Sci & Educ DOI 10.1007/s11191-015-9756-8 BOOK REVIEW

Using History of Philosophy in Philosophy of Science Lydia Patton (ed) (2014) Philosophy, Science, and History: A Guide and Reader. Routledge, New York and London, ISBN: 978-0-415-89831-7, 469 pp, US$56.68 (paperback) Ivan Ferreira da Cunha1

Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Philosophy, Science, and History is an anthology, consisting mostly of excerpts from important texts in philosophy of science. Some of these texts were written in the tradition of philosophy of science as a discipline. However, most of them come from older times when there was not much of a separation between science and philosophy and reflecting about science was a way of doing science—the tradition known as natural philosophy. The book contains a total of 29 chapters, the first of which is a general introduction, and the remaining 28 are grouped in two parts, each with a brief summary presenting the themes discussed. The first part, ‘‘Approaches to the History and Philosophy of Science’’, aims at presenting classical twentieth-century approaches to philosophy of science. It contains an introduction by the editor and texts by George Santayana, Carl Hempel, Hans Reichenbach, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, Martin Rudwick, and Steven Shapin & Simon Schaffer. It focuses on philosophical reflections about science in the debate between the logical and methodological, and the historical and sociological approaches. The second part draws attention to earlier periods of philosophy and history of science; it is divided into three sections (A, B, and C), each devoted to a different debate, and each containing an introduction by the editor. Section A is entitled ‘‘Hypotheses in Scientific Discovery’’, bringing texts by John Stuart Mill, William Whewell, Pierre Duhem, and Norwood Russell Hanson; its theme is the relation between scientific hypotheses and inductive reasoning, in such a way that Hanson’s text appears as the peak of the tradition of investigation on the processes that lead to the formulation of scientific theories. Section B discusses ‘‘Force in Natural Philosophy’’, presenting texts by Rene´ Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, Isaac Newton, E´milie du Chaˆtelet, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Those texts raise numerous discussions, but the Editor’s Introduction to this section directs the reader through the matters of force and causality in classical physics. And in section C one finds some important features of the debate between catastrophism and uniformitarianism in geology and its

& Ivan Ferreira da Cunha [email protected] 1

CAPES, Philosophy Graduate Program, State University of Maringa´ (UEM), Maringa´, Parana´, Brazil

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implications in biology, drawn from texts by George-Louis de Buffon, Georges Cuvier, John Playfair, Charles Darwin, and William Whewell. The book ends with a very thorough index of subjects and authors. Bibliographies for each of the parts and sections are presented in the respective introductions. The feature that first catches the reader’s eye is the quality of the selection. Philosophy, Science, and History brings important texts that are not really common in anthologies of this kind. For instance, Santayana’s ‘‘Reason in Science’’ (pp. 43–47), Hanson’s ‘‘Is There a Logic of Scientific Discovery?’’ (pp. 220–234), Chaˆtelet’s ‘‘On the Divisibility and Subtlety of Matter’’ (pp. 332–343), and Cuvier’s ‘‘Preliminary Observations to the Essay on the Theory of the Earth’’ (pp. 402–416). The special attention given to natural philosophy is likewise a very good aspect to be noticed. In the general introduction, the editor explains that she wanted to introduce the history of philosophy of science (HOPOS) as a discipline; she aims at ‘‘pointing out some major features of the development of the discipline, especially those that may be useful to a student who is encountering the material or the standards for HOPOS work for the first time’’ (p. 4). In this endeavor, texts that cannot be found freely online were preferred. However, no selection as such would be so perfect as to please everyone, and the criticism I have to make is that the discussion in the first part concentrates too much on Thomas Kuhn’s works. It is understood that Kuhn is one of the most important philosophers of science, but his texts occupy 40 % of the first part of the book, while some indications as to how philosophy of science could be applied to education and to other approaches of reflection about science is missing. I shall return to this point. There are some errors: some minor, harmless typographical mistakes, and a quite serious confusion between Thomas Nagel and Ernest Nagel. On pages 23 and 28, the editor is clearly referring to Ernest, but she writes Thomas. Still, no harm done, Nagel plays no lead role in the introductions, and this is very easy to fix, and should be corrected in future editions of the book. Despite that, the editor’s introductions are very good as they provide excellent contexts for the understanding of the texts, debates, and problems, as well as indications for further reading and research, along with brief comments on current literature about the themes presented. The introduction to Part II-B is particularly outstanding in this aspect: more than just contextualizing the remarkable sample of the natural philosophy texts presented, the editor also suggests, in a quite precise manner, three more debates that could figure in that section as well. Hence, with this book, someone who begins to explore HOPOS has not only a solid starting point, but also a clear prospect of continuation. As I mentioned above, the book is intended to be a basic guide for someone who is getting acquainted with the tradition of HOPOS, understood as a discipline. It is, then, not only for students, but also for experienced researchers from other fields, such as, say, the science, technology, and society (STS) studies, which present methodologies and literatures rather distinct from that of traditional philosophers of science. Such experienced researchers are given full conditions of gathering, in the editor’s words, ‘‘the basic elements that one is expected to know if one is traveling in HOPOS circles’’ (p. 4). In possession of these basic elements, such researchers will be able to establish a dialogue between their studies and HOPOS research. My concern, however, is that students, the true beginners, may not be able to grasp such a dialogue (or the possibility of such a dialogue) so easily. Students tend to separate subject matters, and Philosophy, Science, and History might accentuate such a separation by taking for granted that HOPOS is a discipline that can be disconnected from philosophy of science, or vice versa. A similar problem occurs when philosophy of science is taken to be entirely detachable from natural philosophy, a

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problem that is not present in the book—differently from similar anthologies published in the past. Separations of this kind are of no consequence to experienced researchers, for they can bridge the gaps by themselves or in their multidisciplinary work groups. Therefore, using this book in teaching requires an extra effort by the teacher in order to guide the students beyond HOPOS, allowing them to develop the important ability of using history of philosophy and history of science to understand philosophy of science and science itself. It is important to remark that, as noted above, going beyond HOPOS is not among the aims of Philosophy, Science, and History. But it could be, and such a task could be carried through by replacing some of Kuhn’s texts, which seem to endorse a separation between history of science and philosophy of science, in favor of, equally classical and also part of HOPOS, texts by Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, or Paul Feyerabend. These authors, especially Dewey, emphasize the import of science in society by means of education. By discussing relations as such, students may learn to use history of philosophy (of science) in philosophy (or sociology, or history, or anthropology, etc., or even logic) of science—which is something that, it seems, tends to become rare among contemporary scholars. Even though I criticize this aspect, I acknowledge that the extra effort required from teachers in using the book is not too much. I recognize, as well, that the establishment of HOPOS as a discipline is an important breakthrough. The point of my criticism is just to refrain from overlooking the relations between the various disciplines of reflection about science; such relations cannot be just relegated to interdisciplinary groups, but should also be stimulated among students.

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