This book contains readings selected, edited and introduced by Arthur Danto and Sidney Morgenbesser. These authors offer the variety and richness of thought about science from Galileo to the present day. Among their twenty-nine selections, some of which appear here in translation for the first time, are essays by Bertrand Russell, Ernest Nagel, L. Susan Stebbing, Rudolf Carnap, Pierre Duhem, Ludwig Boltzmann, Isaac Newton, Henri Poincare and many other philosophers of science. This book is a rounded, coherent, and comprehensive view of Western man's reflections of the nature, method, and goal of the sciences