front cover of Nature’s Suit
Nature’s Suit
Husserl’s Phenomenological Philosophy of the Physical Sciences
Lee Hardy
Ohio University Press, 2014

Edmund Husserl, founder of the phenomenological movement, is usually read as an idealist in his metaphysics and an instrumentalist in his philosophy of science. In Nature’s Suit, Lee Hardy argues that both views represent a serious misreading of Husserl’s texts.

Drawing upon the full range of Husserl’s major published works together with material from Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts, Hardy develops a consistent interpretation of Husserl’s conception of logic as a theory of science, his phenomenological account of truth and rationality, his ontology of the physical thing and mathematical objectivity, his account of the process of idealization in the physical sciences, and his approach to the phenomenological clarification and critique of scientific knowledge. Offering a jargon-free explanation of the basic principles of Husserl’s phenomenology, Nature’s Suit provides an excellent introduction to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl as well as a focused examination of his potential contributions to the philosophy of science.

While the majority of research on Husserl’s philosophy of the sciences focuses on the critique of science in his late work, The Crisis of European Sciences, Lee Hardy covers the entire breadth of Husserl’s reflections on science in a systematic fashion, contextualizing Husserl’s phenomenological critique to demonstrate that it is entirely compatible with the theoretical dimensions of contemporary science.

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front cover of Physics, the Human Adventure
Physics, the Human Adventure
From Copernicus to Einstein and Beyond
Brush, Stephen G
Rutgers University Press, 2001

Winner of the 2001 Joseph Hazen Education Prize of the History of Science Society​

Physics, the Human Adventure is the third edition of the classic text Introduction to Concepts and Theories in Physical Science. Authored by Gerald Holton, the text was a landmark in science education. It was the first modern textbook in physics (or in any other science) to make full and effective use of the history and philosophy of science in presenting for both the general and the science-oriented student an account of the nature of physical science. A second edition, prepared by Stephen G. Brush, brought the book up to date by increasing the coverage of topics in modern physics and by taking account of recent scholarly research in the history of science. 

In the new book Physics, The Human Adventure, each of the chapters has been reworked to further clarify the physics concepts and to incorporate recent physical advances and research. The book shows the unifying power of science by bringing in connections to chemistry, astronomy, and geoscience. In short, the aid of the new edition is to teach good physics while presenting physical science as a human adventure that has become a major force in our civilization.

New chapters discuss theories of the origin of the solar system and the expanding universe; fission, fusion, and the Big Bang–Steady State Controversy; and thematic elements and styles in scientific thought. New topics include:

• Theories of vision: does the eye send out rays or receive them?

• Distances in the solar system

• The prediction of the return of Halley’s comet and analysis of deviations from Kepler’s laws

• Angular momentum conservation and Laplace’s nebular hypothesis

• Relation between symmetries and conservation laws: Emmy Noether’s theorem

• First estimates of atomic sizes

• Consequences of the indistinguishability of elementary particles of the same kind

• Applications of quantum mechanics to many-particle systems

• Dirac’s prediction of anti-matter

• The anthropic principle and other controversial issues on the frontiers of research

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