![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Topics in philosophy > Epistemology, theory of knowledge
This book returns to a time and place when the concept of transparency was met with deep suspicion. It offers a panorama of postwar French thought where attempts to show the perils of transparency in politics, ethics, and knowledge led to major conceptual inventions, many of which we now take for granted. Between 1945 and 1985, academics, artists, revolutionaries, and state functionaries spoke of transparency in pejorative terms. Associating it with the prying eyes of totalitarian governments, they undertook a critical project against it-in education, policing, social psychology, economic policy, and the management of information. Focusing on Sartre, Lacan, Canguilhem, Levi-Strauss, Leroi-Gourhan, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Transparency in Postwar France explores the work of ethicists, who proposed that individuals are transparent neither to each other nor to themselves, and philosophers, who clamored for new epistemological foundations. These decades saw the emergence of the colonial and phenomenological "other," the transformation of ideas of normality, and the effort to overcome Enlightenment-era humanisms and violence in the name of freedom. These thinkers' innovations remain centerpieces for any resistance to contemporary illusions that tolerate or enable power and social coercion.
This book offers a new and externalist perspective in ignorance studies. Agnotology, the epistemology of ignorance, and, more generally, ignorance studies have grown to cover and explore different phenomena and subjects of research, from known events in history and sociology of science to the investigation of ordinary reasoning and cognitive processing. Nonetheless, although interested scholars have discussed ignorance phenomena and their impact on cognition, most of them have only adopted an internalist perspective to approach this theme. Meanwhile, even though externalist perspectives on cognition flourished in recent literature, authors have paid little attention to the emerging field of ignorance studies. Ignorance has been generally left out from the inquiries on the extension of cognitive states, cognitive processes, and predictive reasoning. Thus, in this volume, we seek to merge the two growing areas of research and to fill this research gap fruitfully. By addressing the uncomfortable themes that pertain to ignorance and related phenomena through an externalist perspective, this book aims to provide much food for thoughts to cognitive scientists and philosophers alike, enriching the current range and reach of both ignorance studies and externalist approaches to cognition.
Focusing on the history of ideas, this book explores important questions concerning knowledge in relation to philosophy, science, ethics and Christian faith. Kirk contributes to the current debate about the intellectual basis and integrity of Western culture, exploring controversial issues concerning the notions of modernity and post-modernity. Repositioning the Christian faith as a valid dialogue partner with contemporary secular movements in philosophy and ethics, Kirk seeks to show that in 'post-Christian' Europe the Christian faith still possesses intellectual resources worthy to be reckoned with. This book's principal argument is that contemporary Western society faces a cultural crisis. It explores what appears to be an historical enigma, namely the question of why Western intellectual endeavours in philosophy and science seem to have abandoned the search for a source of knowledge able to draw together disparate pieces of information provided by different disciplines. Kirk draws conclusions, particularly in the area of ethical decision-making, from this apparent failure and invites readers to consider Christian theism afresh as a means for the renewal of culture and society.
All of us who work in the field of death and dying are, beyond our projects and our practices, working on our awareness of our own mortality. This richly stimulating collection of original articles challenges the reader to develop a disciplined and focused awareness of his/her own mortality, and to grapple with the implications. "Awareness of Mortality" contributes to the basic and passionate intellectual quest for meaning in thanatology. It provokes the reader with a wide range of ideas and thinking styles to deepen the questioning process within his/her own self. "Awareness of Mortality" explores issues in philosophy, ethics, developmental psychology, psychoanalytic psychology, idealistic humanism, sociology, spiritual traditions, and other humanities that thanatology overlaps. "Awareness of Mortality" is an introduction to a broad-based philosophical thanatology.
This book features fourteen original essays that critically engage the philosophy of Richard Rorty, with an emphasis on his ethics, epistemology, and politics. Inspired by James' and Dewey's pragmatism, Rorty urged us to rethink the role of science and truth with a liberal-democratic vision of politics. In doing so, he criticized philosophy as a sheer scholastic endeavor and put it back in touch with our most pressing cultural and human needs. The essays in this volume employ the conceptual tools and argumentative techniques of analytic philosophy and pragmatism and demonstrate the relevance of Rorty's thought to the most urgent questions of our time. They touch on a number of topics, including but not limited to structural injustice, rule-following, Black feminist philosophy, legal pragmatism, moral progress, relativism, and skepticism. This book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars across disciplines who are engaging with the work of Richard Rorty.
