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The Demons of Science What They Can and Cannot Tell Us About Our World

no / The title The Demons of Science may at first appear like a contradiction in terms.
Demons are associated with the forces of darkness; science represents the power of
light. One could assume, therefore, that science has no time for demons. This book
aims to destroy this assumption. Science opens its gates to demons as long as they
play a rational rather than an evil part. They are put to work. Demons are figures of
thought: they belong to the category of thought experiments, which are routinely
employed in science and philosophy. As they are cast as agents with superhuman
abilities, we may expect that demons provide us with valuable—albeit
non-empirical—clues about the constitution of the physical world. But I am
interested in exploring not only what the demons tell us but also what they do not
tell us about our world. They are cast as superhuman actors but even demons have
their limitations. The following chapters contain, I believe, the first systematic study
of the role of demons in scientific and philosophical reasoning about the external
world.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/10688
Date January 2016
CreatorsWeinert, Friedel
Source SetsBradford Scholars
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeBook, No full-text in the repository
Relationhttp://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-31708-3

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