Download or read book Empiricism and History written by Stephen Davies and published by Red Globe Press. This book was released on 2003-05-16 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this concise introduction, Steve Davies explains what historians

Download or read book The Houses of History written by Anna Green and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The only history and theory textbook to include accessible extracts from a wide range of historical writing. Provides a comprehensive introduction to the theorists who have most inflenced twentieth-century historians. Chapters follow a consistent structure, putting difficult ideas into an accessible context. This is the only critical reader aimed at the undergraduate market.

Download or read book Logical Empiricism written by Paolo Parrini and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2010-06-15 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Logical empiricism, a program for the study of science that attempted to provide logical analyses of the nature of scientific concepts, the relation between evidence and theory, and the nature of scientific explanation, formed among the famed Vienna and Berlin Circles of the 1920s and '30s and dominated the philosophy of science throughout much of the twentieth century. In recent decades, a "post-positivist" philosophy, deriding empiricism and its claims in light of more recent historical and sociological discoveries, has been the ascendant mode of philosophy and other disciplines in the arts and sciences.This book features original research that challenges such broad oppositions. In eleven essays, leading scholars from many nations construct a more nuanced understanding of logical empiricism, its history, and development, offering promising implications for current philosophy of science debates.Tapping rich resources of unpublished material from archives in Haarlem, Konstanz, Pittsburgh, and Vienna, contributors conduct a deep investigation into the origins and development of the Vienna and Berlin Circles. They expose the roots of the philosophy in such varied sources as Cassirer, Poincaire, Husserl, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein. Important connections between the empiricists and other movements—neo-empiricism, British empiricism—are vigorously explored.Building on these historical studies, a critical reevaluation emerges that shrinks the distance between old and new philosophers of science, between "analytic" and "Continental" philosophy. A number of compelling recent debates, including those involving Kuhn, Feyerabend, Hesse, Glymour, and Hanson, are reopened to show the ways in which logical empiricist theory can still be validly applied.Logical Empiricism is the result of a remarkable conference, convened in the spirit of reflection and international cooperation, that took place in Florence, Italy, in 1999.

Download or read book Introducing Empiricism written by Dave Robinson and published by Icon Books Ltd. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our knowledge comes primarily from experience – what our senses tell us. But is experience really what it seems? The experimental breakthroughs in 17th-century science of Kepler, Galileo and Newton informed the great British empiricist tradition, which accepts a 'common-sense' view of the world – and yet concludes that all we can ever know are 'ideas'. In Introducing Empiricism: A Graphic Guide, Dave Robinson - with the aid of Bill Mayblin's brilliant illustrations - outlines the arguments of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, J.S. Mill, Bertrand Russell and the last British empiricist, A.J. Ayer. They also explore criticisms of empiricism in the work of Kant, Wittgenstein, Karl Popper and others, providing a unique overview of this compelling area of philosophy.

Download or read book Historia written by Gianna Pomata and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays examine how the genre of historia reflects connections between the study of nature and the study of culture in early modern scholarly pursuits. The early modern genre of historia connected the study of nature and the study of culture from the early Renaissance to the eighteenth century. The ubiquity of historia as a descriptive method across a variety of disciplines--including natural history, medicine, antiquarianism, and philology--indicates how closely intertwined these scholarly pursuits were in the early modern period. The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that historia can be considered a key epistemic tool of early modern intellectual practices. Focusing on the actual use of historia across disciplines, the essays highlight a distinctive feature of early modern descriptive sciences: the coupling of observational skills with philological learning, empiricism with erudition. Thus the essays bring to light previously unexamined links between the culture of humanism and the scientific revolution. The contributors, from a range of disciplines that echoes the broad scope of early modern historia, examine such topics as the development of a new interest in historical method from the Renaissance artes historicae to the eighteenth-century tension between "history" and "system"; shifts in Aristotelian thought paving the way for revaluation of historia as descriptive knowledge; the rise of the new discipline of natural history; the uses of historia in anatomical and medical investigation and the writing of history by physicians; parallels between the practices of collecting and presenting information in both natural history and antiquarianism; and significant examples of the ease with which early seventeenth-century antiquarian scholars moved from studies of nature to studies of culture.

Download or read book Understanding Empiricism written by Robert G. Meyers and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-12-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Understanding Empiricism" is an introduction to empiricism and the empiricist tradition in philosophy. The book presents empiricism as a philosophical outlook that unites several philosophers and discusses the most important philosophical issues bearing on the subject, while maintaining enough distance from, say, the intricacies of Locke, Berkeley, Hume scholarship to allow students to gain a clear overview of empiricism without being lost in the details of the exegetical disputes surrounding particular philosophers. Written for students the book can serve both as an introduction to current problems in the theory of knowledge as well as a comprehensive survey of the history of empiricist ideas. The book begins by distinguishing between the epistemological and psychological/causal versions of empiricism, showing that it is the former that is of primary interest to philosophers. The next three chapters, on Locke, Berkeley, Hume respectively, provide an introduction to the main protagonists in the British empiricist tradition from this perspective. The book then examines more contemporary material including the ideas of Sellars, foundations and coherence theories, the rejection of the a priori by Mill, Peirce and Quine, scepticism and, finally, the status of religious belief within empiricism. Particular attention is paid to criticisms of empiricism, such as Leibniz's criticisms of Locke on innatism and Frege's objections to Mill on mathematics. The discussions are kept at an introductory level throughout to help students to locate the principles of empiricism in relation to modern philosophy.

