A famous ecologist and a philosopher of science team up to offer a fresh new approach to population biology and ecology. Challenging the traditionally accepted Lotka-Volterra model, which is based on predator-prey interactions, this new model emphasizes maternal effects, specifically the significance of a mother's interest in the success of her female offspring.

This introduction to the philosophy of mathematics focuses on contemporary debates in an important and central area of philosophy. The reader is taken on a fascinating and entertaining journey through some intriguing mathematical and philosophical territory, including such topics as the realism/anti-realism debate in mathematics, mathematical explanation, the limits of mathematics, the significance of mathematical notation, inconsistent mathematics and the applications of mathematics. Each...

The modern materialist approach to life has conspicuously failed to explain such central mind-related features of our world as consciousness, intentionality, meaning, and value. This failure to account for something so integral to nature as mind, argues philosopher Thomas Nagel, is a major problem, threatening to unravel the entire naturalistic world picture, extending to biology, evolutionary theory, and cosmology. Since minds are features of biological systems that have developed through...

Why absolute certainty is impossible in scienceIn today's unpredictable and chaotic world, we look to science to provide certainty and answers—and often blame it when things go wrong. The Blind Spot reveals why our faith in scientific certainty is a dangerous illusion, and how only by embracing science's inherent ambiguities and paradoxes can we truly appreciate its beauty and harness its potential.Crackling with insights into our most perplexing c...

To many outsiders, mathematicians appear to think like computers, grimly grinding away with a strict formal logic and moving methodically--even algorithmically--from one black-and-white deduction to another. Yet mathematicians often describe their most important breakthroughs as creative, intuitive responses to ambiguity, contradiction, and paradox. A unique examination of this less-familiar aspect of mathematics, How Mathematicians Think reveals that mathematics is a profoundly c...

A quantity can be made smaller and smaller without it ever vanishing. This fact has profound consequences for science, technology, and even the way we think about numbers. In this book, we will explore this idea by moving at an easy pace through an account of elementary real analysis and, in particular, will focus on numbers, sequences, and series. Almost all textbooks on introductory analysis assume some background in calculus. This book doesn't and, instead, the emphasis is on the applic...

In his long-awaited new edition of Philosophy of Mathematics, James Robert Brown tackles important new as well as enduring questions in the mathematical sciences. Can pictures go beyond being merely suggestive and actually prove anything? Are mathematical results certain? Are experiments of any real value?This clear and engaging book takes a unique approach, encompassing non-standard topics such as the role of visual reasoning, the importance of notation, and the place of ...

Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg’s updated and substantially revised Third Edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving together lucid explanations and clear analyses, the volume is a much-used, thematically oriented introduction to the field.New features of the Third Edition include more coverage of the history of the philosophy of scie...

The book gives a detailed account of the development of the theory of algebraic equations, from its origins in ancient times to its completion by Galois in the nineteenth century. The appropriate parts of works by Cardano, Lagrange, Vandermonde, Gauss, Abel, and Galois are reviewed and placed in their historical perspective, with the aim of conveying to the reader a sense of the way in which the theory of algebraic equations has evolved and has led to such basic mathematical notions as 'gr...

How can the human mind represent the external world? What is thought, and can it be studied scientifically? Should we think of the mind as a kind of machine? Is the mind a computer? Can a computer think? Tim Crane sets out to answer these questions and more in a lively and straightforward way, presuming no prior knowledge of philosophy or related disciplines.Since its first publication, The Mechanical Mind has introduced thousands of people to some of the most important id...

Scientific realism is the optimistic view that modern science is on the right track: that the world really is the way our best scientific theories describe it . In his book, Stathis Psillos gives us a detailed and comprehensive study which restores the intuitive plausibility of scientific realism. We see that throughout the twentieth century, scientific realism has been challenged by philosophical positions from all angles: from reductive empiricism, to instrumentalism and to modern scepti...

This book is written for undergraduates who wish to learn some basic results in analytic number theory. It covers topics such as Bertrand's Postulate, the Prime Number Theorem and Dirichlet's Theorem of primes in arithmetic progression.The materials in this book are based on A Hildebrand's 1991 lectures delivered at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author's course conducted at the National University of Singapore from 2001 to 2008.