Research & Publications
Friedel Weinert
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Bradford
Research Interests: A traditional way of stating my research interests is to say ‘History and Philosophy of Science’, where science comprises both the natural sciences and the social sciences.
But a more accurate way is to say that I am interested in the interrelations between science and philosophy or 'integrated history and philosophy of science'. That is, I am interested in questions such as: How does science influence philosophy and how does philosophy influence science? Which philosophical assumptions exist in science? Which form do philosophical questions take when asked in the context of scientific problem situations? And more generally: How has science changed our philosophical assumptions about the world? These questions form the topics of my books The Scientist as Philosopher (2004), Copernicus, Darwin & Freud (2009), The March of Time (2013) and The Demons of Science (2016).
Publications
Books
Karl Popper: Professional Philosopher and Public Intellectual. A commissioned intellectual biography of Karl R. Popper (Springer 2022)
The Demons of Science: What they Can and Cannot Tell us about our World (New York/Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer 2016)
The March of Time: Changing Conceptions of Time in the Light of Scientific Discoveries (New York/Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer 2013)
Copernicus, Darwin & Freud: Revolutions in the History and Philosophy of Science (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell 2009)
The Scientist as Philosopher: Philosophical Consequences of Great Scientific Discoveries. (New York/Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer 2004)
Traditionen, Diskurse, Argumente. (Bern/Frankfurt a.M./New York: Peter Lang 1985)
Edited Books
Evolution 2.0: Implications of Darwinism in Philosophy, in the Natural and the Social sciences, edited by Martin Brinkworth & Friedel Weinert (The Frontiers Collection, Heidelberg/Berlin/New York: SPRINGER 2012)
Compendium of Quantum Physics: Concepts, Experiments, History and Philosophy. Edited by D. Greenberger, K. Hentschel & F. Weinert (New York/Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer 2009)
Laws of Nature. Edited with an introduction by Friedel Weinert. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1995; reprinted as E-Book 2011)
Some selected articles
‘Wrong Theory - Right Experiment: The Significance of the Stern-Gerlach Experiments.’ Studies in the History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 26/1 (1995), pp. 75-86
‘The Duhem Quine Problem Revisited.’ International Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 9/2 (1995), pp. 147-156
‘On the Status of Social Laws.’ Dialectica 51 (1997), pp. 225-42
‘Fundamental Physical Constants, Null Experiments and the Duhem-Quine Thesis.’ Philosophia Naturalis 35/2 (1998), pp. 225-52
‘Theories, Models and Constraints.’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 30/2 (1999), pp. 303-333
'The Construction of Atom Models: Eliminative Inductivism and its Relation to Falsificationism'. Foundations of Science 5/4 (2000), pp. 491-531
'Einstein and the Representation of Reality', Facta Philosophica 8 (2006), pp. 229-52
'A Conditional View of Causality’, in Causality and Probability in the Sciences. Edited by Federica Russo and Jon Williamson. London: College Publications, Texts In Philosophy 5(2007), pp. 415-37
'Einstein and the Laws of Physics', in Physics and Philosophy (Issue 2007), pp. 1-27
‘Einstein, Science and Philosophy’, Philosophia Scientiae 13/1 (2009), pp. 99-133
’Emergent Minds’, Teorema 28/2 (May 2009), pp. 189-99
'The Role of Probability Arguments in the History of Science’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 41 (2010), pp. 95-104
'Relativistic Thermodynamics and the Passage of Time', Humana.Mente 13 (2010), pp. 175-91
‘Minkowski Spacetime and Thermodynamics’, in V. Petkov (Ed.), Space, Time and Spacetime. Heidelberg, Berlin, New York: Springer (2010), pp. 239-56 (Fundamental Theories of Physics Vol. 167)
‘The Past-Future Asymmetry’, in Origins and Future (The Study of Time XI). Edited by Raji C. Steineck and Claudia Clausius. Leiden/Boston: Brill 2013, 139-66
‘Lines of Descent: Kuhn and Beyond’, Foundations of Science 19/4 (2014), pp. 331-52
‘Temporal Arrows in Space-Time’, Kairos 8 (2013), pp. 13-44 (Preprint)
'EPR and the Passage of Time’, in Philosophia Naturalis 50/2 (2013), pp. 171-197
'Hypothetical not Fictional Worlds', in Kairos XVII/1 (December 2016), pp. 110-136 (Preprint)
'The Time-Symmetric Gold Universe Revisited’, in International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 30 (2016), 231-243 (Eprint)
'Reichenbach's "Causal" Theory of Time: A Re-Assessment', in Axiomathes 33/1(2023) (Eprint)