The term scientism is used in several ways. It is used to denote an epistemological thesis according to which science is the source of our knowledge about the world and ourselves. Relatedly, it is used to denote a methodological thesis according to which the methods of science are superior to the methods of non-scientific fields or areas of inquiry, or even used to put forward a metaphysical thesis that what exists is what science says exists. In recent decades, the term scientism has acquired a derogatory meaning when it is used in defense of non-scientific ways of knowing. In particular, some philosophers level the charge of "scientism" against those (mostly scientists) who are dismissive of philosophy. Other philosophers, however, embrace scientism, or some variant thereof, and object to the pejorative use of the term scientism. This book critically examines the arguments for and against scientism, of various productive kinds to answer the central question: does scientism pose an existential threat to philosophy, or should philosophy become more scientific?

The main and original contribution of this volume is to offer a discussion of teleology through the prism of religion, philosophy and history. The goal is to incorporate teleology within discussions across these three disciplines rather than restrict it to one as is customarily the case. The chapters cover a wide range of topics, from individual teleologies to collective ones; ideas put forward by the French aristocrat Arthur de Gobineau and the Scottish philosopher David Hume, by the Anglican theologian and founder of Methodism, John Wesley, and the English naturalist Charles Darwin.

By the author of the modern classic "The Black Swan," this collection of aphorisms and meditations expresses his major ideas in ways you least expect.
"The Bed of Procrustes" takes its title from Greek mythology: the story of a man who made his visitors fit his bed to perfection by either stretching them or cutting their limbs. It represents Taleb's view of modern civilization's hubristic side effects--modifying humans to satisfy technology, blaming reality for not fitting economic models, inventing diseases to sell drugs, defining intelligence as what can be tested in a classroom, and convincing people that employment is not slavery.
Playful and irreverent, these aphorisms will surprise you by exposing self-delusions you have been living with but never recognized.
With a rare combination of pointed wit and potent wisdom, Taleb plows through human illusions, contrasting the classical values of courage, elegance, and erudition against the modern diseases of nerdiness, philistinism, and phoniness.

This book, first published in 1951, is an examination of Hume's 'Treatise of Human Nature', 'An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals', and 'An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding'. It lucidly clarifies and makes alive the new discoveries of Hume's works in a study that makes plain the importance of this philosopher to the world today.

This textbook presents the basics of philosophy that are necessary for the student and researcher in science in order to better understand scientific work. The approach is not historical but formative: tools for semantical analysis, ontology of science, epistemology, and scientific ethics are presented in a formal and direct way. The book has two parts: one with the general theory and a second part with application to some problems such as the interpretation of quantum mechanics, the nature of mathematics, and the ontology of spacetime. The book addresses questions such as "What is meaning?", "What is truth?", "What are truth criteria in science?", "What is a theory?", "What is a model?" "What is a datum?", "What is information?", "What does it mean to understand something?", "What is space?", "What is time?", "How are these concepts articulated in science?" "What are values?" "What are the limits of science?", and many more. The philosophical views presented are "scientific" in the sense that they are informed by current science, they are relevant for scientific research, and the method adopted uses the hypothetical-deductive approach that is characteristic of science. The results and conclusions, as any scientific conclusion, are open to revision in the light of future advances. Hence, this philosophical approach opposes to dogmatic philosophy. Supported by end-of-chapter summaries and a list of special symbols used, the material will be of interest for students and researchers in both science and philosophy. The second part will appeal to physicists and mathematicians.

In this exploration of new territory between ethics and epistemology, Miranda Fricker argues that there is a distinctively epistemic type of injustice, in which someone is wronged specifically in their capacity as a knower. Justice is one of the oldest and most central themes in philosophy, but in order to reveal the ethical dimension of our epistemic practices the focus must shift to injustice. Fricker adjusts the philosophical lens so that we see through to the negative space that is epistemic injustice.
The book explores two different types of epistemic injustice, each driven by a form of prejudice, and from this exploration comes a positive account of two corrective ethical-intellectual virtues. The characterization of these phenomena casts light on many issues, such as social power, prejudice, virtue, and the genealogy of knowledge, and it proposes a virtue epistemological account of testimony. In this ground-breaking book, the entanglements of reason and social power are traced in a new way, to reveal the different forms of epistemic injustice and their place in the broad pattern of social injustice.

