Sandra Mitchell

Sandra D. Mitchell (born 1951) is an American philosopher and historian of ideas and professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on the philosophies of biology and the social sciences, and the connection between them.

She has worked at the University of California, San Diego, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, and the Institute for Advanced Study, Berlin.

Mitchell received a B.A. in philosophy from Pitzer College (1973), a M.Sc. in Logic, Philosophy and Scientific Method from the London School of Economics (1975), and a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science from the University of Pittsburgh (1987).

In her more recent articles, she has argued that the search for a unified, reductionist Theory of Everything was futile. Instead, she suggests that the sciences should focus on studying the complex correlations between elements and their emergent effects (self-organization) that, as she argues, a theory of everything would never be able to adequately address. ["Die Weltformel ist tot", in Der Spiegel, 2008-05-30 [http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,druck-556283,00.html] , retrieved 2008-06-22]

ee also

*Sokal affair
*Fritjof Capra

Books

*1997 (edited with Peter Weingart, Peter Richerson, Sabine Maasen): "Human by Nature: Between Biology and the Social Sciences", Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 978-0805821543
*2002 (edited with John Earman, Clark Glymour): "Ceteris Paribus Laws." Dordrecht, Netherlands: Kluwer. ISBN 978-1-4020-1020-0
*2003: "Biological Complexity and Integrative Pluralism", Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521817530
*2008: "Komplexitäten: Warum wir erst anfangen, die Welt zu verstehen", Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ISBN 978-3-518-26001-2
(forthcoming in English as "Beyond Simplicity: Integrating Knowledge in a Complex World", Chicago: University of Chicago Press, spring 2009.)

References

External links

*worldcat id|lccn-n2002-154807