Issues and Images in the Philosophy of Science

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.

Klappentext

Wide-ranging investigations of issues in the philosophical understanding of physical concepts, and explorations of differing images of the impacts of scientific developments upon philosophy. Topics include realism and anti-realism, hermeneutic and empiricist interpretations. Dedicated to the distinguished Bulgarian philosopher Azarya Polikarov, with a full bibliography of his works.

Inhalt
Who Needs Aristotle?.- Naive Realism and Naive Antirealism.- Against Postmodernism and the New Philosophy of Science: Nietzsche's Image of Science in the Light of Art.- On the Validity of von Neumann's Theorem.- Explaining Scientific Revolutions.- Micro- and Macro-Hermeneutics of Science.- The Redundancy of Spacetime: Special Relativity as a Grammar and the Strangeness of 'c'.- Context, Hermeneutics, and Ontology in the Experimental Sciences.- Cognitive Dynamics and the Development of Science.- Methodical Constructivism.- Hermeneutic vs. Empiricist Philosophy of Science.- Must the Explanans be True?.- Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence: SETI and Scientific Methodology.- Since Indeterminacy: The New Picture of the Physical World at the End of Modernity.- The Dynamics of Science.- The Law of Logarithmic Returns and Its Implications.- The Human Right to Know and the Reality of Knowledge.- Kuhn's Ontological Relativism.- The Problem of Reduction in the Theory of Special Relativity.- Symmetries and Explanations: The Lessons of Elementary Particle Physics.- Cognition as a System.- System Approach to the Problem of the Classification of Sciences and Scientific Researches.- Appendix / Azarya Polikarov: Selected Books and Articles.- Name Index.