![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > Philosophy of science
This unique introduction fully engages and clearly explains pragmatism, an approach to knowledge and philosophy that rejects outmoded conceptions of objectivity while avoiding relativism and subjectivism. It follows pragmatism's focus on the process of inquiry rather than on abstract justifications meant to appease the skeptic. According to pragmatists, getting to know the world is a creative human enterprise, wherein we fashion our concepts in terms of how they affect us practically, including in future inquiry. This book fully illuminates that enterprise and the resulting radical rethinking of basic philosophical conceptions like truth, reality, and reason. Author Cornelis de Waal helps the reader recognize, understand, and assess classical and current pragmatist contributions-from Charles S. Peirce to Cornel West-evaluate existing views from a pragmatist angle, formulate pragmatist critiques, and develop a pragmatist viewpoint on a specific issue. The book discusses: Classical pragmatists, including Peirce, James, Dewey, and Addams; Contemporary figures, including Rorty, Putnam, Haack, and West; Connections with other twentieth-century approaches, including phenomenology, critical theory, and logical positivism; Peirce's pragmatic maxim and its relation to James's Will to Believe; Applications to philosophy of law, feminism, and issues of race and racism.
In our papers on the rationality of magic, we distinghuished, for purposes of analysis, three levels of rationality. First and lowest (rationalitYl) the goal directed action of an agent with given aims and circumstances, where among his circumstances we included his knowledge and opinions. On this level the magician's treatment of illness by incantation is as rational as any traditional doctor's blood-letting or any modern one's use of anti-biotics. At the second level (rationalitY2) we add the element of rational thinking or thinking which obeys some set of explicit rules, a level which is not found in magic in general, though it is sometimes given to specific details of magical thinking within the magical thought-system. It was the late Sir Edward E. Evans-Pritchard who observed that when considering magic in detail the magician may be as consistent or critical as anyone else; but when considering magic in general, or any system of thought in general, the magician could not be critical or even comprehend the criticism. Evans-Pritchard went even further: he was sceptical as to whether it could be done in a truly consistent manner: one cannot be critical of one's own system, he thought. On this level (rationalitY2) of discussion we have explained (earlier) why we prefer to wed Evans Pritchard's view of the magician's capacity for piece-meal rationality to Sir James Frazer's view that magic in general is pseudo-rational because it lacks standards of rational thinking."
First published in 1927, Science and Philosophy: And Other Essays is a collection of individual papers written by Bernard Bosanquet during his highly industrious philosophical life. The collection was put together by Bosanquet's wife after the death of the writer and remains mostly unaltered with just a few papers added and the order of entries improved. The papers here displayed consist of various contributions Bosanquet made to Mind, the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, the International Journal of Ethics and other periodicals, as well as work from volumes of lectures and essays under his own or other editorship. Throughout the collection, Bosanquet considers the relationship between science and philosophy. The two subject areas became increasingly intertwined during Bosanquet's lifetime as scientific writers grew more interested in the philosophical investigation of the concepts which underlined their work and philosophical thinkers recognised the importance of the relationship between mathematics and logic as well as that between physics and metaphysics. The first essay in this volume discusses this idea explicitly and all subsequent articles may be regarded as essays in support of the main discussion with which the volume opens.
Popper's theory of science has been widely misunderstood and poorly represented in the literature on philosophy of science, over the last three decades. This book discusses the main issues in Popper's theory of science and, after giving a careful characterization of each issue, examines the main objections that have been raised against them and offers ways of circumventing them. It demonstrates that Popper's theory can guide us again to a better understanding of the aim and the structure of science.
For a North American seeking to know the Mexican mind, and especially the sciences today and in their recent development, a great light of genius is to be found in Mexico City in the late 17th century. Tbe genius is that of one who surely may be counted as the first Mexican philosopher of nature, a nun of the Order of Saint Jerome: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. Sor Juana must speak for herself, from her penetrating exercise of an independent mind within a political and religious formation which denigrated women and circumscribed reason itself. To understand this world of ours, to join in an enlightenment which would be both natural and inspired, Sor Juana clearly understood the requirements of leaming, observing, logic and reasoning. In darkness foundering Words fail the troubled mind. For who, I ask, can light me When Reason is blind? Even now, after the great steps toward liberation of women, and the substantial scientific contributions toward sheer empirical awareness of both the multiple orders ofNature and the subtle aesthetics ofindividual art and social harmony, we too in the earthly world of the 20th century must affirm what she affirmed.
