The Law of Causality and Its Limits

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This was a major work of the physicist turned philosopher, Philipp Frank. Already known for his papers on mathematical physics, and for his collaboration with the philosophers and scientists in the Vienna Circle, Frank developed his early essays of 1907-08 on causal law and human experience into this expository and critical treatise of 1931. How useful the logical empiricist requirement to formulate a scientific philosophy was, is demonstrated by Frank’s clarifications of the strengths as well as limitations of the several concepts linked to causal explanation, and indeed by his analysis of misuse, what he called metaphysical, obscure misinterpretations. Among the historically significant topics in this classical treatise on science and its humanist import are Laplace’s determinist hypothesis, loss of causal simplicity in field concept, causality and miracles, lawfulness in biology, cause and chance, conservation laws and causal laws, irreversibility of natural processes, and true world. The work is a classical treatise and should therefore be of interest to university collections in philosophy, physics and history of science. It should appeal to philosophers of science, modern empiricists, historians of science and those interested in the history of the Vienna Circle.