Philosophy of Science [ed: Tony Cheng]

OER Project Directory Introduction to Philosophy
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Post revised March 2025

This is one of the books in the Introduction to Philosophy open textbook series (series editor Christina Hendricks). See the full project summary for the series (Project Summary - Introduction to Philosophy - Rebus Community)

This book focuses on foundational topics in the philosophy of science, and like the other books in the series, is designed to be used, in whole or in part, in introduction to philosophy courses.

Book summary

Philosophy of science can be seen as meta-science, in the sense that it focusses on meta-theoretic questions concerning scientific disciplines. In this book, we do not aim for comprehensiveness; we will rather selectively cover some important issues in philosophy of science. We will begin with varieties of empiricism, including logical empiricism, which has been highly influential in the 20th century philosophy of science. The book will then go through key figures during that time, including Karl Popper (1902-1994), Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), Imre Lakatos (1922-1974), Paul Feyerabend (1924-1994), and Larry Laudan (1941-2022). After letting the readers understand these different perspectives, the book will move on covering the sociology of scientific knowledge, feminism, induction, explanation, and the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. Towards the end, we will switch from general philosophy of science to philosophical issues concerning special sciences. We plan to cover philosophy of biology and philosophy of psychology for now, but the exact chapters to be included will depend on later arrangements.

Chapter Outline

Please see the outline of chapters for the book.

How to participate:

We will be seeking authors for chapters for this book soon.

Relevant Documents:

Author Guide – Read this guide to find out more about what committing to author a chapter involves.

Team: @clhendricksbc (series editor), @apurva … and you?

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Here is the draft outline of chapters for this book, open for comment until about the end of the first week of March. Please read and comment if you have expertise in this area!

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I added a comment to the outline, but what about a chapter on causation? The causal skepticism of Russell through the causal modeling approaches used today?

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@adamedw01 Thanks for your feedback, Adam! I’ll let @eran-asoulin, book editor, address your question about the chapter on causation. :slight_smile:

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And I just sent you an email, Adam…I hadn’t seen this post! I was not always getting notifications from this forum before it was redesigned; hopefully I’ll get them now!

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Dear Christina and Eran,
I am willing and able to write the demarcation chapter for the phil science introduction. I have a PhD in philosophy and have taught the demarcation problem at an introductory level numerous times. Here is a link to my CV and here is a link to the syllabus for the first-year science and society class I refer to above.
Best wishes,
Dustin

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Thanks for your interest, Dustin! @christina.hendricks and @eran.asoulin will review your CV and be in touch soon.

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Thank you, Dustin, and sorry for my delayed reply…I was not reading emails or notifications from this site over the holiday break, but now am back to work! I’ll connect with the book editor, Eran Asoulin, and one of us should get back to you soon!

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