Peter Achinstein

Peter Achinstein is a distinguished American Philosopher of Science. He is the author of numerous influential books and articles. He is the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein University Professor of Philosophy at Yeshiva University, director of the Yeshiva Center for History and Philosophy of Science, and a professor at Johns Hopkins University.

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Biography

Achinstein received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard. He specializes in philosophy of science with strong interests in the history of science.

Achinstein has taught for many years at Johns Hopkins University, where he is currently Professor of Philosophy. In Spring 2009, Achinstein began teaching at Yeshiva University as the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein University Professor of Philosophy and is the founder and director of the Center for History and Philosophy of Science of Yeshiva University, New York. He returned to Johns Hopkins in Spring 2011. He has held Guggenheim, NEH, and NSF fellowships, and has served as a visiting professor at MIT, Stanford, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

He is the author of five influential books in the philosophy and history of science. Among them are Particles and Waves, which received the prestigious Lakatos Award in 1993. This book is a study of methodological problems arising from three episodes in 19th century physics: the wave-particle debate about light, the development of the kinetic-molecular theory, and the discovery of the electron. In 2001, Achinstein published The Book of Evidence, a philosophical and historical study of various concepts of evidence employed in the sciences. A volume of his important collected essays over the years, Evidence, Explanation, and Realism, was published in the spring of 2010. A special volume honoring him, Philosophy of Science Matters: The Philosophy of Peter Achinstein, will be published in 2011.

Former students of Peter Achinstein

Many of Professor Achinstein's students have gone on in careers as philosophers. They include:

Publications

Monographs and collected papers

Edited volumes

Selected articles

See also

External links