 The book has been praised by philosophers such as Horace Romano Harré, Douglas Hofstadter, Alexander Rosenberg, Isaac Levi, Roger Scruton, and Colin Klein, as well as by the historian Peter Gay and the economists H. Scott Gordon and Grażyna Musiał.It was described by Harré as the "best single book on the philosophy of science".Nagel's discussions of reductionism and holism and teleological and non-telological explanations have been praised by Hofstadter, while his discussion of the "dispute over the nature of theories and theoretical terms" has been praised by Scruton.