Ebook: Proper Ambition of Science

What is the proper relation between the scientific worldview and other parts or aspects of human knowledge and experience? Can any science aim at "complete coverage" of the world, and if it does, will it undermine - in principle or by tendency - other attempts to describe or understand the world? Questions of this sort have been of pressing philosophical concern since antiquity. This volume presents nine particular case studies, looking at how this problem has been approached from the ancient world right up to the late 1990s. A comparison of the last two contributions - from David Papineau and Nancy Cartwright - show how far we still are from consensus on the question of the proper ambition of science.