Description: By analysing thought experiments from various periods in the history of philosophy and science, the essays in this volume seek to clarify how thought experiments work, what their limits are, and what their conceptualisation could be.
Review Quotes: "Thus, there is debate about the nature and status of the counterfactuality or modality of thought experiments and also of the epistemic implications of these various modalities. Moreover, there is disagreement about the purposes or function that thought experiments can be put to: can they, for instance, be used constructively to prove (or directly support) theories, or only destructively to weaken or disprove them? Finally, as the presence and fascination of many thought experiments show, their very concreteness seems to provide them with a compelling power to be taken seriously, whatever one may think about their modal and epistemic status. This, I think, is made perfectly clear by the range of contributions in the book, and perhaps its greatest virtue is that it reflects this disagreement in such a transparent way. However, its ambition, stated on the back cover, is very high: "to tame the contemporary wild usage of this notion". While the book succeeds in making the multi-dimensionality of its topic clear, and by addressing many of its aspects in lucid and thought-provoking ways, I fear more is needed for realizing that ambition."
Øyvind Rabbås (University of Oslo), in Reviews in Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 2/2013.
"This significant collection, should stimulate a great deal more work on the wonderfully rich topic of TEs."
James Robert Brown and Michael T. Stuart in: HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Spring 2013), pp. 154-157
"All in all, this collection presents us with nine thought-provoking essays on thought experimentation and other argumentative strategies from antiquity to today.A good reading for anyone interested in the history of philosophy and science and the methodology of thought experimentation in either discipline." Daniel Cohnitz, Metascience (DOI 10.1007/s11016-012-9709-7)
"The papers in the book concentrate on historical and methodological issues of thought experiments providing a range of analyses and thus clarifying a concept that has been hard to pin down...[this book] will provide a useful prism through which to assess agent-based modelling." Corinna Elsenbroich, Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation, Volume 15, Number 1, 2012.