Sociological Theory and the Capability Approach connects normative strands of sociological theory to the fusion of ethics and economics proposed by Amartya Sen's and Martha Nussbaum's capability approach. Spanning classical (Hegel, Marx, Durkheim, Scheler, Weber) and contemporary debates (Parsons, Giddens, Luhmann) it identifies areas that bridge the current gap between sociology and capability approach. It thus builds on explanatory and normative concerns shared by both traditions. Engaging readers from sociology and capability approach, Spiros Gangas suggests that the proposed dialogue should be layered along the main areas of value theory, economy and society, extending this inquiry into the normative meaning attached to being human. To this end, the book reconstructs the notion of agency along the tracks of Nussbaum's central human capabilities, considering also alienation and the sociology of emotions. It concludes by addressing the capability approach through the lens of social institutions before it takes up the challenge of ideological fundamentalism and how it can be effectively confronted by capability approach. This original book provides a fresh perspective on capability approach as it embeds it in the rich pool of sociological theory's accomplishments. As an exercise in theoretical and normative convergence, it will be required reading for academics and students in social theory, cultural theory, philosophy and human development studies.

Goethe's poem, The Mysteries, and the twelve world views. Kant and world views. The development of Rudolf Steiner's research into Goethe's science, The Philosophy of Freedom, and his lectures on Human and Cosmic Thought,(1914) on the twelve world views. Phenomenalism: Look at and Listen to the World; Sensualism -Human Carnality; Materialism- 'Earth goes on standing firm.'; Mathematism - Measure, Number and weight; Rationalism: 'And behold, it was very good.' Idealism: the Logos that was at the beginning. Psychism: I am an I. Pneumatism : I am the Universe. Spiritualism - The Jacob's Ladder. Monadism - Universal relations. Dynamism - 'I am dynamite'. Realism - The World Scales. Humanus: the new human being in the third millennium. Study and Discussion

This book seeks to provide new perspectives, to broaden the field of philosophy of science, or to renew themes that have had a great impact on the profession. Thus, after an initial chapter to situate the current trends in philosophy of science and the prospective of the near future, it offers contributions in five thematic blocks: I) Philosophy of Medicine and Climate Change; II) Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence and the Internet; III) New Analyses of Probability and the Use of Mathematics in Practice; IV) Scientific Progress Revisited; and V) Scientific Realism and the Instrumentalist Alternative. Within this framework, the volume addresses such relevant issues as the methodological validity of medical evidence or decision making in situations of uncertainty; recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and the future of the Internet; current forms of empirically based methodological pluralism and new ways of understanding mathematics with scientific practice; and the revision of the approaches to scientific progress based on the experiences accumulated in recent decades.

This book encourages renewed attention by contemporary epistemologists to an area most of them overlook: ancient philosophy. Readers are invited to revisit writings by Plato, Aristotle, Pyrrho, and others, and to ask what new insights might be gained from those philosophical ancestors. Are there ideas, questions, or lines of thought that were present in some ancient philosophy and that have subsequently been overlooked? Are there contemporary epistemological ideas, questions, or lines of thought that can be deepened by gazing back upon some ancient philosophy? The answers are 'yes' and 'yes', according to this book's 13 chapters, written by philosophers seeking to enrich contemporary epistemology through engaging with ancient epistemology. Key features: Blends ancient epistemology with contemporary epistemology, each reciprocally enriching each. Conceptually sensitive chapters by scholars of ancient epistemology. Historically sensitive chapters by scholars of contemporary epistemology. Clearly written chapters, guiding readers at once through central elements both of ancient and of contemporary epistemology.

This book presents a nonstandard approach to epistemology. Where standard epistemology generally focuses on the certain knowledge the Greeks called episteme, the present focus is on some less assured modes of information. Its deliberations will focus on such cognitively suboptimal processes as conjecture, guesswork, and plausible supposition. This shift of focus has implications for virtually every sector of information management, and the book's instigations presented here will explore some of them. Throughout the rule of pragmatic considerations stand in the foreground.As the book's deliberations set out in detail, the nature of our knowledge of reality is inherently conditioned by the fact of its beings the product of what is, at best and at most, a matter of rational guesswork. And so as regards our knowledge, we had best adopt the pragmatic optimism of expecting-and hoping-that our best is good enough.