The influence of scientific paradigms is much more widespread than usually realized. According to Harris, it permeates the whole of the culture of which science is an integral part. The paradigm of Newtonian science was essentially mechanistic and atomistic, and thinking in these terms not only penetrated philosophy, economics, morals and politics for the next three centuries, but remains latent in 20th century ways of thought. As Harris illustrates, the Newtonian paradigm is obsolete in confronting today's global problems. While Planck and Einstein introduced a new scientific revolution at the beginning of the century, it has yet to be reflected in common habits of thinking. It is now urgently necessary to adopt the new conceptual scheme in other fields as it has come to dominate science if global issues are to be resolved. A provocative analysis that will be of particular interest to students, teachers, and policymakers involved with public policy, the history of science and philosophy, and ethics.
A volume of essays on the themes of tradition, oral communication versus literal communication, Wittgenstein, and computers. The later Wittgenstein is shown to be on the one hand a traditionalist, and on the other hand, along with Heidegger, a philosopher of postmodern -- secondary -- orality, yearning for bygone, premodern times -- the times of primary orality. Under conditions of primary orality traditions fulfilled the specific cognitive role of conserving information -- a role subsequently taken over by writing, and today by electronic data processing. The message of the volume is that the Western values of individuality and critical thinking are intimately bound up with the technology of writing. It offers arguments in favour of the standards and techniques of classical education even under conditions of, indeed as a foundation for, the emerging computer culture.
Scholarly studies of mathematics and the sciences, carried out by philos ophers and historians in Taiwan in recent years, have two main goals: first, positive and critical participation in the logical analysis of scientific theories and scientific explanation; and second, conceptual clarification joined with faithful historical investigation of the sciences of traditional and modem China. In this book, Professors Cheng-hung Lin and Daiwie Fu have gathered fine representative essays from both endeavors. Their two introductory discussions guide the reader in three ways. First, we have insightful remarks concerning the development of science studies in Taiwan during the past three decades. Then we see the place of such studies, particularly those in the logic and methodology of science, in the philosophy of science as that discipline has evolved in the West in recent years. Finally we have an account of the changes that have occurred among philosophers and historians of Chinese science as they have turned away from an assump tion of Western definitions of scientific achievement, a tum that is common to Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese and Western scholars."
Having enjoyed more than twenty years of development, feminist
epistemology and philosophy of science are now thriving fields of
inquiry, offering current scholars a rich tradition from which to
draw. In addition to a recognition of the power of knowledge itself
and its effects on women s lives, a central feature of feminist
epistemology and philosophy of science has been the attention they
draw to the role of power dynamics within knowledge-seeking
practices and the implications of these dynamics for our
understandings of knowledge, science, and epistemology.
At the 1969 annual meeting of the American Association for the Ad vancement ofScience, held in Boston on December 27-29, a sequence of symposia on the philosophical foundations of science was organized jointly by Section L of the Association and the Boston Colloquium for the Philosophy of Science. Section L is devoted to the history, philos ophy, logic and sociology of science, with broad connotations extended both to 'science' and to 'philosophy'. With collaboration generously extended by other and more specialized Sections of the AAAS, the Section L program took an unusually rich range of topics, and indeed the audiences were large, and the discussions lively. This book, regrettably delayed in publication, contains the major papers from those symposia of 1969. In addition, it contains the distin guished George Sarton Memorial Lecture of that meeting, 'Boltzmann, Monocycles and Mechanical Explanation' by Martin J. Klein. Some additions and omissions should be noted: In Part 1, dedicated to the 450th anniversary of the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, we have been una bie to include a contrihution by Elmer Belt who was prevented by storms from participating. In Part II, on physics and the explanation of life, we were unable to persuade Isaac Asimov to overcome his modesty about the historical remarks he made under the title 'Arrhenius Revisited'."
