This volume attempts to provide a new articulation of issues surrounding scientific realism, scientific rationality, the epistemology of non-classical physics, the type of revolutionary changes in the development of science, the naturalization of epistemology within frameworks of cognitive science and structural linguistics, models of the information technology revolution, and reconstructions of early modern logical systems.

This comprehensive volume marks a new standard in scholarship in the emerging field of the philosophy of chemistry. Philosophers, chemists, and historians of science ask some fundamental questions about the relationship between philosophy and chemistry.

This book is unusual in many respects. It was written by a prolific author whose tragic untimely death did not allow to finish this and many other of his undertakings. It was assembled from numerous excerpts, notes, and fragments according to his initial plans. Zilberman’s legacy still awaits its true discovery and this book is a second installment to it after The Birth of Meaning in Hindu Thought (Kluwer, 1988). Zilberman’s treatment of analogy is unique in its approach, scope, and universality for Western philosophical thought. Constantly compared to eastern and especially classical Indian interpretations, analogy is presented by Zilberman as an important and in many ways primary method of philosophizing or philosophy-building. Due to its universality, this method can be also applied in linguistics, logic, social analysis, as well as historical and anthropological research. These applications are integral part of Zilberman’s book. A prophetic leap to largely uncharted territories, this book could be of considerable interest for experts and novices in the field of analogy alike.

This volume deals with a variety of moments in the history of mechanics when conflicts arose within one textual tradition, between different traditions, or between textual traditions and the wider world of practice. Its purpose is to show how the accommodations sometimes made in the course of these conflicts ultimately contributed to the emergence of modern mechanics.

Creativity, Psychology, and the History of Science offers for the first time a comprehensive overview of the oeuvre of Howard E. Gruber, who is noted for his contributions both to the psychology of creativity and to the history of science. The present book includes papers from a wide range of topics. In the contributions to creativity research, Gruber proposes his key ideas for studying creative work. Gruber focuses on how the thinking, motivation and affect of extraordinarily creative individuals evolve and how they interact over long periods of time. Gruber’s approach bridges many disciplines and subdisciplines in psychology and beyond, several of which are represented in the present volume: cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, history of science, aesthetics, and politics. The volume thus presents a unique and comprehensive contribution to our understanding of the creative process. Many of Gruber's papers have not previously been easily accessible; they are presented here in thoroughly revised form.

This study recapitulates basic developments in the tradition of hermeneutic and phenomenological studies of science. It focuses on the ways in which scientific research is committed to the universe of interpretative phenomena. It treats scientific research by addressing its characteristic hermeneutic situations, and uses the following basic argument in this treatment: By demonstrating that science’s epistemological identity is not to be spelled out in terms of objectivism, mathematical essentialism, representationalism, and foundationalism, one undermines scientism without succumbing scientific research to “procedures of normative-democratic control” that threaten science’s cognitive autonomy. The study shows that in contrast to social constructivism, hermeneutic phenomenology of scientific research makes the case that overcoming scientism does not imply restrictive policies regarding the constitution of scientific objects.

This book collects contributions by some of the leading scholars working on seventeenth-century mechanics and the mechanical philosophy. Together, the articles provide a broad and accurate picture of the fortune of Galileo's theory of motion in Europe and of the various physical, mathematical, and ontological arguments that were used in favour and against it. Were Galileo's contemporaries really aware of what Westfall has described as "the incompatibility between the demands of mathematical mechanics and the needs of mechanical philosophy"? To what extent did Galileo's silence concerning the cause of free fall impede the acceptance of his theory of motion? Which methods were used, before the invention of the infinitesimal calculus, to check the validity of Galileo's laws of free fall and of parabolic motion? And what sort of experiments were invoked in favour or against these laws? These and related questions are addressed in this volume.

The book "Between Adaptation and Revolt. Discussions and Research Trends in Bulgarian Philosophy" brings together seven studies, which analyses some of the main discussions in Bulgarian philosophy, and offers also philosophical portraits of contemporary Bulgarian scholars of different generations: Nikolay Raynov, Azarya Polikarov, Julia Kristeva, Rosen Stupoff and Hristo Stoev. As in her previous books on Contemporary Western Philosophy, Yvanka Raynova uses here the approach of comparative and translative hermeneutics. This allows her to prove two main theses. Firstly, unlike some authors who consider Bulgarian philosophy and culture to be characterized by a lack of tradition, she maintains that tradition does exist, but that it is marked by three historical ruptures: The fall of Bulgaria under Ottoman domination in 1396, the gradual decapitation of philosophical and cultural pluralism after 1945, and the downfall of Marxism following the collapse of "real socialism" after 1990. Second, Raynova opposes the view that there were only "minor deviations" from Marxism-Leninism in Bulgarian philosophy during socialism, showing that a number of Bulgarian philoso-phers not only resisted the dominant ideological discourse, but also addressed serious issues, entering into discussion with the leading Western scholars of the time.

The nature of scientific explanation has been an important topic in philosophy of science for many years. This book highlights some of the conceptual problems that still need to be solved and points out a number of fresh philosophical ideas to explore.