W e s l e y S a l m o n (University of Pittsburgh) SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Venue: Main Building of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, "Elnoki Tanacsterem" (Budapest, Roosevelt ter 9.) May 11, 1999, 4:00 PM Wesley Salmon was born in 1925 in Detroit, Michigan. He received his Ph.D. at the University of California in Los Angeles in 1950. His major professor was Hans Reichenbach. Salmon was appointed at Brown University (1955-63), Indiana University (1963-73) and the University of Arizona (1973-81). At the present he is university Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh and President of the International Union of History and philosophy of Science. His publications include Limitations of Deductivism, edited with Adolf Grunbaum, University of California Press, 1988, Four Decades of Scientific Explanation, University of Minnesota Press, 1990, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World, Princeton University Press, 1992, and Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories: Proceedings of the Carnap-Reichenbach Centennial, edited with Gereon Wolters, University of Pittsburgh Press and the Universitätsverlag Konstanz, 1993. His most recent publication is Causality and Explanation, Oxford University Press, 1998. Abstract: At the beginning of the twentieth century, many philosophers and scientists held that explanation was outside of the scope of science - perhaps in the realm of metaphysics or theology. Now that we are near the end of the century, philosophers and scientists believe that science can furnish explanation and understanding of natural phenomena. This lecture will discuss this profound philosophical change. It will also touch on some important practical consequences of the transformation. _________________________________ Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Eotvos University, Budapest Hungarian National Committee of IUHPS/DLMPS -- Laszlo E. Szabo Department of Theoretical Physics Department of History and Philosophy of Science Eotvos University, Budapest H-1518 Budapest, Pf. 32. Phone: (36-1)2090-555/6671 Fax: (36-1)372-2509 Home: (36-1)200-7318 http://hps.elte.hu/~leszabo