This book presents 12 original essays on historical and contemporary philosophical discussions of judgment. The central issues explored in this volume can be separated into two groups namely, those concerning the act and object of judgment. What kind of act is judgment? How is it related to a range of other mental acts, states, and dispositions? Where and how does assertive force enter in? Is there a distinct category of negative judgments, or are these simply judgments whose objects are negative? Concerning the object of judgment: How many objects are there of a given judgment? One, as on the dual relation theory of Frege and Moore? Or many as in Russell's later multiple relation theory? If there is a single object, is it a proposition? And if so, is it a force-neutral, abstract entity that might equally figure as the object of a range of intentional attitudes? Or is it somehow constitutively tied to the act itself? These and related questions are approached from a variety of historical and contemporary perspectives. This book sheds new light on current controversies by drawing on the details of the distinct intellectual contexts in which previous philosophers' positions about the nature of judgment were formulated. In turn, new directions in present-day research promise to raise novel interpretive prospects and challenges in the history of philosophy.
In the recent history of philosophy few works have appeared which favorably portray Idealism as a plausible philosophical view of the world. Considerably less has been written about Idealism as a viable framework for doing theology. While the most recent and significant works on Idealism, composed by the late John Foster (Case for Idealism and A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenological Idealism), have put this theory back on the philosophical map, no such attempt has been made to re-introduce Idealism to contemporary Christian theology. Idealism and Christian Theology is such a work, retrieving ideas and arguments from its most significant modern exponents (especially George Berkeley and Jonathan Edwards) in order to assess its value for present and future theological construction. As a piece of constructive philosophical-theology itself, this volume considers the explanatory power an Idealist ontology has for contemporary Christian theology.
In The Eroticization of Distance: Nietzsche, Blanchot and the Legacy of Courtly Love, Joseph D. Kuzma explores the significance of courtly erotic themes in Friedrich Nietzsche's mature philosophy and in Maurice Blanchot's writings of the 1940s and early 1950s. Rather than offering an account of erotic relationality that prioritizes reconciliation, fulfillment, or release, Nietzsche attempts to formulate a nonteleological eroticism that aims at nothing but the perpetual intensification of desire. Kuzma suggests that it is Blanchot who carries Nietzsche's courtly erotic tendencies to their most provocative point, by highlighting potentials for intimate relationality that might be established through a shared experience of dispossession and loss. This first monograph to engage specifically with the theme of eroticism in Blanchot's writings will be of interest not only to students and scholars of Nietzsche, Blanchot, or French philosophy, but also anyone interested in the philosophy of sexuality, the history of love, theories of the emotions, or nineteenth and twentieth-century European thought more generally.
Analytical philosophy now embraces a much greater variety of topic and divergence of opinion than it once did. What presuppositions of relevance are implicit in its dialogue, what patterns of reasoning does it rely on, and why is consensus so hard to achieve? The author seeks to resolve these questions in an original and constructive way that also illuminates several important issues of philosophical substance, such as the question of whether the linguistic analysis of thought should be replaced by a computational one.
This book features original essays by leading epistemologists that address questions related to epistemic dilemmas from a variety of new, sometimes unexpected, angles. It seems plausible that there can be "no win" moral situations in which no matter what one does one fails some moral obligation. Is there an epistemic analog to moral dilemmas? Are there epistemically dilemmic situations-situations in which we are doomed to violate an epistemic requirement? If there are, when exactly do they arise and what can we learn from them? The contributors to this volume cover a wide variety of positions on epistemic dilemmas. The coverage ranges from discussions of the nature of epistemic dilemmas to arguments that there are no such things to suggestions for how to resolve (or at least live with) epistemic dilemmas to proposals for how thinking about epistemic dilemmas can be used to inform theorizing in other areas of epistemology. Epistemic Dilemmas will be of interest to scholars and advanced students in epistemology working on the nature of justification and evidential support, higher-order requirements, or suspension of judgment.
This book suggests that to know how Wittgenstein's post-Tractarian philosophy could have developed from the work of Kant is to know how they relate to each other. The development from the latter to the former is invoked heuristically as a means of interpretation, rather than a historical process or direct influence of Kant on Wittgenstein. Ritter provides a detailed treatment of transcendentalism, idealism, and the concept of illusion in Kant's and Wittgenstein's criticism of metaphysics. Notably, it is through the conceptions of transcendentalism and idealism that Wittgenstein's philosophy can be viewed as a transformation of Kantianism. This transformation involves a deflationary conception of transcendental idealism along with the abandonment of both the idea that there can be a priori 'conditions of possibility' logically detachable from what they condition, and the appeal to an original 'constitution' of experience. The closeness of Kant and post-Tractarian Wittgenstein does not exist between their arguments or the views they upheld, but rather in their affiliation against forms of transcendental realism and empirical idealism. Ritter skilfully challenges several dominant views on the relationship of Kant and Wittgenstein, especially concerning the cogency of Wittgenstein-inspired criticism focusing on the role of language in the first Critique, and Kant's alleged commitment to a representationalist conception of empirical intuition.
