizing that, in the seventeenth century, metaphysics was an intellectual practice that one engaged in wittingly. By contrast, Burtt adopted a historiographical approach in which metaphysics consists of the nonempirical presupposition of an age (a position advanced by R. G. Collingwood). That approach, although valid within its limits, distorts or omits from consideration the witting practice of metaphysics by figures such as Kepler and Descartes. And it makes metaphysicians of Copernicus and Galileo, who are better classified as a mathematical astronomer and a mathematical natural philosopher and writer on astronomy. The chapter ends with some reflections on purportedly aphilosophical history of science. (shrink)

We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, urban life underwent increasingly rapid change as towns outgrew their limits, industries polluted their skies and rivers, and a host of new types of building appeared to cater for new needs and activities. Not only did towns look different, but, as Thomas Markus has said, ‘they also ‘felt’ different in the organization of the spaces they contained.’ Buildings which housed scientific activities—the learned societies, literary and philosophical societies, professional institutes, mechanics institutes, and by the (...) end of the century the new civic universities—were one manifestation of this different ‘feeling’. These were quite new types of building, and we should therefore expect them to give us valuable information about the development of science, about ‘images’ of science and the meaning of those images, as well as the actual practice of science. (shrink)

welcomed by a new generation of students and scholars in all branches of learning.

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Alchemy is central to Jung's hypothesis of the collective unconscious. In this volume he begins with an outline of the process and aims of psychotherapy, and then moves on to work out the analogies between alchemy, Christian dogma and symbolism and his own understanding of the analytic process. Introducing the basic concepts of alchemy, Jung reminds us of the dual nature of alchemy, comprising both the chemical process and a parallel mystical component. He also discusses the seemingly deliberate mystification of (...) the alchemists. Finally, in using the alchemical process as providing insights into individuation, Jung emphasises the importance of alchemy in relating to us the transcendent nature of the psyche. (shrink)

Held at Philadelphia for promoting useful knowledge.

Diagrams refer to the phenomena overtly represented, to analogous phenomena, and to previous pictures and their graphic conventions. The diagrams of ecologists Clarke, Hutchinson, and H.T. Odum reveal their search for physical analogies, building on the success of World War II science and the promise of cybernetics. H.T. Odum's energy circuit diagrams reveal also his aspirations for a universal and natural means of reducing complexity to guide the management of diverse ecological and social systems. Graphic conventions concerning framing and translation (...) of ecological processes onto the flat printed page facilitate Odum's ability to act as if ecological relations were decomposable into systems and could be managed by analysts external to the system. (shrink)

I find it more than merely suggestive that we call many different kinds of pictures "realistic." As a category label, "realistic" is remarkably elastic. We cheerfully place into the category pictures that are made in strict accordance with the rules of linear perspective, pictures that are at slight variance with those rules but that nonetheless look perfectly "correct" , and pictures made in flagrant contravention of perspective geometry . We accept as realistic pictures that are made in strict accordance with (...) the rules of perspective construction that we could never judge as being similar to anything we might or could ever see . We accept as realistic pictures that are in sharp disagreement with what we now take to be the facts of vision . . . There is something charming and yet nasty about the belief in the special relation of picture to world. It is charming because it allows us to "enter" with ease into pictures and allows them to "extend" into our world. It allows us to think of pictures as "true to life," to use [Ernst] Gombrich's beguiling term, to look at a picture and ask questions of it, as if we were looking at the world through a window. It allows us to treat pictures as substitutes for the objects they represent and so, for example, to buy clothing from an illustrated catalogue, or to analyze architectural styles from pictures of buildings. In brief, it allows us to feel proximity to what is depicted and urges us to conclude that in certain important respects looking at a picture is equivalent to looking at what is pictured. Joel Snyder, associate professor of humanities and of art and design at the University of Chicago, teaches aesthetics, and theory and history of photography. A practicing photographer, he is currently completing a monograph on the photographer Timothy H. O'Sullivan. His contributions to Critical Inquiry include "Photography, Vision, and Representation" and "Reflexions on Las Meninas: Paradox Lost", written with Ted Cohen in the Winter 1980 issue. (shrink)

By the early years of the twentieth century, astronomers regarded photography as one of the most valuable tools at their disposal, a technique which not only provided an accurate and reliable representation of astronomical phenomena, but also radically changed the role of the astronomical observer. Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at Oxford, wrote in 1905: ‘The wonderful exactness of the photographic record may perhaps best be characterised by saying that it has revealed the deficiencies of all our other astronomical (...) apparatus – object-glasses and prisms, clocks, even the observer himself.’ H. C. Russell, government astronomer in Sydney, suggested that photography might in the future make the observer redundant: ‘In many cases the observer must stand aside while the sensitive photographic plate takes his place and works with the power of which he is not capable… I feel sure that in a very few years the observer will be displaced altogether.’ Such visions were not uncommon at the time, emanating from the trust invested in the photographic process after the spectacular achievements of the late nineteenth century. (shrink)

Summary The enthusiasm of Renaissance humanists for classical learning greatly influenced the development of botany in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Humanist scholars restored the treatises of Theophrastus, Pliny, Galen and Dioscorides on botany and materia medica to general circulation and argued for their use as textbooks in Renaissance universities. Renaissance botanists' respect for classical precepts and models of the proper methods for studying plants temporarily discouraged the use of naturalistic botanical illustration, but encouraged other techniques for collecting and (...) communicating new observations: herbaria, botanical gardens and field trips. (shrink)

Inviting a reappraisal of the status of scientific knowledge, Andrew Pickering suggests that scientists are not mere passive observers and reporters of nature.

My aim … is to show that the celestial machine is likened not to a kind of divine living being but rather to a clockwork. I consider the human body to be a machine … Although it may exaggerate to say that Descartes fathered the mechanization of biology, it is true that his Treatise of Man provided the first systematic development of the idea that a complete understanding of all the phenomena of life, including all abilities and behaviour of animals, (...) can be achieved by viewing living things as machines. To make this out, Decartes had to learn to think about living things in a new way. My first aim here is to identify the fundamental conceptual innovations at work in Descartes’ attempt to extend the new mechanics to include biology. My second aim is to locate the point at which Descartes’ mechanical imagination runs out. This requires study of Descartes’ scientific work on sense. (shrink)

The now-classic Metaphors We Live By changed our understanding of metaphor and its role in language and the mind. Metaphor, the authors explain, is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects. Because such metaphors structure our most basic understandings of our experience, they are "metaphors we live by"--metaphors that can shape our perceptions and actions without our ever noticing them. In (...) this updated edition of Lakoff and Johnson's influential book, the authors supply an afterword surveying how their theory of metaphor has developed within the cognitive sciences to become central to the contemporary understanding of how we think and how we express our thoughts in language. (shrink)

Assuming an essential difference between scientific data and phenomena, this paper argues for the view that we have to understand how empirical findings get transformed into scientific phenomena. The work of scientists is seen as largely consisting in constructing these phenomena which are then utilized in more abstract theories. It is claimed that these matters are of importance for discussions of theory choice and progress in science. A case study is presented as a starting point: paleomagnetism and the use of (...) paleomagnetic data in early discussions of continental drift. Some general features of this study are presented in formalized language. It is suggested that the presentation given is particularly suited for a semantic conception of theories. Even though the construction of scientific phenomena is the main topic of this paper, the view presented here is more adapted to realism than social constructivism. (shrink)