Alan Chalmers

Alan Francis Chalmers ( born 1939 in Bristol ) is a British university teacher of philosophy. He dealt at the University of Sydney in particular with the historical development of the natural sciences and the philosophical foundations of the natural sciences. Alan Chalmers studied physics at the University of Bristol, University of Manchester and the University of London.

He has published numerous articles on philosophy of science, the core statements he summarized in two books. Its central theme is the search for a philosophical basis of science, which can distinguish them from those pseudo-sciences.

• Ways of science. Introduction to the Philosophy of Science
• Frontiers of science

In the first book looks and he rejects the naive inductivism and falsifiability as inadequate foundations of the natural sciences. In his second book he rejects both Karl Popper's critical rationalism and Paul Feyerabend's relativism as suitable candidates an axiomatization of Sciences, the first because it was too rigid and the historical development of science contradict the last, because it authorizes a pseudoscience. As an alternative, he proposes to define science by its purpose, a unified description of the world has to offer, and to measure their success by how science serves this purpose.