In this volume of the Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, we present a collection of articles on philosophical issues in contemporary physics. The principal domain of these investigations is quantum physics. There are also articles on questions in classical mechanics (Hooker), and relativity theory (papapetrou and Stachel), as well as a monographic essay in evolutionary epistemology (yilmaz), applying the conceptual and mathematical understanding of special relativistic quantum field theory to set forth a theory of the evolution and adaptation of perceptual structures. Finally, in addition, there are two essays on classical issues in the philosophy of nature - one, on types of continuity (Capek), which suggests an analogy between the perceptual and the quantum domains; the other, on causality, the first translation into English of a minor classic in the philosophical understanding of modern physics, H. Berg- man's well-known but little-read Der Kampf um das Kausalgesetz in der jiingsten Physik (Vieweg, Braunschweig, 1929). On the occasion of this publication, Professor Bergman has kindly contributed an introductory essay, 'Personal Remembrances of Albert Einstein'. Of the seven essays on quantum mechanics, four are on quantum logic (Marlow, Heelan, Bub and Demopoulos, Van Fraassen), the last being a critical survey of various current proposals for quantum logics; the re- maining three (MacKinnon, Stachel and Van Fraassen) are concerned with both the formal issues and the ontological commitments of quantum physics.
* Written by an interdisciplinary group of specialists from the arts, humanities and sciences at Oxford University * Suitable for a wide non-academic readership, and will appeal to anyone with an interest in mathematics, science and philosophy.
The publication in 1632 of Galileo's Dialogue on the Two Chief World Systems, Ptolemaic and Copernican marked a crucial moment in the 'scientific revolution' and helped Galileo become the 'father of modern science'. The Dialogue contains Galileo's mature synthesis of astronomy, physics, and methodology, and a critical confirmation of Copernicus's hypothesis of the earth's motion. However, the book also led Galileo to stand trial with the Inquisition, in what became known as 'the greatest scandal in Christendom'. In The Routledge Guidebook to Galileo's Dialogue, Maurice A. Finocchiaro introduces and analyzes: the intellectual background and historical context of the Copernican controversy and Inquisition trial; the key arguments and critiques that Galileo presents on both sides of the 'dialogue'; the Dialogue's content and significance from three special points of view: science, methodology, and rhetoric; the enduring legacy of the Dialogue and the ongoing application of its approach to other areas. This is an essential introduction for all students of science, philosophy, history, and religion wanting a useful guide to Galileo's great classic.
This monograph develops a new way of justifying the claims made by science about phenomenon not directly observable by humans, such as atoms and black holes. It details a way of making inferences to the existence and properties of unobservable entities and states of affairs that can be given a probabilistic justification. The inferences used to establish realist claims are not a form of, and neither do they rely on, inference to the best explanation. Scientific Realism maintains that scientific theories and hypotheses refer to real entities, forces, and relations, even if one cannot examine them. But, there are those who doubt these claims. The author develops a novel way of defending Scientific Realism against a range of influential attacks. He argues that in some cases, at least, we can make probabilistically justifiable inferences from observed data to claims about unobservable, theoretical entities. He shows how this enables us to place some scientific realist claims on a firmer epistemological footing than has previously been the case. This also makes it possible to give a unified set of replies to the most common objections to Scientific Realism. The final chapters apply the developed conceptual apparatus to key cases from the history of science and from recent science. One example concerns realism with respect to atoms. Another looks at inferences from recent astronomical data to conclusions about the size and shape of those parts of the universe lying beyond that which we can observe.
The unusual ambition of this volume is to engage scientists, historians, and philosophers in a common quest to delineate the structure of the creative thinking responsible for major advances in physical theory. The topic does not fit anyone discipline's proprietary interests, and can only be pursued cooperatively. This volume was conceived in the hope that the importance of learning something general about how theories are developed and what makes the difference between productive and abortive directions of theo retical inquiry could overcome well-known barriers to such cooperation. The volume originated in a conference held at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro in 1988, as an installment of the annual Greensboro Symposium in Philosophy. Most of the papers descend from papers pre sented on that occasion. The authors are well known in their own disciplines, but should be identified to the wider audience for interdisciplinary work in science studies. Rafael Sorkin, of Syracuse University, and Don Page, of the University of Alberta, are theoretical physicists who have done research in quantum gravity and cosmology. John Stachel, a physicist at Boston University, is widely known as the Director of the Einstein Project and editor of Einstein's papers. William Harper, a historian of science and philosopher at the University of Western Ontario, is a Newton scholar and specialist in decision theory."