This book's basic hypothesis - which it proposes to test with a cognitive-sociological approach - is that legal behavior, like every form of human behavior, is directed and framed by biosocial constraints that are neither entirely genetic nor exclusively cultural. As such, from a sociological perspective the law can be seen as a super-meme, that is, as a biosocial constraint that develops only in complex societies. This super-meme theory, by highlighting a fundamental distinction between defensive and assertive biases, might explain the false contradiction between law as a static and historical phenomenon, and law as a dynamic and promotional element. Socio-legal scholars today have to face the challenge of pursuing a truly interdisciplinary approach, connecting all the fields that can contribute to building a modern theory of normative behavior and social action. Understanding and framing concepts such as rationality, emotion, or justice can help to overcome the significant divide between micro and macro sociological knowledge. Social scientists who are interested in the law must be able to master the epistemological discourses of different disciplines, and to produce fruitful syntheses and bridge-operations so as to understand the legal phenomenon from each different point of view. The book adopts four perspectives: sociological, psychological, biological-evolutionary and cognitive. All of them have the potential to be mutually integrated, and constitute that general social science that provides common ground for exchange. The goal is to arrive at a broad and integrated view of the socio-legal phenomenon, paving the way for a comprehensive theory of norm-oriented and norm-perceived actions.
Bertrand Russell famously quipped that he didn't believe in God for the same reason that he didn't believe in a teapot in orbit between the earth and Mars: it is a bizarre assertion for which no evidence can be provided. Is belief in God really like belief in Russell's teapot? Kenneth L. Pearce argues that God is no teapot. God is a real answer to the deepest question of all: why is there something rather than nothing? Graham Oppy argues that we should believe that there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal properties-and hence should believe that there are no gods. Beginning from this basic disagreement, the authors proceed to discuss and debate a wide range of philosophical questions, including questions about explanation, necessity, rationality, religious experience, mathematical objects, the foundations of ethics, and the methodology of philosophy. Each author first presents his own side, and then they interact through two rounds of objections and replies. Pedagogical features include standard form arguments, section summaries, bolded key terms and principles, a glossary, and annotated reading lists. In the volume foreword, Helen De Cruz calls the debate "both edifying and a joy," and sums up what's at stake: "Here you have two carefully formulated positive proposals for worldviews that explain all that is: classical theism, or naturalistic atheism. You can follow along with the authors and deliberate: which one do you find more plausible?" Though written with beginning students in mind, this debate will be of interest to philosophers at all levels and to anyone who values careful, rational thought about the nature of reality and our place in it.
How, asks Geoff Goodman in The Internal World and Attachment, can
we progress further in integrating the fruits of attachment
research with the accumulated clinical wisdom of psychoanalytic
theorizing about the internal world of object representations? The
key, he answers, is to look more closely at the basic assumptions
of each body of theory, especially those assumptions, whether
embedded or explicit, that bear on the formation of psychic
structure. Drawing on Kernberg's insights into the affective and
instinctual substrata of psychic organizations, Goodman proposes
that insecure attachment categories can be correlated with
particular constellations of self and object representations. Such
convergences provide a springboard to further theoretical
explanations, most especially to the relations between attachment
and adult sexual behavior. Indeed, one outstanding feature of
Goodman's proposals is the light they cast on various forms and
meanings of sexual psychopathology, as he delineates how both
promiscuity and retreats from sexual intimacy can be differentially
interpreted depending on the patient's pattern of attachment.
