Dean Rickles: Symmetry, Structure and Spacetime

Dean Rickles Symmetry, Structure and Spacetime. Amsterdam: Elsevier 2007. Pp. 242. US$136.00 (cloth ISBN-13: 978-0-444-53116-2). Rickles' book has two main aims. The first is negative: it seeks to argue, contra many contemporary philosophers of physics, that certain issues in physics are orthogonal to certain metaphysical issues. The second is positive: it proposes a new version of structuralism ('minimal structuralism'), which Rickles takes to be motivated by the preceding discussion and to be immune to the objections commonly raised against extant forms of structuralism.