What is temperature, and how can we measure it correctly? These may
seem like simple questions, but the most renowned scientists
struggled with them throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. In
Inventing Temperature, Chang examines how scientists first created
thermometers; how they measured temperature beyond the reach of
standard thermometers; and how they managed to assess the
reliability and accuracy of these instruments without a circular
reliance on the instruments themselves.
In Theoretical Knowledge an original conception of a structure and dynamics of scientific knowledge is proposed. A detailed analysis of the foundations of science performed by the author allowed him to develop new ideas and approaches, to demonstrate how sociocultural factors are incorporated in the process of yielding of new theories. He shows direct and inverse links between foundations of science and new theories and empirical facts evolved from those, how among many potentially possible histories of science a culture selects just those directions which become a real history of science. The author analyses mechanisms of the generation of scientific theories and shows that those are changed in the process of historical development of science. He displays three historical types of scientific rationality (classical, non-classical and post-non-classical, which appears in modern science) and shows features of their coexistence and interplay. It is shown that along with the emerging of post-non-classical rationality science increases the sphere of its worldview applications. Science begins to correlate not only with the basic values of technogenic civilization but also with some values and patterns of traditional cultures. The investigation is based on the extensive literature on the history of natural and social sciences. The reader will find in the book authentic historical reconstructions of the processes of the development of classical and quantum electrodynamics, relativity, and conceptions of evolution in biology.
This volume in the Synthese Library Series is the result of a con- ference held at the Roskilde University, Denmark, September 16- 18, 1998. The purpose of this meeting was to shed light on some of the recent issues in probability theory and track their history; to analyze their philosophical and mathematical significance, and to analyze the role of mathematical probability theory in other sciences. Hence the conference was called Probability Theory- Philosophy! Recent History and Relations to Science. The editors would like to thank the invited speakers includ- ing in alphabetical order Prof. N.H. Bingham (BruneI Univer- sity), Prof. Berna KIlmc; (Bogazici University), Prof. Eberhard Knoblock (Techniche Universitat Berlin), Prof. J.B. Paris (Uni- versity of Manchester), Prof. T. Seidenfeld (Carnegie Mellon University), Prof. Glenn Shafer (Rutgers University) and Prof. Volodya Vovk (University of London) for contributing, in the most lucid and encouraging way, to the fulfillment of the con- ference aim. The editors are also grateful to the invited speakers for making their contributions available for publication. The conference was organized by the Danish Network on the History and Philosophy of Mathematics http://mmf.ruc.dkjmathnetj The editors would like to thank the network's organizing com- mittee consisting of Prof. Kirsti Andersen (University of Aarhus), Prof. Jesper Liitzen (University of Copenhagen), Dr. Tinne Hoff Kjeldsen (Roskilde University) and the committee's secretaries Lise Mariane Jeppesen and Jesper Thrane (Roskilde University).
In this collection we finally find the philosophy of technology, a young and rapidly developing area of scholarly interest, making contact with history of science and technology, and mainstream epistemological and metaphysical issues. The sophistication of these papers indicates the maturity of the field as it moves away from the advocacy of anti-technology ideological posturing toward a deeper understanding of the options and restraints technological developments provide. The papers presented here take us over a threshold into the real world of complicated social and technological interactions where science and art are shown to be integral to our understanding of technological change, and technological innovations are seen as configuring our knowledge of the world and opening up new possibilities for human development. With its rich historical base, this volume will be of interest to all students concerned about the interactions among technology, society, and philosophy.
In this book, 11 leading scholars contribute to the understanding of the scientific and philosophical works of Moses Maimonides (1135-1204), the most luminous Jewish intellectual since Talmudic times. Deeply learned in mathematics, astronomy, astrology (which he strongly rejected), logic, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and jurisprudence, and himself a practising physician, Maimonides flourished within the high Arabic culture of the 12th century, where he had momentous influence upon subsequent Jewish beliefs and behavior, upon ethical demands, and upon ritual traditions. For him, mastery of the sciences was indispensable in the process of religious fulfilment.
