A systematic companion to “neoclassical” philosophy of science

Abstract

After the demise of logical empiricism in the late fifties of the past century, philosophy of science entered a sort of Kuhnian revolutionary phase. Both its central problems and the methods used to address them underwent a profound change; under the pressure of the ‘‘new’’ philosophy of science—and of the various historical, sociological, cultural, or feminist approaches—the way of doing philosophy championed by Carnap and Popper was progressively abandoned by many scholars interested in the study of science. Today, it is unclear whether this revolutionary phase is coming to an end, and if a new paradigm is in sight. That this may be the case is suggested by the appearance of some advanced introductions to the philosophy of science, which aim at replacing classical work like those by Carnap (1966) and Hempel (1966) as manuals for the present generation of scholars. These new contributions provide the (advanced) student, and the expert as well, with a firm grip of what, following Kuipers (2001), we may call the ‘‘neoclassical’’ approach to the philosophy of science: briefly, updating and revitalizing the traditional analytic account to tackle the hot problems of postpositivist philosophy of science. With this book, Gerhard Schurz provides probably the most complete advanced introduction to neoclassical philosophy of science appeared so far. Philosophy of science: An unified approach is an impressive overview of the main issues in general philosophy of science, organized by topics and written in a extremely rigorous and systematic style. To be sure, Schurz’s book is a deliberately biased one: To dispel any doubt, right at the beginning he declares himself ‘‘a follower of logically and empirically oriented philosophers of science such as Carnap, Hempel, Reichenbach, and Stegmuller in the German speaking area’’ (xvii). Thus, it is easy