Pii: S0039-3681(98)00045-4

Perhaps the most important point to make about Robert Klee’s recent Introduction to the Philosophy of Science: Cutting Nature at its Seams is that we need many more books like it: it is an engaging, accessible and comprehensive introductory text in the philosophy of science which manages to avoid sailing over the head of the beginner philosophy student without talking down to the working professional. I suspect that many teachers of the philosophy of science will, along with their students, find something in this book to stimulate their own thinking about the subject. Despite its many strengths, however, the book’s central strategy of argument is, as we shall see, compromised by a fundamental weakness. One particularly impressive feature of the text is its effective use of immunology as a case study. Klee’s first chapter presents the basics of immunological science, and it serves him well as a constant source of illustration throughout the text. As Klee notes, this pedagogical strategy avoids the traditional exclusive focus on the (sometimes idiosyncratic) features of physics. Far more importantly, however, it avoids the classic philosopher’s mistake of testing accounts of science against a high-school textbook reconstruction of scientific activity, rather than the sophisticated, complex, richly detailed and messy business in which real science consists. Klee writes with the confident authority of a philosopher who knows immunology well and knows how to apply its realistic features, history and examples to philosophical argument.