Boston studies in the philosophy of science ;

"Modern physical science is constituted by specialized scientific fields rooted in experimental laboratory work and in rational and mathematical representations. Contemporary scientific explanation is rigorously differentiated from religious interpretation, although, to be sure, scientists sometimes do the philosophical work of interpreting the metaphysics of space, time, and matter. However, it is rare that either theologians or philosophers convincingly claim that they are doing the scientific work of physical scientists and mathematicians." "The rigidity of these divisions and differentiations is relatively new. Modern physical science was invented slowly and gradually through interactions of the aims and contents of mathematics, theology, and natural philosophy since the seventeenth century. In essays ranging in focus from seventeenth-century interpretations of heavenly comets to twentieth-century explanations of tracks in bubble chambers, ten historians of science demonstrate metaphysical and theological threads continuing to underpin the epistemology and practice of the physical sciences and mathematics, even while they became disciplinary specialties during the last three centuries." "The volume is prefaced by tributes to Erwin N. Hiebert, whose teaching and scholarship have addressed and inspired attention to these issues."--BOOK JACKET.

In this volume specialists from several disciplines present the first comprehensive, readily-accessible analysis of Grassmann's thought, its historical context and emergence, its reception, and its continuing influence on many branches of learning. The book addresses a general public in mathematics, physics, and linguistics, including graduate students in these fields, as well as historians of these disciples.

"Beginning with a pair of essays dealing with the experimental and mathematical foundations of physics in the work of Henry Cavendish and Joseph Fourier, the volume goes on to consider the two broad areas of investigation that constituted the central foci of the development of the physics discipline in the nineteenth century: electricity and magnetism, including especially the work of Michael Faraday, William Thomson, and James Clerk Maxwell; and thermodynamics and matter theory, including the theoretical work and legacy of Josiah Willard Gibbs, some experimental work relating to thermodynamics and kinetic theory by Heinrich Hertz, and the work of Felix Seyler-Hoppe on hemoglobin in the neighboring field of biophysics/biochemistry. Moving on to the beginning of the twentieth century, a group of three articles on Albert Einstein deal with his early career and various influences on his work. Finally, a set of historiographical issues important for the history of physics are discussed, and the chronological conclusion of the volume is an article on the Solvay Conference of 1933."--BOOK JACKET.

liii, 268 pages ; 23 cm

xxxvii, 613 p. : 23 cm

"The problem of Galileo's logical methodology has long interested scholars. In this volume William A. Wallace offers a solution that is completely unexpected, yet backed by convincing documentary evidence. His analysis starts with an early notebook Galileo wrote at Pisa, appropriating a Jesuit professor's exposition of the Posterior Analytics of Aristotle, and ends with one of the last letters Galileo wrote, stating that in logic he has been a Peripatetic all his life. Wallace's detective work unearths the complete logic course from which the notebook was excerpted, then proceeds to show how its terminology and methodology continue to surface in Galileo's later writings in which he founds his new sciences of the heavens and of local motion. The result is a tour de force that commends itself not only to Galileo scholars and to logicians, philosophers, and historians, but to anyone interested in the epistemic roots of modern science."--BOOK JACKET.

"In Science, Politics and Social Practice (Volume II of Essays in honor of Robert S. Cohen), an international group of scholars - philosophers, sociologists, historians, and political scientists - discuss issues at the cutting edge of contemporary social and political thought, and its bearing on science. Several essays discuss the relations of Marxism to science, and specifically, to the philosophies of science of Carnap and Popper, as well as Soviet Marxism, and the effects of Stalinism on Soviet science. There are also essays on the philosophy and methodology of the social sciences, on questions of method and aim in historical narrative, on the issue of cultural relativism, and more."--BOOK JACKET.

"This book is a reassessment of the work of Fisher, Haldane, Muller and Wright on the occasion of the centenaries of their birth. Given the seminal role played by these figures in twentieth century evolutionary biology, it is also an important contribution to the history of biology. It brings together the scholarship of biologists, historians and philosophers to analyze the relative contributions and influence of these figures. In considering Muller along with Fisher, Haldane and Wright as a founder of 'evolutionary genetics', this book breaks new ground in the historiography of biology."--BOOK JACKET.