I have always had a great interest in the philosophy of science. At first this interest led to reflections on the mathematical sciences;l later my focus shifted to the natural sciences;2 during the past twenty years or so my interest has also included the behavioral, social, and historical sciences) From the very start my interest was always combined with a concern for the history of the sciences. In philosophy of science proper, my main interest was not in logical, methodological, or even epistemological issues, although I obviously studied and taught the most important insights proposed in the leading publications in this large field of study. My concern has always been predominantly ontological; and in that area I have approached the relevant issues from a 4 phenomenological perspective. For what follows it is perhaps of some importance to mention here that I came to phenomenology in a rather indirect way, through the philosophy of Nicolai Hartmann. Yet it was mainly the influence of Herman Van Breda and Alphonse De Waelhens which led me directly to Husserl's phenomenology. At first I fo cused almost exclusively on Husserl's phenomenology. Later I moved in the direction of the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and, 1Cf. Joseph J. Kockelmans, Philosophy of Mathematics in the Middle Ages (in Dutch) (Langemark: Vonksteen, 1953); "On the Mode of Being of Mathematical Entities" (in Dutch), in Tijdschrift voor Philosophie, 16(1954), pp. 289-33l. 2Joseph J. Kockelmans, On Time and Space."
It was as a result of having known Juhos personally over many years that I became familiar with his thought. I met him and Viktor Kraft in Vienna soon after the War and through their acquaintance I first came into contact with the tradition of the Vienna Circle. To their conversation .too lowe much as regards the clarification of my own views, even if in the end these took quite a different turn in many essentials. At this point my gratitude goes first of all to Mrs. Lia J uhos for the gen erous help she has given me and the editors of the Vienna Circle collection in selecting the contents of this volume. Next, we owe a special debt to Dr. Paul Foulkes for his splendid translation of the text. Finally, I wish to thank Dr. Veit Pittioni for his constant assistance. As Juhos' last student, he was thoro).lghly familiar with his supervisor's mode of thought and has significantly furthered the assembly and execution of this book."
Everybody knows Marjorie Grene. In part, this is because she is a presence: her vividness, her energy, her acute intelligence, her critical edge, her quick humor, her love of talking, her passion for philosophy - all combine to make her inevitable. Marjorie Grene cannot be missed or overlooked or undervalued. She is there - Dasein personified. It is an honor to present a Festschrift to her. It honors philosophy to honor her. Professor Grene has shaped American philosophy in her distinc tive way (or, we should say, in distinctive ways). She was among the first to introduce Heidegger's thought ... critically ... to the American and English philosophical community, first in her early essay in the Journal of Philosophy (1938), and then in her book Heidegger (1957). She has written as well on Jaspers and Marcel, as in the Kenyon Review (1957). Grene's book Dreadful Freedom (1948) was one of the most important and influential introductions to Existentialism, and her works on Sartre have been among the most profound and insightful studies of his philosophy from the earliest to the later writings: her book Sartre (1973), and her papers 'L'Homme est une passion inutile: Sartre and Heideg ger' in the Kenyon Review (1947), 'Sartre's Theory of the Emo tions' in Yale French Studies (1948), 'Sartre: A Philosophical Study' in Mind (1969), 'The Aesthetic Dialogue of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty' in the initial volume of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1970), 'On First Reading L'Idiot de"
Ideas for Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Natural Sciences (published in 1993 as volume 15 of this series) comprised mainly ontological reflections on the natural sciences. That book explained why the natural sciences must be considered inherently interpretive in character, and clarified the conditions under which scientific interpretations are "legitimate" and may be called "true." This companion volume focuses on methodological issues. Its first part elucidates the methodical hermeneutics developed in the 19th century by Boeckh, Birt, Dilthey, and others. Its second part, through the use of concrete examples drawn from modern physics as it unfolded from Copernicus to Maxwell, clarifies and "proves" the main points of the ontologico-hermeneutical conception of the sciences elaborated in the earlier volume. It thereby both illuminates the most important problems confronting an ontologico-phenomenological approach to the natural sciences and offers an alternative to Kuhn's conception of the historical development of the natural sciences. |
![]() ![]() You may like...
The Structural Foundations of Quantum…
Dean Rickles, Steven French, …
Hardcover
R3,754
Discovery Miles 37 540
|