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The splendid achievements of Japanese mathematics and natural sciences during the second half of our 20th century have been a revival, a Renaissance, of the practical sciences developed along with the turn toward Western thinking in the late 19th century. The equally admirable results of Japanese philosophers (and historians) of science in our time followed upon a period less congenial to Western interests in the philosophical questions linked to modern science; and this reluctance to confront the epistemology, not even the humane significance, of the sciences went along with devotion to other Western trends. Thus, with the'new'Japan of the Meiji restoration of 1868, and the early introduction of Western philosophy in the subsequent decade by Nishi Amane, a period of intellectual attraction to utilitarian, positivist, evolutionary, even materialist outlooks was soon replaced by devotion to scholarly work on Kant and Hegel, on ethical and general philosophical idealism. These studies often could emulate the critical spirit (the philosopher Onishe Hajime, praised for his own critical independence, was known as the Japanese Kant) but the neo­ Kantian and neo-Hegelian developments were not much affected by either empirical sciences or theoretical speculations about Nature. The pre-eminent philosopher of Japan ofthe first half of our century was Nishida Kitaro, with a pioneering treatise A Study of the Good, who, with his leading student Tanabe Hajime, formed the'Kyoto School'of pre-war philosophy.

By North-American standards, philosophy is not new in Quebec: the first men­ tion of philosophy lectures given by a Jesuit in the College de Quebec (founded 1635) dates from 1665, and the oldest logic manuscript dates from 1679. In English-speaking universities such as McGill (founded 1829), philosophy began to be taught later, during the second half of the 19th century. The major influence on English-speaking philosophers was, at least initially, that of Scottish Empiricism. On the other hand, the strong influence of the Catholic Church on French-Canadian society meant that the staff of the facultes of the French-speaking universities consisted, until recently, almost entirely of Thomist philosophers. There was accordingly little or no work in modem Formal Logic and Philosophy of Science and precious few contacts between the philosophical communities. In the late forties, Hugues Leblanc was a young student wanting to learn Formal Logic. He could not find anyone in Quebec to teach him and he went to study at Harvard University under the supervision of W. V. Quine. His best friend Maurice L'Abbe had left, a year earlier, for Princeton to study with Alonzo Church. After receiving his Ph. D from Harvard in 1948, Leblanc started his profes­ sional career at Bryn Mawr College, where he stayed until 1967. He then went to Temple University, where he taught until his retirement in 1992, serving as Chair of the Department of Philosophy from 1973 until 1979.

This book presents a perspective on the history of theoretical physics over the past two hundreds years. It comprises essays on the history of pre-Maxwellian electrodynamics, of Maxwell's and Hertz's field theories, and of the present century's relativity and quantum physics. A common thread across the essays is the search for and the exploration of themes that influenced significant con­ ceptual changes in the great movement of ideas and experiments which heralded the emergence of theoretical physics (hereafter: TP). The fun. damental change involved the recognition of the scien­ tific validity of theoretical physics. In the second half of the nine­ teenth century, it was not easy for many physicists to understand the nature and scope of theoretical physics and of its adept, the theoreti­ cal physicist. A physicist like Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the eminent contributors to the new discipline, confessed in 1895 that,'even the formulation of this concept [of a theoretical physicist] is not entirely without difficulty'. 1 Although science had always been divided into theory and experiment, it was only in physics that theoretical work developed into a major research and teaching specialty in its own right. 2 It is true that theoretical physics was mainly a creation of tum­ of-the century German physics, where it received full institutional recognition, but it is also undeniable that outstanding physicists in other European countries, namely, Ampere, Fourier, and Maxwell, also had an important part in its creation.

