Customer Reviews

A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science (Opus)

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this is an introduction to the history of philosophical thinking throughout history, not an indepth treatment of ethics throughout history as one reviewer criticised it for not being (something it never stated it was).

It is thorough without being overwhelming for someone interested in an introduction to philosopphy, and it is interesting not dry and boring or hard to follow as many philosophy books can prove to be.

It is exactly what it says it is and does a good job at it.

Losse starts with the Pythagoreans, the atomists, and Aristotle. He ends up discussing Popper, Hempel, Kuhn, Feyerband, Lakatos, and a variety of contemporary philosophers. It's densely packed, and for novices to philosophy or logic it might take some effort, but for those with a little background it is easy and, at least for me, fun.

This is not an introduction to philosophy of science; it is a history of the evolution of philosophy of science. As such, it serves its purpose very well.

This book is as advertized; an historical introduction to the philosophy of science. I have heard it paraphrased that "History of Science without Philosophy of Science is Blind; Philosophy of Science without the History of Science is Empty." This is a very easy read to get you started on your way to understanding science as an evolving set of methods and views. I can see layman and students in undergraduate sciences with no prior knowledge of the history or philosophy and reap great rewards from this work. It fashioned as a collection short essays on topics through history. If you are looking for a hardcore introduction with all kinds of depth, this is not it. For advanced HPS students, look elsewhere. If you know a bit about the history and philosophy of science, you can pick and choose your way through the sections of this book. For this reason, I have found it immensely useful.

My review is from the position that philosophy defines what is possible to be and know by ontology and phenomenology, while science defines what is demonstrable to be and know by observation and experiment. In this definition, models and data, experiment and observation, induction and deduction, and causality and probability contribute to one another, gradually extending our ability to symbolize.

Losee never defines the terms "science" or "philosophy," saying the boundary between them is "unclear" (3). He says the "philosophy of science is a second-order criteriology," (2), or a bunch of questions. Having nothing but a bunch of questions, he bobbles through two millennia of literature at a loss for any landing. He starts out with a competent crew like Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, but half way through the book, he throws the philosophers overboard in favor of a random selection of contemporary writers on science. For some of these, he provides little biographical sketches in lieu of any theoretical framework for selecting them. Most of the book consists of book reports with no particular point or purpose.

There are lots of references to natural science (physics, chemistry, geology, and biology) and some to analytic science (mathematics), but few to historical science (archaeology) and almost none to action science (sociology, anthropology, and psychology). In fact, there is no treatment of action sciences to speak of, since he dismisses the sociology of knowledge as "implausible." (241) It is difficult to see how this squares with his generous statement that Aristotle is "plausible." (13) He proceeds from an idealistic conviction that scientific data are independent of social facts, being some sort of natural necessities independent of culture.

His chapters have grand titles ("Mathematical Positivism") that give the appearance of a view of history, but many end in no conclusion at all. Where any summary is drawn, it is banal: "the philosopher seeks to develop evaluative principles applicable to diverse instances," for example (276).

I was interested in this book because its pretty rare to find historical treatments of problems in anglo-saxon or analytic philosophy beyond as a historical curiosity. First of all this book is over-simplified to the point of uselessness for any meaningful understanding beyond even maybe high-school levels at times. The historical orientation here seems to mean chronological- that you start with Aristotle and come down to Mill or Kuhn both without getting anything beyond magazine level information nor some (relevant and important) sense of historical connectedness, which would require a more extensive treatment of each philosopher at any rate.. So the historical thrust fails for the reason that the level of the book is too low to seriously carry it out, and maybe the author's knowledge on past philosophers is not deep enough - as is common in English language philosophy. I want to believe the first reason is truer, but in any case i think this book's level of treatment will be boringly low for most interested adult (over twenty let's say) readers, and its wiser to try a non-historical introduction to the topic.