Download or read book The History of Understanding in Analytic Philosophy written by Adam Tamas Tuboly and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interpretive understanding of human behaviour, known as verstehen, underpins the divide between the social sciences and the natural sciences. Taking a historically orientated approach, this collection offers a fresh take on the development of understanding within analytic philosophy before, during and after logical empiricism. In doing so, it reinvigorates debates on the role of the social sciences within contemporary epistemology. Bringing together leading experts including Martin Kusch, Thomas Uebel, Karsten Stueber and Giuseppina D'Oro, it is an authoritative reference on the logical empiricists' philosophy of social science. Charting the various reformulations of verstehen as proposed by Wilhem Dilthey, Max Weber, R.G Collingwood and Peter Winch, the volume explores the reception of the social sciences prior to logical empiricism, before surveying the positive and negative critiques from Otto Neurath, Felix Kaufmann, Viktor Kraft and other logical empiricists. As such, chapters reveal that verstehen was not altogether rejected by the Vienna Circle, but was subject to various conceptual uses and misuses. Along with systematic historical coverage, the book situates verhesten within contemporary interdisciplinary developments in the field, shedding light on the 21st-century 'turn' to understanding among analytic philosophers and opening further lines of inquiry for philosophy of social science.

Download or read book Peirce s Empiricism written by Aaron Bruce Wilson and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2016-10-19 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Widely praised as a founder of modern semiotics and of the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, Charles S. Peirce (1839-1914) spent over forty years developing a philosophical system that addresses the fundamental problems of Western metaphysics, epistemology, and value theory. Although never formally completed, what emerges from Peirce’s writings is a distinctive system, through an innovative semiotic or theory of signs and cognition, that combines with a robustly realist metaphysics that emphasizes the mind-independence of laws and other universals. Peirce’s Empiricism: Its Roots and Its Originality explains this marriage of empiricism with realism by tracing the roots of Peirce’s thought in the history of Western philosophy, with particular attention paid to his predecessors in the empiricist and the common sense traditions. By purging modern empiricism of its nominalistic metaphysics and its Cartesian assumptions about mind and knowledge, and by combining it with insights from sources as diverse as Duns Scotus and Charles Darwin, Peirce reinvents the idea that all our knowledge depends on sense perception while reaffirming the place of philosophy as a foundational field of inquiry. In Peirce’s Empiricism, Aaron Bruce Wilson defends an interpretation of Peirce’s philosophical work as forming a systematic whole, and develops the connections between Peirce, Reid, and the British empiricists. Wilson provides focused analyses of Peirce’s accounts of experience, habit, perception, semeiosis, truth, and ultimate ends. This book will be of great value to students and scholars with interests in Peirce, American philosophy more broadly, modern philosophy, and semiotics.

Download or read book Social Empiricism written by Miriam Solomon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2007-01-26 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the last forty years, two claims have been at the core of disputes about scientific change: that scientists reason rationally and that science is progressive. For most of this time discussions were polarized between philosophers, who defended traditional Enlightenment ideas about rationality and progress, and sociologists, who espoused relativism and constructivism. Recently, creative new ideas going beyond the polarized positions have come from the history of science, feminist criticism of science, psychology of science, and anthropology of science. Addressing the traditional arguments as well as building on these new ideas, Miriam Solomon constructs a new epistemology of science. After discussions of the nature of empirical success and its relation to truth, Solomon offers a new, social account of scientific rationality. She shows that the pursuit of empirical success and truth can be consistent with both dissent and consensus, and that the distinction between dissent and consensus is of little epistemic significance. In building this social epistemology of science, she shows that scientific communities are not merely the locus of distributed expert knowledge and a resource for criticism but also the site of distributed decision making. Throughout, she illustrates her ideas with case studies from late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century physical and life sciences. Replacing the traditional focus on methods and heuristics to be applied by individual scientists, Solomon emphasizes science funding, administration, and policy. One of her goals is to have a positive influence on scientific decision making through practical social recommendations.

Download or read book Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind written by Wilfrid Sellars and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-25 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history.

Download or read book Rationalism Empiricism and Idealism written by British Academy and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lectures, most of which were delivered in the last 15 years to the British Academy as Dawes Hicks lectures. Includes index. Locke's logical atavism / Michael Ayres -- Locke and the ethics of belief / J.A. Passmore -- Leibniz and Descartes / Ian Hacking -- Pre-established harmony versus constant conjunction / Hid©♭ Ishiguro -- Times, beginnings, and causes / G.E.M. Anscombe -- The naturalism of Book I of Hume's Treatise of human nature / David Pears -- Absolute idealism / A.M. Quinton --The good self and the bad self / Richard Wollheim.

Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory written by Nancy Partner and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory introduces the foundations of modern historical theory and the applications of theory to a full range of sub-fields of historical research, bringing the reader as up to date as possible with continuing debates and current developments. The book is divided into three key parts, covering: - Part I. Foundations: The Theoretical Grounds for Knowledge of the Past - Part II. Applications: Theory-Intensive Areas in History - Part III. Coda. Post-Postmodernism: Directions and Interrogations. This important handbook brings together, in one volume, discussions of modernity, empiricism, deconstruction, narrative and postmodernity in the continuing evolution of the historical discipline into our post-postmodern era. Chapters are written by leading academics from around the world and cover a wide array of specialized areas of the discipline, including social history, intellectual history, gender, memory, psychoanalysis and cultural history. The influence of major thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Hayden White is fully examined. This handbook is an essential resource for practising historians, and students of history, and will appeal to scholars in related disciplines in the social sciences and humanities who seek a closer understanding of the theoretical foundations of history.

Download or read book Aristotle s Empiricism written by Jean De Groot and published by Parmenides Publishing. This book was released on 2014-02-05 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Aristotle's Empiricism, Jean De Groot argues that an important part of Aristotle's natural philosophy has remained largely unexplored and shows that much of Aristotle's analysis of natural movement is influenced by the logic and concepts of mathematical mechanics that emerged from late Pythagorean thought. De Groot draws upon the pseudo-Aristotelian Physical Problems XVI to reconstruct the context of mechanics in Aristotle's time and to trace the development of kinematic thinking from Archytas to the Aristotelian Mechanics. She shows the influence of kinematic thinking on Aristotle's concept of power or potentiality, which she sees as having a physicalistic meaning originating in the problem of movement.De Groot identifies the source of early mechanical knowledge in kinesthetic awareness of mechanical advantage, showing the relation of Aristotle's empiricism to more ancient experience. The book sheds light on the classical Greek understanding of imitation and device, as it questions both the claim that Aristotle's natural philosophy codifies opinions held by convention and the view that the cogency of his scientific ideas depends on metaphysics.

Download or read book Radical Interpretation in Religion written by Nancy Frankenberry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-09-19 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Publisher Description

Download or read book Understanding History written by Jonathan Gorman and published by University of Ottawa Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Has any question about the historical past ever been finally answered? Of course there is much disagreement among professional historians about what happened in the past and how to explain it. But this incisive study goes one step further and brings into question the very ability of historians to gather and communicate genuine knowledge about the past. Understanding History applies this general question from the philosophy of history to economic history of American slaveholders. Do we understand the American slaveholders? Has the last word on the subject been said? Both the alleged "profitability" of slavery and the purported causes of the American Civil War are philosophically analyzed. Traditional narrative history and econometric history are examined and compared, and their different philosophical assumptions made explicit. The problem of justifying historical methodologies is first set in the wider context of the philosophical problem of knowledge, then lucidly explained and resolved along pragmatic lines. The novelty of Gorman's approach lies in its comparison of narrative with econometric history, its analysis of empathetic understanding in terms of cost-benefit analysis, and its elucidation of the metaphysical presuppositions of empiricism. It stands out especially for the clarity, rigor, and simplicity of its arguments.

Download or read book Aristotle s Empiricism written by Marc Gasser-Wingate and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though Aristotle is often thought to be an empiricist--someone who thinks all knowledge is somehow derived from perception--the philosopher is often thought to have little to say on these matters. Gasser-Wingate here offers a sustained examination of these discussions and their epistemological, psychological, and ethical implications. It defends an interpretation of Aristotle as a moderate sort of empiricist, who thinks we can develop sophisticated forms of knowledge by broadly perceptual means, and that we therefore share an important part of our cognitive lives with nonrational animals, but al.

Download or read book Shen Gua s Empiricism written by Ya Zuo and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-10-20 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Shen Gua (1031–1095) is a household name in China, known as a distinguished renaissance man and the author of Brush Talks from Dream Brook, an old text whose remarkable “scientific” discoveries make it appear curiously ahead of its time. In this first book-length study of Shen in English, Ya Zuo reveals the connection between Shen’s life as an active statesman and his ideas, specifically the empirical stance manifested through his wide-ranging inquiries. She places Shen on the broad horizon of premodern Chinese thought, and presents his empiricism within an extensive narrative of Chinese epistemology. Relying on Shen as a searchlight, Zuo focuses in on how an individual thinker summoned conditions and concepts from the vast Chinese intellectual tradition to build a singular way of knowing. Moreover, her study of Shen provides insights into the complex dynamics in play at the dawn of the age of Neo-Confucianism and compels readers to achieve a deeper appreciation of the diversity in Chinese thinking."