Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues

Curd and Cover's "Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues" is both an anthology and an introduction to philosophy of science. It concentrates on the most central problems of philosophy of natural science, and does not cover philosophy of social science, or particular problems in philosophy of physics or philosophy of biology. Among the topics covered are the nature of science, scientific explanation, induction, prediction, confirmation, reduction, objectivity, underdetermination, laws of nature and scientific realism and anti-realism. Most of the selections are excellent, including classical and contemporary readings. The majority of the book consists in the readings; however, the commentary by Curd and Cover is very extensive. The book is organized clearly. Each section begins with a brief introduction by Curd and Cover; the readings follow this; and, finally, these are explained and summarized by Curd and Cover's commentary. A thorough and helpful glossary follows towards the end of the book. This book is excellent, and I strongly recommend it, especially for upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in philosophy. However, I think that readers unfamiliar with analytic philosophy may find some of the readings and the commentary difficult; Chalmer's "What Is This Thing Called Science?" is a less daunting introduction.

I hope I won't be suspected of overstating the virtues of this book when I say that this is the single finest philosophy anthology that I've ever encountered--and, believe me, I've seen my fair share of them. Curd and Cover deserve to be commended--and I hereby commend them--for their work in editing this volume. Not only have they made compiled a very useful anthology of approximately fifty selections in contemporary philosophy of science, but they've included a very significant amount of original editorial material. Indeed, I've never seen a philosophy anthology with editorial material anywhere near this extensive or helpful. Curd and Cover provide the reader with introductions to each section; detailed and thoughtful commentaries, many of which are forty to fifty pages long, on the readings at the end of each section; a twenty-page glossary of terms; and extensive bibliographies on each of the subjects covered. Roughly a third of this book, which is 1300+ pages long, has been written by the editors. Because of the comprehensiveness of the commentaries that Curd and Cover have included on each section of readings, this volume, unlike many such anthologies, works very well as a stand-alone introduction to the field. For these commentaries provide the necessary background that the reader needs to fully appreciate the problems with which the authors of particular selections are struggling, the arguments they present in the selections, and the importance of the various selections in contemporary thinking about how best to solve the problems of the philosophy of science. In other words, the commentaries here do much of the work that a lecturer would do, and so reading these papers along with the commentaries is like going through an excellent and wide-ranging introductory course in the philosophy of science.This anthology is intended to introduce the most general subjects in contemporary philosophy of science. Curd and Cover emphasize work in the philosophy of science that is of importance to anyone interested in the subject, and they have deliberately tried to avoid including readings that assume the reader is familiar with a great deal of contemporary science or its history. There are sections on each of the following topics: the demarcation problem (the problem of isolating what, if anything, is essential to, and distinctive of, scientific inquiry), values and objectivity in science, underdetermination and the Duhem-Quine thesis, induction and the nature of scientific evidence, explanation, laws of nature, intertheoretic reduction, and scientific realism. Most of these sections include four or five papers (the section on realism, which is by far the largest section, contains about twice as many). And this book includes work by many of the most important figures in these areas, including Kuhn, Popper, Hempel, Lakatos, Laudan, Kitcher, van Fraassen, et al. And the reader should note that this anthology focuses only on work in the natu

Anyone who ever wondered about science in general, or what answers sciences can give us to questions we pose, and which not, if we should believe what science tells us or rather not, what it is that sets apart physics and astrologie, or if the picture that science gives us in its laws and theories reflects reality or is just an instrument for science, all those (and all those who would like to start pondering right now)can get a very profound introduction into those (and other) aspects of philosophical contemplation by reading this very well written and edited book. It consists of 9 chapters, each treating one subject by first giving a short introduction by the editors, then several papers by leading philosophers in the field, and then a very well written commentary on each of those papers, that retrace and explain the papers for easier digestion. My fullest recommendations for this book.