In A Social Theory of Freedom, Mariam Thalos argues that the theory of human freedom should be a broadly social and political theory, rather than a theory that places itself in opposition to the issue of determinism. Thalos rejects the premise that a theory of freedom is fundamentally a theory of the metaphysics of constraint and, instead, lays out a political conception of freedom that is closely aligned with questions of social identity, self-development in contexts of intimate relationships, and social solidarity. Thalos argues that whether a person is free (in any context) depends upon a certain relationship of fit between that agent's conception of themselves (both present and future), on the one hand, and the facts of their circumstances, on the other. Since relationships of fit are broadly logical, freedom is a logic-it is the logic of fit between one's aspirations and one's circumstances, what Thalos calls the logic of agency. The logic of agency, once fleshed out, becomes a broadly social and political theory that encompasses one's self-conceptions as well as how these self-conceptions are generated, together with how they fit with the circumstances of one's life. The theory of freedom proposed in this volume is fundamentally a political one.

This book emphasizes that Aristotle was aware of the philosophical attempt to subordinate divine Intellect (nou: V) to a prior and absolute principle. Nyvlt argues that Aristotle transforms the Platonic doctrine of Ideal Numbers into an astronomical account of the unmoved movers, which function as the multiple intelligible content of divine Intellect. Thus, within Aristotle we have in germ the Plotinian doctrine that the intelligibles are within the Intellect. While the content of divine Intellect is multiple, it does not imply that divine Intellect possesses a degree of potentiality, given that potentiality entails otherness and contraries. Rather, the very content of divine Intellect is itself; it is Thought Thinking Itself ( s se s ). The pure activity of divine Intellect, moreover, allows for divine Intellect to know the world, and the acquisition of this knowledge does not infect divine Intellect with potentiality. The status of the intelligible object(s) within divine Intellect is pure activity that is identical with divine Intellect itself, as T. De Koninck and H. Seidl have argued. Therefore, the intelligible objects within divine Intellect are not separate entities that determine divine Intellect, as is the case in Plotinus.

This is the first volume dedicated solely to the topic of epistemological disjunctivism. The original essays in this volume, written by leading and up-and-coming scholars on the topic, are divided into three thematic sections. The first set of chapters addresses the historical background of epistemological disjunctivism. It features essays on ancient epistemology, Immanuel Kant, J.L. Austin, Edmund Husserl, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second section tackles a number contemporary issues related to epistemological disjunctivism, including its relationship with perceptual disjunctivism, radical skepticism, and reasons for belief. Finally, the third group of essays extends the framework of epistemological disjunctivism to other forms of knowledge, such as testimonial knowledge, knowledge of other minds, and self-knowledge. Epistemological Disjunctivism is a timely collection that engages with an increasingly important topic in philosophy. It will appeal to researches and graduate students working in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of perception.

David Kellogg Lewis (1941-2001) was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He made significant contributions to almost every area of analytic philosophy including metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of science, and set the agenda for various debates in these areas which carry on to this day. In several respects he remains a contemporary figure, yet enough time has now passed for historians of philosophy to begin to study his place in twentieth century thought. His philosophy was constructed and refined not just through his published writing, but also crucially through his life-long correspondence with fellow philosophers, including leading figures such as D.M. Armstrong, Saul Kripke, W.V. Quine, J.J.C. Smart, and Peter van Inwagen. His letters formed the undercurrent of his published work and became the medium through which he proposed many of his well-known theories and discussed a range of philosophical topics in depth. A selection of his vast correspondence over a 40-year period is presented here across two volumes. Structured in three parts, Volume 2 explores Lewis' contributions to philosophical questions of mind, language, and epistemology respectively. The letters address Lewis's answer to the mind-body problem, propositional attitudes and the purely subjective character of conscious experience, meaning and reference as well as grammar in language, vagueness, truth in fiction, the problem of scepticism, and Lewis's work on decision theory and rationality, among many other topics. This volume is a testament to Lewis' achievement in these areas and will be an invaluable resource for those exploring contemporary debates concerning mind, language, and epistemology.