Working in the tradition of analytic philosophy, Alexander Brown argues that many different forms of political communication (or anti-communication) that often infuriate the public can also be ethically or morally objectionable. These forms include question dodging, offering scripted answers, stonewalling, not listening, disseminating propaganda, pandering, being insincere, giving false denials, issuing revisionist interpretations, refusing to take responsibility, never apologising, boasting, and gaslighting. Brown invokes a host of normative reasons including those having to do with epistemic arrogance, interference in autonomy, and violating the right to be heard. This is not to say that, all things considered, politicians should never engage in dubious political communication. Sometimes these are necessary evils. Brown argues, however, that further moral inquiry is needed to show why they are evils, and to determine when the use of these rhetorical tactics can be excessive, unreasonable, or out of place. Key Features: * Identifies and conceptualises forms of dubious political communication * Develops an ethical evaluation of political communication * Considers possible justifications for the use of dubious political communication * Makes practical recommendations on how to regulate unethical political communication
Both volumes of this work have as their central concern to sort out who one is from what one is. In this Book 1, the focus is on transcendental-phenomenological ontology. When we refer to ourselves we refer both non-ascriptively in regard to non-propertied as well as ascriptively in regard to propertied aspects of ourselves. The latter is the richness of our personal being; the former is the essentially elusive central concern of this Book 1: I can be aware of myself and refer to myself without it being necessary to think of any third-personal characteristic; indeed one may be aware of oneself without having to be aware of anything except oneself. This consideration opens the door to basic issues in phenomenological ontology, such as identity, individuation, and substance. In our knowledge and love of Others we find symmetry with the first-person self-knowledge, both in its non-ascriptive forms as well as in its property-ascribing forms. Love properly has for its referent the Other as present through but beyond her properties. Transcendental-phenomenological reflections move us to consider paradoxes of the transcendental person . For example, we contend with the unpresentability in the transcendental first-person of our beginning or ending and the undeniable evidence for the beginning and ending of persons in our third-person experience. The basic distinction between oneself as non-sortal and as a person pervaded by properties serves as a hinge for reflecting on the afterlife . This transcendental-phenomenological ontology of necessity deals with some themes of the philosophy of religion."
This book offers a systematic look at current challenges in moral epistemology through the lens of research on higher-order evidence. Fueled by recent advances in empirical research, higher-order evidence has generated a wealth of insights about the genealogy of moral beliefs. Higher-Order Evidence and Moral Epistemology explores how these insights have an impact on the epistemic status of moral beliefs. The essays are divided into four thematic sections. Part I addresses higher-order evidence against morality that comes from sources such as disagreement and moral psychology. Part II covers rebuttals of higher-order evidence against morality. The essays in Part III examine the relevance of higher-order evidence for a broader range of phenomena in moral epistemology, for both individuals and groups, including moral testimony and phenomena of practical concern, such as fundamentalist views about moral matters. Finally, Part IV discusses permissible epistemic attitudes regarding a body of moral evidence, including the question of how to determine the permissibility of such attitudes. This volume is the first to explicitly address the implications of higher-order evidence in moral epistemology. It will be of interest to researchers and advanced graduate students working in epistemology and metaethics.
Checking is a very common concept for describing a subject's epistemic goals and actions. Surprisingly, there has been no philosophical attention paid to the notion of checking. This is the first book to develop a comprehensive epistemic theory of checking. The author argues that sensitivity is necessary for checking but not for knowing, thereby finding a new home for the much discussed modal sensitivity principle. He then uses the distinction between checking and knowing to explain central puzzles about knowledge, particularly those concerning knowledge closure, bootstrapping and the skeptical puzzle. Knowing and Checking: An Epistemological Investigation will be of interest to epistemologists and other philosophers looking for a general theory of checking and testing or for new solutions to central epistemological problems.
This book offers a historical explanation of important philosophical problems in logic and mathematics, which have been neglected by the official history of modern logic. It offers extensive information on Gottlob Frege's logic, discussing which aspects of his logic can be considered truly innovative in its revolution against the Aristotelian logic. It presents the work of Hilbert and his associates and followers with the aim of understanding the revolutionary change in the axiomatic method. Moreover, it offers useful tools to understand Tarski's and Goedel's work, explaining why the problems they discussed are still unsolved. Finally, the book reports on some of the most influential positions in contemporary philosophy of mathematics, i.e., Maddy's mathematical naturalism and Shapiro's mathematical structuralism. Last but not least, the book introduces Biancani's Aristotelian philosophy of mathematics as this is considered important to understand current philosophical issue in the applications of mathematics. One of the main purposes of the book is to stimulate readers to reconsider the Aristotelian position, which disappeared almost completely from the scene in logic and mathematics in the early twentieth century.
