Author: Elliott Sober
Publisher: Westview Pre
Keywords: philosophy, dimensions, biology
Number of Pages: 256
Published: 2000-01-12
List price: $42.00
ISBN-10: 0813391261
ISBN-13: 9780813391267

Perhaps because of it implications for our understanding of human nature, recent philosophy of biology has seen what might be the most dramatic work in the philosophies of the ”special” sciences. This drama has centered on evolutionary theory, and in the second edition of this textbook, Elliott Sober introduces the reader to the most important issues of these developments. With a rare combination of technical sophistication and clarity of expression, Sober engages both the higher level of theory and the direct implications for such controversial issues as creationism, teleology, nature ver

Author: Elliott Sober
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Keywords: philosophy, logic, library, clarendon, simplicity
Number of Pages: 200
Published: 1975-12-18
List price: $85.00
ISBN-10: 019824407X
ISBN-13: 9780198244073

Attempts to show that the simplicity of a hypothesis can be measured by attending to how well it answers certain kinds of questions.

Author: Elliott Sober
Publisher: The MIT Press
Keywords: second, biology, evolutionary, issues, conceptual
Number of Pages: 496
Published: 1993-12-08
List price: $46.00
ISBN-10: 0262691620
ISBN-13: 9780262691628

"This book has no competition whatsoever. There is no anthology which even attempts to cover this ground.... It will, I believe, become the standard text." -- Richard Boyd, Cornell University There has been considerable and lively debate in philosophy of biology over the decade since the first edition of this anthology appeared. Changes and additions in the new edition reflect the ways in which the subject has broadened and deepened on several fronts; more than half of the chapters are new. In all, twenty-three selections take up fitness, function and teleology, adaptationism, units

Author: Elliott Sober
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Keywords: philosophical, focus, theory, evolutionary, selection, nature
Number of Pages: 400
Published: 1993-08-15
List price: $29.00
ISBN-10: 0226767485
ISBN-13: 9780226767482

The Nature of Selection is a straightforward, self-contained introduction to philosophical and biological problems in evolutionary theory. It presents a powerful analysis of the evolutionary concepts of natural selection, fitness, and adaptation and clarifies controversial issues concerning altruism, group selection, and the idea that organisms are survival machines built for the good of the genes that inhabit them. "Sober’s is the answering philosophical voice, the voice of a first-rate philosopher and a knowledgeable student of contemporary evolutionary theory. His book merits bro

Author: Elliott Sober
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Keywords: science, logic, evolution, evidence
Number of Pages: 412
Published: 2008-04-21
List price: $28.00
ISBN-10: 0521692741
ISBN-13: 9780521692748

How should the concept of evidence be understood? And how does the concept of evidence apply to the controversy about creationism as well as to work in evolutionary biology about natural selection and common ancestry? In this rich and wide-ranging book, Elliott Sober investigates general questions about probability and evidence and shows how the answers he develops to those questions apply to the specifics of evolutionary biology. Drawing on a set of fascinating examples, he analyzes whether claims about intelligent design are untestable; whether they are discredited by the fact that many adap

Author: Elliott Sober
Publisher: The MIT Press
Keywords: inference, evolution, parsimony, past, reconstructing
Number of Pages: 288
Published: 1991-02-05
List price: $30.00
ISBN-10: 0262691442
ISBN-13: 9780262691444

Reconstructing the Past seeks to clarify and help resolve the vexing methodological issues that arise when biologists try to answer such questions as whether human beings are more closely related to chimps than they are to gorillas. It explores the case for considering the philosophical idea of simplicity/parsimony as a useful principle for evaluating taxonomic theories of evolutionary relationships. For the past two decades, evolutionists have been vigorously debating the appropriate methods that should be used in systematics, the field that aims at reconstructing phylogenetic relationship

Author: Elliott Sober
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Keywords: philosophy, cambridge, biology, studies, evolutionary, point, view, essays, biological
Number of Pages: 268
Published: 1994-09-30
List price: $53.00
ISBN-10: 0521477530
ISBN-13: 9780521477536

This new collection of essays will appeal to a readership that extends well beyond the frontiers of the philosophy of science. Sober shows how ideas in evolutionary biology bear in significant ways on traditional problems in philosophy of mind and language, epistemology, and metaphysics. Among the topics addressed are psychological egoism, solipsism, and the interpretation of belief and utterance, empiricism, Ockham’s razor, causality, essentialism, and scientific laws.