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.

Epistemic interactivism, an aspect of the epistemology of representation, is a cognitive intercourse between the subject and person-object of knowledge that underlies the conception of a person in Esan thought. Traditional theories of representation (especially as presented by Descartes and Locke) separated the subject from the object of knowledge, and classified persons and non-persons as object of knowledge. This separation and classification ignored the cognitive and moral values of persons, disengaged the subject from the world and burdened the self with solitude and isolation, and created propositional knowledge that dehumanised the relationship between the subject and person-object of knowledge. Within the theoretical framework of Hegel's epistemic interactivism (meliorated by Bowne's personalism) and Esan epistemology (in African philosophy), this book exposes the epistemic interactivism of Esan thought which unified the subject and person-object of knowledge on cognitive and moral grounds; thus providing an adequate basis for personhood and resolving the dehumanised relationship between the subject and person-object of knowledge in the traditional theories of representation. Within the context of epistemic injustices, this book analyses the interactivist epistemology of indigenous Esan thought as an alternative epistemological conception of the person-object of knowledge which resolves the deficiency of the traditional theories of representation.

With the rise of the knowledge economy, the knowledge content of goods and services is going up just as their material content is declining. Economic value is increasingly seen to reside in the former - that is, in intangible assets - rather than in the latter. Yet we keep wanting to turn knowledge back into something tangible, something with definite boundaries which can be measured, manipulated, appropriated, and traded. In short, we want to reify knowledge.
Scholars have been debating the nature of knowledge since the time of Plato. Many new insights have been gained from these debates, but little theoretical consensus has been achieved. Through six thematically linked chapters, the book articulates the theoretical approach to the production and distribution of knowledge that underpins Max Boisot's conceptual framework, the Information Space or I-Space. In this way the book looks to provide theoretical and practical underpinnings to Boisot's book Knowledge Assets(OUP, 1998).
Following an introductory chapter, how knowledge relates to data and information is first examined in chapter 1, and how different economic actors - entrepreneurs, managers, etc - use knowledge as a basis for action is explored in chapter 2. Chapter 3 looks at how the heterogeneity of economic actors arises naturally from their respective data processing strategies in spite of any similarities in the data that they might share. Chapter 4 argues, contra much transaction-based economics, that an organizational order must have preceded a market order, something that should be reflected in any knowledge-based theory of the firm. Chapter 5 discusses the cultural and institutional significance of differentkinds of knowledge flows. Finally, chapter 6 presents an agent-based simulation model, SimISpace, that illustrates how the I-Space might be applied to concrete problems such those of intellectual property rights. A concluding chapter proposes a research agenda based on the theorizing developed in the book.
The approach the book sets out is used by a whole range of organizations to issues of knowledge management, policy, economics, and organizational and cultural change.

This book defines the concept and practices of literacy through a discussion of knowledge, information media, culture, subjectivity, science, communication, and politics. Examining the ways in which the spread of literacy and education have caused culture wars in pluralist societies since the 16th century, the author reviews an interdisciplinary array of scholarly literature to contend that science, and more broadly evidence-based inductive arguments, offer the only reliable source information, and the only peaceful solution to cultural conflict in the 21st century. With a focus on the multifaceted practice of literacy-as-communication as embedded within larger social and political processes, this book offers a comprehensive study of literacy through five core topics: knowledge, psychology, culture, science, and arguing over truth in pluralist democracies. The central thesis of the book argues that we require a new literacy that incorporates reading and writing with advanced cognitive and epistemological skills. Today's citizens need to be able to understand the basic cognitive and cultural processes through which knowledge is created, and they need to know how to evaluate knowledge, peacefully debate knowledge, and productively use knowledge, for both personal decisions and public policy. How Do You Know? The Epistemological Foundations of 21st Century Literacy is an interdisciplinary study that will appeal to scholars across the sciences and humanities, especially those concerned with pedagogy and the science of learning.