The term "femme" originates from 1940s Western working-class lesbian bar culture, wherein femme referred to a feminine lesbian who was typically in a relationship with a butch lesbian. Expanding from this original meaning, femme has since emerged as a form of femininity reclaimed by queer and culturally marginalized folks. Importantly, femme has also evolved into a theoretical framework. Femme theory argues that "femme" constitutes a missing piece in queer and feminist discourses of femininity. Attending to this gap, femme theory centres queer femininities as a means of pushing against the deeply embedded masculinist orientation of queer and gender theory. Thus, femme theory offers tools to shift the way researchers and readers understand femininity as well as systems of gender and power more broadly. This book is an introduction to femme theory, showcasing how femme can be used as a theoretical framework across a variety of contexts and disciplines, such as Film & Media Studies, Psychology, Sociology, or Critical Disability Studies; from countries, including Canada, China, Guyana and the USA. Femme theory asks readers to reconsider how femininity is conceptualized, revealing some of the many taken for granted assumptions that are embedded within cultural discourses of gender, sexuality, and power. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies.
This book presents key psychoanalytic theories from a fresh perspective: that of the mystical element. The author explores the depth-structure of central assumptions in psychoanalytic theory to uncover the mystical core of conventional analytic thinking. Exploring authors from Freud and Ferenczi, through Bion and Winnicott, to contemporary voices such as Ogden, Bollas and Eigen, the book shows that psychoanalysis has always operated on the assumption of psychic overlap, a "soul-to-soul" contact, between patient and analyst. Surprisingly, the book shows how this "magical" facet goes hand in hand with a pragmatic worldview that explores the epistemological complexities of psychoanalysis in search of a way to join the subjective, even the mystical, with the practical aim of serving as a validated mental health discipline. This is accomplished through an interdisciplinary and intertextual encounter between psychoanalysis and the innovative pairing of William James' pragmatic philosophy and Martin Buber's dialogic thought. The author's paradoxical stance surrounding the nature and role of psychoanalysis and its mystical facet resonate the great challenge embedded in Winnicott's insistence on tolerating paradox and Bion's demand to respect all parts of the (psychoanalytic) truth, in this case, the practical and mundane alongside the mystical and magical. The book's broad, interdisciplinary outlook will captivate both psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic therapists as well as scholars of philosophy.
The first philosophical introduction to extremism which will become the 'go to' book on the topic. A highly topical subject on which courses are emerging - this book will enable teachers to teach it. Quassim Cassam is a prestigious name and already well-known for his work on terrorism and conspiracy theories and is a regular commentator on BBC Radio. Includes lots of examples of many kinds of extremism, from the philosophical and psychological (Nietzsche and Jung) to the political (Suffragettes, ANC) to contemporary examples like Prevent, the UK Deadicalization program and examples from the US and Europe.
This book has grown out of a conference on "Degrees of Belief" that was held at the University of Konstanz in July 2004, organised by Luc Bovens, Wolfgang Spohn, and the editors. The event was supported by the German Research Fo- dation (DFG), the Philosophy, Probability, and Modeling (PPM) Group, and the CenterforJuniorResearchFellows(since2008: Zukunftskolleg)attheUniversityof Konstanz. The PPM Group itself - of which the editors were members at the time - was sponsored by a So a Kovalevskaja Award by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Program for the Investment in the Future (ZIP) of the German Government to Luc Bovens, who co-directed the PPM Group with Stephan Hartmann. The publication of this book received further support from the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group Formal Epistemology at the Zukunftskolleg and the Department of Philosophy at the U- versity of Konstanz, directed by Franz Huber, and funded by the DFG. We thank everyone involved for their support. Dedicated to the memory of Philippe Smets and Henry Kyburg. Konstanz, Germany Franz Huber Christoph Schmidt-Petri v Contents Belief and Degrees of Belief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Franz Huber Part I Plain Belief and Degrees of Belief Beliefs, Degrees of Belief, and the Lockean Thesis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37 Richard Foley The Lockean Thesis and the Logic of Belief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 James Hawthorne Partial Belief and Flat-Out Belief. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Keith Frankish Part II What Laws Should Degrees of Belief Obey? Epistemic Probability and Coherent Degrees of Belief . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |
![]() ![]() You may like...
Globalization for Development - Meeting…
Ian Goldin, Kenneth Reinert
Hardcover
R3,534
Discovery Miles 35 340
Understanding Linux Network Internals
Christian Benvenuti
Paperback
PowerShell for Administration, IT Pro…
William R. Stanek, William Stanek
Hardcover
R1,533
Discovery Miles 15 330
Level Design - Processes and Experiences
Christopher W. Totten
Paperback
R1,581
Discovery Miles 15 810
|