We are little accustomed in modern times to think of philosophy in terms of play. With few exceptions, philosophers in the last few centuries are conspicuous for their gravity. If a lighter touch enters their writings it is rather as a douceur with which to punctuate argument. To charge a philosopher with playing games is to condemn his activity as trivial and futile.

1.—Some years ago we were indebted to Mr Kuhn for a refreshing work on the philosophical interpretation of Copernican astronomy. Now he has launched into a more ambitious programme: he has sketched the ground-work for a veritable aggiornamento in our appraisal of the physico-mathematical sciences. The author works in historical depth but on a very narrow front. This latter contraction is responsible for much of the force and clarity of the thesis. But the reader should be sensible from the start (...) of this restriction in the field of acute attention. Although the author tends to use the term ‘science’ without qualification, in truth what he has to say is of only minor relevance to the descriptive or classificatory sciences. The persuasive power of his thesis is virtually confined to the exact operations of the physicist, the astronomer, and the chemist. Kuhn and Canon Raven, in his biologically oriented Gifford Lectures, are both concerned with the appraisal of the history of the natural sciences. Yet their treatments are bewilderingly different, until we understand how each has restricted his canvas. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Interpretations of the conflict between Galileo and the Roman Curia are many and various. A few commentators profess to see no great issues at stake, and are inclined to dismiss the Trial of 1633 as merely the outcome of personal jealousies and local intrigues. Others see the Trial as damning evidence for the Church’s rooted hostility to scientific enquiry. Others again find no evidence of a conflict between the Church and science, and see the Trial as one more instance of (...) a routine administrative authority frowning on the would-be innovator: something which is likely to happen in any field where there is an official ‘establishment’. (shrink)

1.—In the early decades of the Eighteenth Century a French Jesuit, one Fr. Jean Hardouin, was engaged in propounding a startling theory concerning the credentials of ancient literature. He declared that nearly all the reputed writings of antiquity, secular and sacred alike, were in fact composed by a monkish group of literary forgers in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries. The only works he admitted as authentic were the Latin Scriptures, Homer, Herodotus, and a few others of minor import. In defence (...) of this thesis he argued that it was admitted on every hand that some of the reputed writings of antiquity were not authentic. He was but carrying out a more rigorous examination than had ever before been made. The result of this severely critical scrutiny was to strip away most of the picture we had commonly but erroneously accepted of the antique world and to leave behind what was, by comparison, but a skeleton. This skeleton, alone, could be taken as real; our former beliefs were but a systematic imposture. We had, all unknowing, built up an enchanted vision of the ancient world; at a wave of the critic’s hand the enchantment is banished. (shrink)

The work of Galileo has been strangely neglected in the English-speaking world. His trial by the Roman Inquisition has always had notoriety, but has hitherto been seriously known only through the English translation from the German of Karl von Gebler’s brilliant study, Galileo Galilei and the Roman Curia. Although Galileo is, above all men, the founder of the modern scientific age, his chef d’oeuvre, the Dialogues on the Two Great Systems of the World, has been practically unknown to English readers; (...) the English translation of 1661 by Thomas Salusbury being exceedingly rare. (shrink)

WHATEVER one may think of the merits and demerits of the Cartesian system one must acknowledge the great vitality of the Cartesian principles. They were launched with a passion, a sincerity, an engagement rarely equalled. The principles in some way met a deeply-felt need stirring in many breasts in the 17th century; a half-unconscious aspiration which many struggled to articulate and expressed in a variety of ways. Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, each in his own way helped to formulate and create the (...) new order, and in doing so stimulated the general appetite for it so that it grew apace. Descartes prepared the ground, Galileo planted the tree, Bacon looked after the ‘public relations’. The scientific age is the outcome of their work. These men were themselves too close to things to see clearly the consequences of what they were doing; some of these consequences would have greatly surprised them. Could Descartes, for instance, personally the most ‘existentialist’ of philosophers, have foreseen that his principles would give rise to a diametrically opposite regime: that forcing the radical separation and disengagement of man and the material world would lead to a state of brittle ‘facts’ and shallow ‘emotions’, and would provoke the contemporary ‘existentialist’ reaction? (shrink)

In recent years, due largely to the efforts of Karl Popper, the principle of falsification has come to the fore in discussions on the logic of the sciences and metaphysics. In its narrow form the principle may be put thus: a scientific theory can never be proved true, it can only be proved false. But it is commonly expanded into a wider form. This is done on the supposition that scientific knowledge is common–sense knowledge writ large. The principle now becomes: (...) an assertion has a meaning and is significant only in so far as it is susceptible to empirical testing and so to being possibly shown false. In this general form the principle is proposed as a criterion for all genuine knowledge. (shrink)

The old controversy between the classical education in the humanities and the modern kind of education in the sciences is frequently before us in these times. Russia is rapidly gaining ascendancy in scientific achievement; England and the United States of America are urged to meet the challenge by increasing the pressure of a scientific training for all capable of it. Is such a policy really desirable? From one point of view it might seem merely a matter of changing the subjects (...) to be studied at school and university. Instead of the talented youth reading Plato and Thucydides, he is to be directed to the Infini-tesimal Calculus and the Quantum Theory of Radiation. The former studies, the argument would run, are agreeable but barren; the latter are austere but fruitful. (shrink)

