Because of the comprehensiveness of the commentaries that Curd and Cover have included on each section of readings, this volume, unlike many such anthologies, works very well as a stand-alone introduction to the field. For these commentaries provide the necessary background that the reader needs to fully appreciate the problems with which the authors of particular selections are struggling, the arguments they present in the selections, and the importance of the various selections in contemporary thinking about how best to solve the problems of the philosophy of science. In other words, the commentaries here do much of the work that a lecturer would do, and so reading these papers along with the commentaries is like going through an excellent and wide-ranging introductory course in the philosophy of science.
This anthology is intended to introduce the most general subjects in contemporary philosophy of science. Curd and Cover emphasize work in the philosophy of science that is of importance to anyone interested in the subject, and they have deliberately tried to avoid including readings that assume the reader is familiar with a great deal of contemporary science or its history. There are sections on each of the following topics: the demarcation problem (the problem of isolating what, if anything, is essential to, and distinctive of, scientific inquiry), values and objectivity in science, underdetermination and the Duhem-Quine thesis, induction and the nature of scientific evidence, explanation, laws of nature, intertheoretic reduction, and scientific realism. Most of these sections include four or five papers (the section on realism, which is by far the largest section, contains about twice as many). And this book includes work by many of the most important figures in these areas, including Kuhn, Popper, Hempel, Lakatos, Laudan, Kitcher, van Fraassen, et al.
And the reader should note that this anthology focuses only on work in the natural sciences. None of these selections discusses philosophical issues arising in the social sciences--though the topics covered are of sufficient generality that they should be of interest to people studying the social sciences as well. Furthermore, none of these selections are primarily about the philosophical issues arising in particular natural sciences. So don't come to this anthology looking for philosophy of biology or philosophy of physics.
I'd recommend this book to anyone interested in the philosophy of science, and it's ideal for classes introducing philosophy of science to advanced undergraduates and to graduate students.