This is a book about dreaming and knowing, and about thinking that one can ascertain the difference. It is a book about the Bernards of the world who would have us believe that there is a humanly uncreated world existing en Boi that freely dis­ closes its forever fixed ontology, even though they too must accept that -many of the worlds we make as we try to under­ stand ourselves are counterfeit. It is a book about the real estate of the human mind. The book is about Leibniz and Kant, and about methods of science. It is also about what is now called pseudo-science. It tries to show how Kant struggled to mark the limits of the humanly knowable, and how thi s strug­ gle involved him in trying to answer questions of importance then and now. Some are philosophers'questions: the epistemo­ logical status of mathematics, the role of space and time in knowing, the nature of the conceptual constraints on our ef­ forts to hypothesize the possible. Some are questions of per­ ennial human interest: Can spirits exist? How is the soul re­ lated to the body? How can we legitimately talk about God, if at all? Finally, Kant teaches that these are all questions bearing on our entitlements in claiming to know. Leibniz fashioned a way of talking about nature and super­ nature that I call the Double Government Methodology.

The development of geography also forms an interesting chapter in the history of the University ofTartu and in that of Estonian science in general. On the one hand, geography is a natural science in the broader sense ofthe word, on the other hand it is a study of human activity. This status of geography makes it particularly sensitive to the cultural and political circumstances under which scholarship and science have developed in Estonia. The article by Professor of Human Geography Ott Kurs (born 1939) and historian of science (PhD in geography) Erki Tamrniksaar (born 1969)'In Political Draughts Between Science and the Humanities: Geography at the University ofTartu Between the th th 17 -20 Centuries'is devoted to this topic. Among other things, the article states that regular instruction in geography started at the University of Tartu in 1826, when the second chair of geography in Europe was established here. Although the present book does not contain any studies on philosophy at th Tartu University in the 19 century, I would still like to mention two names. th In the early 19 century, I. Kant's philosophy was dominant at Tartu Uni­ versity. One of Kant's pupils, Gottlob Benjamin Jasche (1762-1839), who had worked under him as a Privatdozent in Konigsberg, served as a professor here from 1802-1839. In the history of philosophy he is primarily known as the publisher of Kant's Logic.

There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model-based reasoning considered in this book. The term ‘model'comprises both internal and external representations. The models are intended as interpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations and are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain. The book's contributors are researchers active in the area of creative reasoning in science and technology.

Philosophers have studied geometry since ancient times. Geometrical knowledge has often played the role of a laboratory for the philosopher's conceptual experiments dedicated to the ideation of powerful theories of knowledge. Lorenzo Magnani's new book Philosophy and Geometry illustrates the rich intrigue of this fascinating story of human knowledge, providing a new analysis of the ideas of many scholars (including Plato, Proclus, Kant, and Poincaré), and discussing conventionalist and neopositivist perspectives and the problem of the origins of geometry. The book also ties together the concerns of philosophers of science and cognitive scientists, showing, for example, the connections between geometrical reasoning and cognition as well as the results of recent logical and computational models of geometrical reasoning. All the topics are dealt with using a novel combination of both historical and contemporary perspectives. Philosophy and Geometry is a valuable contribution to the renaissance of research in the field.

Ideas for Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Natural Sciences (published in 1993 as volume 15 of this series) comprised mainly ontological reflections on the natural sciences. That book explained why the natural sciences must be considered inherently interpretive in character, and clarified the conditions under which scientific interpretations are'legitimate'and may be called'true'. This companion volume focuses on methodological issues. Its first part elucidates the methodical hermeneutics developed in the 19th century by Boeckh, Birt, Dilthey, and others. Its second part, through the use of concrete examples drawn from modern physics as it unfolded from Copernicus to Maxwell, clarifies and'proves'the main points of the ontologico-hermeneutical conception of the sciences elaborated in the earlier volume. It thereby both illuminates the most important problems confronting an ontologico-phenomenological approach to the natural sciences and offers an alternative to Kuhn's conception of the historical development of the natural sciences.

`...interesting, instructive and eminently readable.'- Mary J. Seller, The Expository Times The book shows how development in the biological sciences has been influenced by ethical, religious, social and philosophical assumptions as to the nature of life and mankind's place in the world. These beliefs have been presupposed in experimental investigations as well as in biological theories. The book is not intended as a comprehensive history of biology, rather some of that history is used as evidence of external influences. To this end there are accounts of past investigations (from the time of Aristotle to the present day).