Abstract

The new book by Professor David J. Stump explores and develops the theories of the a priori, which are rarely considered in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science: the theories of pragmatic and functional a priori, proposed in the early XX century by Clarence Irving Lewis and Arthur Pap. The author begins with the analysis of «constitutive elements of science» and Henri Poincare's conventionalism. He consistently and historically examines the approaches towards the theories of the a priori within the philosophy of science in the XX-XXI centuries, and also develops his own original approach to a priori based on the philosophy of science.