Friedel Weinert – författare

“Why is Darwin less the Copernicus than the Kepler of biology? What are good criteria for scientific revolutions? Shift of perspective? Replacement of paradigms? Reweaving conceptual networks? Explanatory gain? Restructuring the constraint space? Threatening worldviews? Whoever wants to learn more about these and many other important issues of history and philosophy of science will have to read on!”Klaus Hentschel, University of Stuttgart

“Friedel Weinert has done a rare and excellent thing in this book: he has shown how the philosophy of science is intimately connected with the development of physical, biological, and social sciences and that argument concerning the foundations of these sciences cannot be advanced without reference to philosophy. It is a clearly written and engaging book that will be informative for teachers, students, and the lay public alike.”Robert Nola, University of Auckland

Karl R. Popper is widely regarded as one of the most influential 20th century philosophers. In this new biography, Weinert provides a comprehensive and accessible account of his life and work, also addressing Popper’s role as a public intellectual. Drawing on a wide range of sources and interviews with former colleagues and collaborators, he recounts not only the wide interest from the scientific community, but also the inspiration that politicians took from Popper’s work. The book surveys the vast and varied intellectual landscape of Popper''s philosophical journey during his long career: from the natural and social sciences (physics, evolution, sociology) to political philosophy and the philosophy of mind. It pays significant attention to Popper’s critical method - i.e., the notion that ideas and institutions should be exposed to rigorous tests – the approach that led him to a fervent defence of objectivity, rationality and realism, against all forms of irrationalism, as well as a passionate advocacy of freedom, social justice and liberal democracy, against all forms of authoritarianism. The book brings Popper into focus as a modern Enlightenment philosopher.

This book is the first all-encompassing exploration of the role of demons inphilosophical and scientific thought experiments. In Part I, the author explains the importance of thought experiments in science andphilosophy. Part II considers Laplace’s Demon, whose claim is that the world iscompletely deterministic. Part III introduces Maxwell’s Demon, who - by contrast - experiences a world that is probabilistic and indeterministic. Part IV explores Nietzsche’s thesis of the cyclic and eternal recurrence of events. In each casea number of philosophical consequences regarding determinism and indeterminism, the arrows of time, the nature of the mind andfree will are said to follow from the Demons’s worldviews. The book investigates what these Demons - and others - can and cannot tell us about our world.  

How do major scientific discoveries reshape their originators’, and our own, sense of reality and concept of the physical world? The Scientist as Philosopher explores the interaction between physics and philosophy. Clearly written and well illustrated, the book first places the scientist-philosophers in the limelight as we learn how their great scientific discoveries forced them to reconsider the time-honored notions with which science had described the natural world. Then, the book explains that what we understand by nature and science have undergone fundamental conceptual changes as a result of the discoveries of electromagnetism, thermodynamics and atomic structure. Even more dramatically, the quantum theory and special theory of relativity questioned traditional assumptions about causation and the passage of time. The author concludes that the dance between science and philosophy is an evolutionary process, which will keep them forever entwined.

These essays by leading philosophers and scientists focus on recent ideas at the forefront of modern Darwinism, showcasing and exploring the challenges they raise as well as open problems. This interdisciplinary volume is unique in that it addresses the key notions of evolutionary theory in approaches to the mind, in the philosophy of biology, in the social sciences and humanities; furthermore it considers recent challenges to, and extensions of, Neo-Darwinism. The essays demonstrate that Darwinism is an evolving paradigm, with a sphere of influence far greater than even Darwin is likely to have imagined when he published ‘On the Origin of Species’ in 1859.

The aim of this interdisciplinary study is to reconstruct the evolution of our changing conceptions of time in the light of scientific discoveries. It will adopt a new perspective and organize the material around three central themes, which run through our history of time reckoning: cosmology and regularity; stasis and flux; symmetry and asymmetry. It is the physical criteria that humans choose – relativistic effects and time-symmetric equations or dynamic-kinematic effects and asymmetric conditions – that establish our views on the nature of time. This book will defend a dynamic rather than a static view of time.