The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader - by Daniel J McKaughan & Holly Vandewall

Book Synopsis

The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader brings together seminal texts from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century and makes them accessible in one volume for the first time.

With readings from Aristotle, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Darwin, Faraday, and Maxwell, it analyses and discusses major classical, medieval and modern texts and figures from the natural sciences. Grouped by topic to clarify the development of methods and disciplines and the unification of theories, each section includes an introduction, suggestions for further reading and end-of-section discussion questions, allowing students to develop the skills needed to:

§ read, interpret, and critically engage with central problems and ideas from the history and philosophy of science
§ understand and evaluate scientific material found in a wide variety of professional and popular settings
§ appreciate the social and cultural context in which scientific ideas emerge
§ identify the roles that mathematics plays in scientific inquiry

Featuring primary sources in all the core scientific fields - astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the life sciences - The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader is ideal for students looking to better understand the origins of natural science and the questions asked throughout its history. By taking a thematic approach to introduce influential assumptions, methods and answers, this reader illustrates the implications of an impressive range of values and ideas across the history and philosophy of Western science.

Review Quotes

"This collection aptly unites, and thematically arranges, some of the most important sources in the history of the biological and physical sciences from antiquity through the end of the 19th century. The volume is designed for use in upper division or graduate history and philosophy of science courses and affords instructors ready access to key texts from a near-comprehensive range of time periods. The book stops before the 20th century, but this limitation ensures that the sources it includes are broadly accessible to students without advanced scientific training. The selection of sources is careful, and the translations (where applicable) are fluid ... Summing Up: Recommended. Advanced undergraduate and graduate students and their instructors." --CHOICE

"McKaughan and VandeWall set off on a difficult quest: to bottle two millennia of our species' best thoughts about the world and our place in it into a single collection, to do it without overwhelming the new reader with a deluge of opaque material, to cover the ever-expanding panoply of disciplines and practices, and through it all to not lose sight of that humbling sense of wonder at nature that our ancestors experienced and that we who stand on the shoulders of giants would do well to remember. I can't wait to share this with my own students." --Erik L. Peterson, Assistant Professor of the History of Science, The University of Alabama, USA

"Can an education in the history & philosophy of science be distilled into a single volume? The McKaughan & VandeWall anthology has done so. It reflects the conviction that historians of science ought to be well trained as philosophers of science and vice versa. This collection is an extremely rich resource for both encountering science (natural philosophy) as it really was and for discerning progress. It samples generously from oft-neglected eras, regions, disciplines, and authors. Having designed a course in the history & philosophy of science myself, I really appreciate this book." --J. Brian Pitts, Senior Research Associate, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Cambridge, UK.

About the Author

Daniel J. McKaughan is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College, USA.

Holly VandeWall is Assistant Professor of the Practice of Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College, USA.