Review of History of Philosophy of Science Books

Epilepsy, or About Turning Health into Units Vasia Lekka:  The Neurological Emergence of Epilepsy: The National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic (1870-1895) . New York: Springer, 2015. pp. xiii-209. Hardcover  ISBN 978-3-319-06292-1.  € 128, 39.  As philosophy of science is moving from its earlier general perspective to the new directions of  philosophies  of  sciences , general sociological and historical approaches to science are dividing as well into various sub-researches like sociology and history of  medicine . One of the last approaches to this field is Vasia Lekka’s The Neurological Emergence of Epilepsy – The National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic (1870–1895) dealing with the history and social embeddedness of epilepsy in the late Victorian era of England. Lekka’s book is an attracting work containing many important documents, materials, data and it deals with them from a well-focused perspective, raising fa...

Realizing Realism: Review of The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism Juha Staatsi (ed.),  The Routledge Handbook of Scientific Realism . London and New York: Routledge, 2018. pp. xiii + 456. Hardcover ISBN 978-1-138-88885-2. GBP £180. We might ask – and to add, it would be entirely justified to raise the question – about the contemporary significance of handbooks. They are big, heavy, hard to turn over their pages, often make it difficult to browse their contents, concentrate an enormous amount of knowledge on a few pages; also due to their intrinsic build-up, they contain many repetitions, and above all, it is hard to pay their prices for a regular mortal citizen. Despite these drawbacks, they are still produced, sold and bought; their significance is still there to be accounted for. Besides some obvious institutional merits (they provide important publication forum your young philosophers next to the big names of a given field), handbooks could play a significant ...

A Brief Guide to Explanations Chrysostomos Mantzavinos: A Dialogue on Explanation . Cham: Springer. pp. ix-56. Softcover, 2018. ISBN 978-3-030-05833-3. 69.99 USD. Questions of explanations took a central place among analytically oriented philosophers for decades in the second half of the twentieth century. After Carl G. Hempel’s works of in the 1940s, many scholars addressed explanation as one of the major concepts of philosophy of science; this trend existed until the 1990s, and found its peak in the works of Wesley Salmon and others. Though attention has recently turned towards different concepts, such as laws of nature, induction and probability, explanation was put back on the table. Besides questioning some old stories about how the question of explanation found its way in to the discussions of scientific philosophers in the 1940s (see the works of Fons Dewulf 2018a, 2018b), and besides the reinvention of philosophy of history as a respectful field for analytic ph...