A Plea for Natural Philosophy - And Other Essays

The philosopher Penelope Maddy is well-known for her pursuit of ''Second Philosophy'', a form of naturalism that sees the methods of philosophy as indistiguishable from those of the empirical sciences. This volume collects eleven of her recent essays (five new and six reprinted), exploring a range of topics--from methodology, epistemology, and the philosophy of science, to the philosophies of logic, arithmetic, and higher mathematics. Though the topics vary widely, each essay bears in one way or another on the description, exploration, or application of Second Philosophy, revealing the underlying systematic character of Maddy''s thought.