Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvii

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2. Who Needs Aristotle?

   • Joseph Agassi

   Pages 1-11

3. Naive Realism and Naive Antirealism

   • Evandro Agazzi

   Pages 13-26

4. Against Postmodernism and the “New” Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche’s Image of Science in the Light of Art

   • Babette E. Babich

   Pages 27-45

5. On the Validity of von Neumann’s Theorem

   • Eftichios Bitsakis

   Pages 47-62

6. Explaining Scientific Revolutions

   • Ronald N. Giere

   Pages 63-86

7. Micro- and Macro-Hermeneutics of Science

   • Dimitri Ginev

   Pages 87-93

8. The Redundancy of Spacetime: Special Relativity as a Grammar and the Strangeness of ‘c’

   • Rom Harré

   Pages 95-105

9. Context, Hermeneutics, and Ontology in the Experimental Sciences

   • Patrick A. Heelan

   Pages 107-126

10. Cognitive Dynamics and the Development of Science

    • William. E. Herfel, Clifford. A. Hooker

    Pages 127-172

11. Methodical Constructivism

    • Peter Janich

    Pages 173-190

12. Hermeneutic vs. Empiricist Philosophy of Science

    • Joseph J. Kockelmans

    Pages 191-215

13. Must the Explanans be True?

    • Władysław Krajewski

    Pages 217-222

14. Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence: SETI and Scientific Methodology

    • David Lamb

    Pages 223-251

15. Since Indeterminacy: The New Picture of the Physical World at the End of Modernity

    • Ramón Queraltó

    Pages 253-262

16. The Dynamics of Science

    • Friedrich Rapp

    Pages 263-274

17. The Law of Logarithmic Returns and Its Implications

    • Nicholas Rescher

    Pages 275-287

18. The Human Right to Know and the Reality of Knowledge

    • Hans Jörg Sandkühler

    Pages 289-303

19. Kuhn’s Ontological Relativism

    • Howard Sankey

    Pages 305-320

20. The Problem of Reduction in the Theory of Special Relativity

    • Erhard Scheibe

    Pages 321-342

Azarya Polikarov was born in Sofia on October 9, 1921. Through the many stages of politics, economy, and culture in Bulgaria, he maintained his rational humanity and scientific curiosity. He has been a splendid teacher and an accomplished critical philosopher exploring the conceptual and historical vicis­ situdes of physics in modern times and also the science policies that favor or threaten human life in these decades. Equally and easily at home both within the Eastern and Central European countries and within the Western world. Polikarov is known as a collaborating genial colleague, a working scholar. not at all a visiting academic tourist. He understands the philosophy of science from within, in all its developments, from the classical beginnings through the great ages of Galilean, Newtonian. Maxwellian science. to the times of the stunning discoveries and imaginative theories of his beloved Einstein and Bohr of the twentieth century. Moreover, his understanding has come along with a deep knowledge of the scientific topics in themselves. Looking at our Appendix listing his principal publications, we see that Polikarov's public research career, after years of science teaching and popular science writing, began in the fifties in Bulgarian, Russian and German journals.

• concept
• constructivism
• hermeneutics
• philosophy of science
• reduction

• University of Sofia, Bulgaria

  Dimitri Ginev

• Boston University, USA

  Robert S. Cohen

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