We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical, context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.

It is ten years since Adolf Griinbaum published the first edition of this book. It was promptly recognized to be one of the few major works in the philosophy of the natural sciences of this generation. In part, this is so because Griinbaum has chosen a problem basic both to philosophy and to the natural sciences - the nature of space and time; and in part, this is so because he so admirably exemplifies that Aristotelian devotion to the intimate and mutual dependence of actual science and philosophical understanding. More than this, however, the quality of his work derives from his achievement in combining detail with scope. The problems of space and time have been among the most difficult in contemporary and classical thought, and Griinbaum has been responsible to the full depth and complexity of these difficulties. This revised and enlarged second edition is a work in progress, in the tradition of reflective analysis of modern science of such figures as Ehrenfest and Reichenbach. In publishing this work among the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, we hope to contribute to and encourage that broad tradition of natural philosophy which is marked by the close collaboration of philoso phers and scientists. To this end, we have published the proceedings of our Colloquia, of meetings and conferences here and abroad, as well as the works of single authors.

The third volume in McGill-Queen's University Press's Fundamentals of Philosophy series, Philosophy of Science is an engaging and accessible introduction to the main themes of contemporary philosophy of science. The book offers an indispensable grounding in the philosophical understanding of science and its problems.

This volume presents philosophy of science at its best, i.e. as a philosophical questioning informed by current scientific research, which carefully assesses and evaluates its commitments and consequences. As such it represents philosophy simpliciter at its best, for it is concerned with and dares to ask fundamental questions about the nature of the results of the natural sciences, arguably our most reliable sources of knowledge of the world. The contributions collected in this volume make clear that a philosophy that is disconnected from science is sterile and that the practice of science that is disconnected from a philosophical attempt to understand the natural world in its most general features is blind. Throughout the book we are confronted with questions about the nature of species, numbers, space, time, matter, consciousness and so on. Taking seriously these questions, along with other open problems in philosophy of sciences, and keeping the dialogue between science and philosophy wide open, is likely to be our best bet for a deeper understanding of what surrounds us. The book has a further, deeply important merit. Being the result of a post-graduate conference, it brings together not only leading, long established experts in the field but also new, young researchers, who usually find too small a place within the academic environment. Promoting exactly this kind of interaction is an essential step in constructing a new paradigm for an open, collaborative and fruitful scientific community.

This volume explores the logic and methodology of scientific inquiry rather than its substantive results.