A scientific community cannot practice its trade without some set of received beliefs. These beliefs form the foundation of the "educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice". The nature of the "rigorous and rigid" preparation helps ensure that the received beliefs are firmly fixed in the student's mind. Scientists take great pains to defend the assumption that scientists know what the world is like...To this end, "normal science" will often suppress novelties which undermine its foundations. Research (...) is therefore not about discovering the unknown, but rather "a strenuous and devoted attempt to force nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education". (shrink)

Francis Bacon, lawyer, statesman, and philosopher, remains one of the most effectual thinkers in European intellectual history. We can trace his influence from Kant in the 1700s to Darwin a century later. The Advancement of Learning , first published in 1605, contains an unprecedented and thorough systematization of the whole range of human knowledge. Bacon’s argument that the sciences should move away from divine philosophy and embrace empirical observation would forever change the way philosophers and natural scientists interpret their world.

Volumes I and II provided a completely new translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. Volume III contains 207 of Descartes' letters, over half of which have previously not been translated into English. It incorporates, in its entirety, Anthony Kenny's celebrated translation of selected philosophical letters, first published in 1970. In conjunction with Volumes I and II it is designed to meet the widespread demand for a comprehensive, authoritative and accurate edition (...) of Descartes' philosophical writings in clear and readable modern English. (shrink)

A highly condensed account of the author's present view of some philosophical problems unresolved in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. The concept of incommensurability, now considerably developed, remains at center stage, but the evolutionary metaphor, introduced in the final pages of the book, now also plays a principal role.

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

The significance of the plurality of the Copernican Revolution is the main thrust of this undergraduate text In this study of the Copernican Revolution, the ...

Draws on new evidence to argue that the Jesuits had plotted Galileo's downfall for reasons other than his beliefs about astronomy.

We study here the reception by their contemporaries of Antoine de Villon's and étienne de Clave's anti-Aristotelian, almost materialistic and atomistic theses, which they intended to support publicly in Paris in 1624, using chemical experiments to this purpose. After surveying the intellectual context which could have then nourished an atomism based upon chemical experiments, we go on to show how these theses, far from having been perceived as prominently atomistic, were condemned by the contemporaries above all because of the theological (...) implications of their provocative anti-Aristotelism. Alchemy itself was not directly implicated in the case of the theses. On the contrary, the theses were perceived as an alien body within the alchemical tradition. (shrink)