Philosophy of Science ― Between the Natural Sciences, the Social Sciences, and the Humanities

This broad and insightful book presents current scholarship in important subfields of philosophy of science and addresses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary readership. It groups carefully selected contributions into the four fields of I) philosophy of physics, II) philosophy of life sciences, III) philosophy of social sciences and values in science, and IV) philosophy of mathematics and formal modeling.

Readers will discover research papers by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Keizo Matsubara, Kian Salimkhani, Andrea Reichenberger, Anne Sophie Meincke, Javier Suárez, Roger Deulofeu, Ludger Jansen, Peter Hucklenbroich, Martin Carrier, Elizaveta Kostrova, Lara Huber, Jens Harbecke, Antonio Piccolomini d’Aragona and Axel Gelfert. This collection fosters dialogue between philosophers of science working in different subfields, and brings readers the finest and latest work across the breadth of the field, illustrating that contemporary philosophy of science has successfully broadened its scope of reflection. It will interest and inspire a wide audience of philosophers as well as scholars of the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities.

The volume shares selected contributions from the prestigious second triennial conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science/ Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP.2016, March 8, 2016 – March 11, 2016).

Alexander Christian is a research fellow at the Dusseldorf center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (DCLPS) at the Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf. His main research areas are general philosophy of science and ethics of science, with a particular focus on bias, questionable research practices and scientific misconduct in medical research. He published about the demarcation problem (“Wissenschaft und Pseudowissenschaft”, Peter Lang, 2013), values in science and the suppression of empirical evidence.

David Hommen is currently Post-Doctoral research fellow in the DFG Collaborative Research Centre “The Structure of Representations in Language, Cognition, and Science” at Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf. His main research areas are philosophy of mind, the theory of concepts, causal theory and the metaphysics of absences. He is co-author of “Negative Kausalitat” (de Gruyter 2012, with Dieter Birnbacher) and author of “Mentale Verursachung, innere Erfahrung und handelnde Personen” (mentis 2013).

Nina Retzlaff is a research fellow at the Dusseldorf center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (DCLPS) at the Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf. Her main research interests lie in philosophy of science, causality and metaphysics. In the context of her PhD thesis, she is investigating causality with regard to quantum mechanics.

Gerhard Schurz holds the Chair for Theoretical Philosophy at the Heinrich Heine University Dusseldorf and is the Director of the Dusseldorf Center for Logic and Philosophy of Science (DCLPS). His research areas include general and special philosophy of science, logic, epistemology, generalized evolution theory, artificial intelligence and metaethics. He published more than 200 papers. Among other books, he published “The Is-Ought Problem“, Dordrecht: Kluwer (1997), “Einfuhrung in die Wissenschaftstheorie“, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (2006, 4. Aufl. 2014), “Evolution in Natur und Kultur“, Heidelberg: Spektrum Akademischer Verlag (2011), “Philosophy of Science: A Unified Approach“, New York: Routledge (2013) and “Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie“, Berlin: DeGruyter (2015).