Review of History of Philosophy of Science Books

A Decidable Problem: Buying or Not Alonzo Church’s Collected Works The Collected Works of Alonzo Church . Edited by Tyler Burge and Herbert Enderton. Cambridge, MA., London: The MIT Press, 2019, pp. xxxvi + 1189. Hardcover ISBN 978-0-262-02564-5. $135. Parceling up the intellectual history of western science into diverse and well-defined fields is not a new thing at all. Nonetheless, the studies in recent years about philosophy and science show an even more stratified picture of the historical dimension of knowledge production. Among philosophers, special attention has been given to philosophy of science, theory of knowledge, and  to  some  extend  to  the  philosophy of language. Even though the history of logic has its own journal ( History and Philosophy of Logic ), its own handbook series (under the general editorship of Dov M. Gabbay), if you ask someone about  the subject , she will tell you only a few things. Perhaps something about Got...

Otto Neurath’s Educational Story in Pictures and Texts Otto Neurath:  From hieroglyphics to Isotype: a visual autobiography.  Edited by Matthew Eve and Christopher Burke. Devizes: Perpensa Press, 2019, pp. xxxii + 191. Paperback ISBN 978-1-9160539-1-5.  £25.00 Otto Neurath (1882-1945) is one of the strangest figures in the history of so-called analytic philosophy. For many decades, during his lifetime and even during the second half of the twentieth century, he was viewed as a clumsy propagandist, an ardent defender of Marxism and thus as a philosophically irrelevant social scientist, an organizer and perhaps as an educator. Philosophers, who thought that his papers lacked the basic philosophical skills – namely precise argumentation, sharp definitions and clear identification of problems – often described him in hostile terms. It might be not at all accidental or surprising that Neurath fell from the canon of analytic philosophy almost immediately after his de...

Valuing value-discussions in science Kevin C. Elliott and Daniel Steel (eds.),  Current Controversies in Values and Science . New York and London: Routledge, 2017. pp. ix + 186. Hardcover ISBN 978-1-138-19328-4.  £130. There are fashions in the history of philosophy of science regarding what are the main concepts that are being used to analyze science and which of the scientific concepts are to be analyzed at all in the first place. In the first half of the twentieth century – at least according to the received view, which, it has to be added, is not entirely far from the truth – these were “verification”, “falsification”, “explanation”, “induction” and many more, often connected to a supposed general methodology and logical side of scientific theories. Questions of values were usually set aside; they became subjects for anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists and historians. As time went on, fashions changed and values turned into respectful research objects...

Background Work on Logical Empiricism: New Volumes on Cohen and Bühler Christian Damböck (ed.),  Philosophie und Wissenschaft bei Hermann Cohen/Philosophy and Science in Hermann Cohen . Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis, vol. 28. Dordrecht: Springer, 2018, pp. viii + 247. Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-58022-7.  € 87,46. Janette Friedrich (ed.),  Karl Bühlers Krise der Psychologie: Positionen, Bezüge und Kontroversen im Wien der 1920e/30er Jahre . Veröffentlichungen des Instituts Wiener Kreis, vol. 26. Dordrecht: Springer, 2018. pp. x + 204. Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-58082-1.  € 87,46 “Cohen and logical empiricism? Is it a meaningful question to ask?” opens Massimo Ferrari (p. 161.) his contribution to Christian Damböck’s recently edited volume on  Philosophie und Wissenschaft bei Hermann Cohen/Philosophy and Science in Hermann Cohen . But we might generalize the issue and raise the question whether a book on Hermann Cohen has any place...