Are scientific enquiries directly relevant to epistemological issues? That is the question which links together the four studies comprising this work. Professor Mandelbaum answers the question in the affirmative. On the basis of this answer he rejects all phenomenalist or subjectivist notions: that we know only our states of mind or ideas. He rejects likewise any epistemology of a naïvely realist kind, which asserts that things are just as they appear to be. In their room he defends the epistemological doctrine (...) which he calls ‘critical realism’. A critical realist acknowledges that physical objects exist independently of our perception of them but insists, on the strength of scientific testimony, that not all the qualities which physical objects appear to possess are really possessed by them. On this count, Locke was a pioneer critical realist when he denied, on what he supposed to be scientific evidence, that secondary qualities inhere in objects. Mandelbaum is not committed precisely to Locke’s form of critical realism, but he believes that Locke was following the right general lines. (shrink)

From the pen of Professor Geach we have learnt to expect the fastidious art of the microscopist. Not microscopy for its own sake, however, but microscopy as the vigilant servant, ensuring that large views, if and when they are built, shall be built only from sound materials. The present volume is a collection of nine papers—some previously published in journals, and some appearing for the first time. They exhibit the author’s painstaking skill in logical analysis, and his predilection for the (...) paths trodden by Aquinas and the later Wittgenstein. If they invite the charge of lengthy and sometimes tedious hair-splitting, the author has his answer ready: often hair-splitting is the only way to attain the truth. (shrink)

Feigl’s essay “The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’” was first published in 1958 in the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. The present work is a reprint together with a postscript in which Feigl discusses various criticisms directed to his thesis since the original publication.

Some ninety years ago, Sidgwick wrote his Outlines of the History of Ethics for English Readers The work was precisely what the title claimed: a series of outlines running from the pre-Socratics to J S Mill and beyond. Sidgwick had no doctrinal axe to grind. His object was to inform, and in this object he was highly successful. He had a gift for clear unhurried exposition, and the Outlines remains to this day a masterpiece of its kind.

Eclipses are proverbially fraught with forebodings. The solar eclipse of 1919 was no exception. Seen in retrospect, that eclipse marked the end of an old era and the beginning of a new in the philosophy of science. Not in science itself, be it noted, for the scientific life is a life of patience and sobriety and continuity, knowing little of what the world calls ‘sensation’. But for the onlookers, the philosophers of science, the event was drama. The reign of Newton, (...) long tottering, was finally broken; Einstein took up the vacant chair. Men were not slow to learn the lesson: if king-making can be done once it can be done again. Philosophy of science must needs hereafter be a philosophy of revolutions—whether continuous revolution or spasmodic revolutions is still a subject of debate. (shrink)

In recent years there has been an immense upsurge of writings on the philosophy of science. It is noticeable, however, that much of this writing is ‘philosophical’ in only a rather remote sense of the word. The Reader in the History and Philosophy of Science in the University of Cambridge has set out to recall philosophers of science to ‘the general nature of philosophical thinking and of the philosophical tradition that has accumulated over the centuries’. A complementary aim of the (...) work is ‘to remind the students of general philosophy that their philosophical heritage is deeply grounded in, if not originating from, speculation about science, showing that the methods and results of scientific enquiry have had a profound direction on philosophical thought’. (shrink)

This is a paperback edition of a work first published in 1960. It is not a history of science. It is that much more difficult and elusive thing, a history of scientific ideas. Or perhaps better, a series of roving meditations on that history as an element in the history of European culture. ‘This book is written in the conviction that science is the distinctive achievement of our history, and that nothing less momentous than the preservation of our culture hangs (...) on understanding its growth and bearing’. (shrink)

Feigl’s essay “The ‘Mental’ and the ‘Physical’” was first published in 1958 in the Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science. The present work is a reprint together with a postscript in which Feigl discusses various criticisms directed to his thesis since the original publication.

This collection of papers arose out of an international conference on Newton held at the University of Western Ontario in 1967.

Plato, in the Phaedrus, expressed forebodings about the written word. And the history of hermeneutics does little to dispel Plato’s prophecy of ills to come. At the present time, observes Professor Hirsch, we are, as regards literary criticism, in the high tide of subjectivism and scepticism. The meaning of Scripture is a new revelation to each generation; the meaning of a literary text is what it means to us today, and whatever meaning the author may have intended is irrelevant. The (...) magisterium of the teacher, as the preserver of a heritage and the conveyor of knowledge, has gone: his reading is no more valid than that of a pupil. On the other hand, to shift the focus of discussion from the text to the author is equally unsatisfactory. This course leads us into a search for influences and an enquiry into authorial habits and experiences. Literary criticism degenerates into futility. We must endeavour to fix on a point between these two extremes, a point where an objectively valid interpretation emerges, an interpretation which links the mind of the reader with the mind of the author. We must presume that the author, when he wrote, meant something determinate by his text. Our task is to discover from the text what he meant. How best to perform this task is the theme of the present book. (shrink)

Professor Randall is already well known to students of Greek philosophy through his lively book on Aristotle published in 1960. If his treatment of the Stagirite had more of Aristotle than of Randall, the same can hardly be said of the present work, which is decidedly more Randall than Plato. Indeed it might fairly be described as a dramatic reverie on Plato. None the worse for that of course, since the touch of Socrates was meant to stimulate, but the reader (...) should be warned in advance not to expect the measured treatment of a Taylor or a Friedländer. (shrink)

The generation of American idealist philosophers came to an end effectively with the first World War. Idealism was superseded by a variety of philosophical schools: pragmatists, empiricists, positivists and latterly existentialists. Now there are signs of a return to idealism. The rising tide of social anomy, which the recent schools can do nothing to prevent, has directed men’s minds once more to the roots of community life. The writings of the idealists, hitherto dismissed as scarcely intelligible abstractions, are now being (...) read in chastened spirit with a new awareness of their purport. (shrink)