Publication date:
23 March 2023Length of book:
150 pagesPublisher
Institute Of Physics PublishingDimensions:
254x178mm7x10"
ISBN-13: 9780750326346
This book is about the ways that philosophers inquire into science. They do so with several different approaches, which this book parses into three. One analyzes the results of inquiry, another the process of inquiry, and still another inquiring, or what it means to be an inquirer. Each approach puts a different feature of science centre-stage – its logic, practice, and being-inquiring – questions it in different vocabularies for different ends, and ends up with different kinds of conclusions. This book outlines these approaches in a non-technical way, and highlights their differences by showing how they engage specific topics and issues in physics, including method, discovery, and theory. The key audiences for this book include the wider physics community, as well as philosophy and physics students.
Key Features:
- Author is well respected in the field and well known, in particular through his writings in Physics World
- Provides a broad and impartial coverage of the topic
- Aimed at the physics reader and not the philosopher
"Professor Crease is outstandingly qualified to write this book. Not only is he a highly distinguished historian and philosopher of science but also a polished and creative writer of both books and shorter journalism." - Brian Foster, Universities of Hamburg (Germany) and Oxford (UK)
"Crease’s strengths as a philosopher of and writer on science are already on display in many of his other writings, including his earlier IOP short book. He has a track record of writing about science—especially physical science, and even more specifically physics—as more than a source of theories, which is the unfortunate default position of many other writers on science ... Crease is especially good at portraying science as a real and distinctive human activity, not just a system of interesting thoughts about Nature." - Robert C. Scharff, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of New Hampshire