Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas

This book is a revised version of an earlier printing originally published in Spanish. It is composed of eight chapters, divided into three parts. Part 1, ‘The model of controversy spaces’, contains a single chapter by the editor, following a six-page introduction, also by the editor, to the overall theme of the book. Part 2 contains two chapters under the rubric ‘Controversy spaces in the history of philosophy’. Part 3, ‘Controversy spaces in the history of science’, contains the remaining five chapters.

In his introduction, Oscar Nudler claims that there are three possible answers to the question of whether or not there can be progress in science: ‘the Scientific Method’ (1), the negation of any universal method, and the rejection of any regular pattern in the history of science. The first of these is not associated with anyone in particular, but the second and third are credited to Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend, respectively.

In philosophy, Nudler tells us, the debate is not about how it progresses, but whether it does it at all. Once again, three positions are identified: one is optimistic, another is pessimistic, and a third holds that progress has to do with, not the solution, but rather the dissolution of problems by means of unending controversies.

However, Nudler adds in Ch. 1 that all of that changed in the second half of the twentieth century when the cognitive significance of controversies took center stage. Dating back to the Sophists, controversies are today studied under two opposing models: one, inspired by René Descartes and Francis Bacon, which views controversies as two-player games where the attitude toward dialectics is essentially negative and has the sole purpose of ‘interroga[ing] nature following the right method’ (10); and the other that, drawing its inspiration from Plato, views dialectics as ‘being superior in the hierarchy of knowledge’ (11).

Comprising Part 2, Ch. 2, by Francisco Naishtat reviews three controversies in historiography, and Ch. 3, by Diana Pérez, tracks the fortunes of the concept of supervenience in recent thought on the philosophy of mind. Part 3, which contains five chapters, by Olimpia Lombardi, Martin Labarca, Laura Benítez Grobet, Eleonora Cresto, and José María Gil, addresses themes as varied as the problem of irreversibility, the relation between chemistry and physics, Jacques Rohault’s system of natural philosophy, the notion of DNA in molecular biology, and the development of linguistic thought in the twentieth-century in the United States, respectively.

The contributors converge on the unifying idea of a ‘controversy space’, which is defined by Nudler as ‘a structure which usually has as elements, at any given point in time, some controversy which is central and other peripheral controversies related to it’ (18). This book is impressive in terms of both its scope and the number of different academic fields it surveys on its topic.