Eric Scerri: Collected papers on philosophy of chemistry Imperial College Press, 1st edn (June 9, 2008),ISBN-10: 1848161379, ISBN-13: 978-1848161375

摘要

This is an outstanding and much anticipated volume, which collects in one place a numberof the seminal papers written by one of the pioneers in the philosophy of chemistry. Fordecades Eric Scerri has been a major contributor to this newest and fastest growing area inthe philosophy of science, but until now one has been forced to look for reprints of hispapers in other volumes or scattered across the many journals that have periodicallypublished within this emerging field. No more. With the founding of the journal Foun-dations of Chemistry in 1997, scholars have been able to find a good deal of the best recentwork within one journal; for a compendium of the classic articles one may consult the firstanthology in the field Philosophy of Chemistry: Synthesis of a New Discipline, published in2006; and for the best collection of articles by someone who has had a hand in all of theseprevious ventures, one may now turn to the excellent Collected Papers on Philosophy ofChemistry, which draws together many of the best papers by Scerri himself. Scerri's priorarticles on topics such as reductionism, the periodic table, the realism debate, and chemicaleducation are all featured here. It is also welcome that this volume offers a few samples ofhis more recent work.