The dramatic transformation of our planet by human actions has been heralded as the coming of the new epoch of the Anthropocene. Human relations with water raise some of the most urgent questions in this regard. The starting point of this book is that these changes should not be seen as the result of monolithic actions of an undifferentiated humanity, but as emerging from diverse ways of relating to water in a variety of settings and knowledge systems. With its large population and rapid demographic and socioeconomic change, Asia provides an ideal context for examining how varied forms of knowledge pertaining to water encounter and intermingle with one another. While it is difficult to carry out comprehensive research on water knowledge in Asia due to its linguistic, political and cultural fragmentation, the topic nevertheless has relevance across boundaries. By using a carefully chosen selection of case studies in a variety of locations and across diverse disciplines, the book demonstrates commonalities and differences in everyday water practices around Asia while challenging both romantic presumptions and Eurocentrism. Examples presented include class differences in water use in the megacity of Delhi, India; the impact of radiation on water practices in Fukushima, Japan; the role of the King in hydraulic practices in Thailand, and ritual irrigation in Bali, Indonesia.

G. E. R. Lloyd explores the variety of ideas and assumptions that humans have entertained concerning three main topics: being, or what there is; humanity--what makes a human being a human; and understanding, both of the world and of one another. Amazingly diverse views have been held on these issues by different individuals and collectivities in both ancient and modern times. Lloyd juxtaposes the evidence available from ethnography and from the study of ancient societies, both to describe that diversity and to investigate the problems it poses. Many of the ideas in question are deeply puzzling, even paradoxical, to the point where they have often been described as irrational or frankly unintelligible. Many implicate fundamental moral issues and value judgements, where again we may seem to be faced with an impossible task in attempting to arrive at a fair-minded evaluation. How far does it seem that we are all the prisoners of the conceptual systems of the collectivities to which we happen to belong? To what extent and in what circumstances is it possible to challenge the basic concepts of such systems? Being, Humanity, and Understanding examines these questions cross-culturally and seeks to draw out the implications for the revisability of some of our habitual assumptions concerning such topics as ontology, morality, nature, relativism, incommensurability, the philosophy of language, and the pragmatics of communication.

This radical reading of Wittgenstein's third and last masterpiece, "On Certainty," has major implications for philosophy. It elucidates Wittgenstein's ultimate thoughts on the nature of our basic beliefs and his demystification of skepticism. Our basic certainties are shown to be nonepistemic, nonpropositional attitudes that, as such, have no verbal occurrence but manifest themselves exclusively in our actions. This fundamental certainty is a belief-"in," a primitive confidence or" ur-trust" whose practical nature bridges the hitherto unresolved catagorial gap between belief and action.

Originally published in 1994, The Incommensurability Thesis is a critical study of the Incommensurability Thesis of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. The book examines the theory that different scientific theories may be incommensurable because of conceptual variance. The book presents a critique of the thesis and examines and discusses the arguments for the theory, acknowledging and debating the opposing views of other theorists. The book provides a comprehensive and detailed discussion of the incommensurability thesis.

Until quite recently, mind-body dualism has been regarded with deep suspicion by both philosophers and scientists. This has largely been due to the widespread identification of dualism in general with one particular version of it: the interactionist substance dualism of Rene Descartes. This traditional form of dualism has, ever since its first formulation in the seventeenth century, attracted numerous philosophical objections and is now almost universally rejected in scientific circles as empirically inadequate. During the last few years, however, renewed attention has begun to be paid to the dualistic point of view, as a result of increasing discontent with the prevailing materialism and reductionism of contemporary scientific and philosophical thought. Awareness has grown that dualism need not be restricted to its traditional form and that other varieties of dualism are not subject to the difficulties commonly raised against Descartes' own version of it. Interest in these alternative versions of dualism is growing fast today, because it seems that they are capable of capturing deep-seated philosophical intuitions, while also being fully consistent with the methodological assumptions and empirical findings of modern scientific work on the human mind and brain. The object of this book is to provide philosophers, scientists, their students, and the wider general public with an up-to-date overview of current developments in dualistic conceptions of the mind in contemporary philosophy and science."