Download or read book Essays Sceptical and Anti sceptical on Problems Neglected Or Misconceived written by Thomas de Quincey and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays Sceptical and Anti sceptical written by Thomas De Quincey and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays Sceptical and Anti spectical on Problems Neglected Or Misconceived written by Thomas De Quincey and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays Sceptical and Anti sceptical on Problems Neglected of Misconceived written by Thomas De Quincey and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Christian s Plea Against Modern Unbelief written by Robert Ainslie Redford and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Skeptical Essays written by Benson Mates and published by . This book was released on 1981-01 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In philosophy," the author writes in his preface, "we have learned to get our satisfaction from showing that the other fellow is mistaken rather than from establishing the truth of our own positive tenets." The impeccably professional work of a mature and distinguished logician and scholar, Skeptical Essays propounds the view that the principal traditional problems of philosophy are genuine intellectual knots; they are intelligible enough, but at the same time the are absolutely insoluble. The problems Mates discusses are: the Liar paradox and Russell's Antinomy of the class of all nonself-membered classes; the problem of determinism and moral responsibility; and the existence of the external world. Clearly written and effectively organized, the book will be an excellent text for advanced students.
Download or read book A Skeptics Skeptic written by Massimo Pigliucci and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-03 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I've been writing about "skepticism" (meaning, taking a skeptical stance on pseudo-science, pseudo-philosophy, pseudo-politics, and a few other "pseudos") since as far back as 1997, when I began organizing Darwin Day events at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. From time to time, over the intervening 16 or so years, I found myself turning my gadfly-sh keyboard toward other skeptics, usually famous ones. The reason is that it seems to me that a community -- such as the skeptic / atheist / humanist (S/A/H, for short) one -- that prides itself in its intellectualism and openness to reason and evidence, ought to critically examine its own tenets and positions, especially when espoused by prominent members of said community. Indeed, one of the gratifying things about being a skeptic is precisely that, by and large, we don't act like a church. We recoil from dogmas, and we don't ostracize dissenting members of our community, immediately rushing to build a new church down the street. Or do we? Well, okay, the recent history of the S/A/H community actually does sometimes eerily recall religious schisms and doctrinal disputes. Still, at least we don't burn people at the stakes, or launch fatwas against them! The gentle reader will notice that several of the essays included in the Skeptics' Skeptic collection are, ahem, quite ironic, even sarcastic at times, certainly more so than the typical Rationally Speaking post. There are reasons for that. To begin with, the people targeted here are Big Boys who can definitely take the heat (many are academics, and academics are selected for having a thick skin). Moreover, rest assured that they can (and have, in several cases!) fight back with equal or larger force. But the most important explanation for my above-average forcefulness here is that I take public intellectualism seriously, and these people are somewhat major public intellectuals. They influence countless others, and they therefore bear the responsibility of writing rigorously as well as clearly. When they don't (in my opinion, of course) I call them out. It should go without saying, but I'll say it any way: contra persistent insinuations to the contrary (by, say, The Discovery Institute, the inane "think tank" that promotes Intelligent Design creationism), these and other writings by yours truly do not signal the beginning of a move away from my philosophical naturalism, support for science, or defense of reason. They are simply cases in which I deploy precisely those tools to engage the best minds of the S/A/H, so that we as a broader movement can keep Carl Sagan's famous "candle in the dark" alit against the always numerous and always powerful forces of obscurantism and repression.
Download or read book A Defense of Philosophical Skepticism and Other Essays written by Leslie Stephen and published by . This book was released on 1941 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theory Vs Anti theory in Ethics written by N. Fotion and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a broad and new theory of theory formation in ethics. There are many existing theories, and more could be generated, but most thinkers of theory formation have a narrow view of what a theory of ethics should be like. They favor certain kinds of grand theories that generate various ethical rules and principles. In fact these grand theories allegedly do so much work that they give the appearance of being super-theories (or strong theories). Many theory creators think that it is possible to create strong theories, and that they themselves have created such a theory. Anti-theorists scoff at these claims. In effect, then, the argument between the two sides is not one of theory versus anti-theory but of grand or strong theory versus anti-grand or strong theory. Nick Fotion argues that once a broader view of theory is accepted, it is easier to see that there really is no serious conflict between theorists and anti-theorists. In principle, both sides, if they overcome their addiction to thinking in terms of grand, strong theory formation, can accept a role for theories in ethics. Theories in ethics can be either grand or local in nature. Provided theory creators and users don't expect theories to performs all kinds of impossible tasks (e.g., to deal with all of our ethical problems and be so fully justified that only one theory can be accepted as being correct) it is easier to accept them. It is also easier to accept the idea that a theorist might very well appeal to more than one theory to help him or her deal with whatever ethical issues bother.
Download or read book Can Men Be Rational written by Bertrand Russell and published by . This book was released on 2011-05-01 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book In the Space of Reasons written by Wilfrid Sellars and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sellars (1912-1989) was, in the opinion of many, the most important American philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century. This collection, coedited by Sellars's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy.
Download or read book Is Science Superstitious written by Bertrand Russell and published by . This book was released on 2011-06-01 with total page 34 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Passion of the Western Mind written by Richard Tarnas and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2011-10-19 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[This] magnificent critical survey, with its inherent respect for both the 'Westt's mainstream high culture' and the 'radically changing world' of the 1990s, offers a new breakthrough for lay and scholarly readers alike....Allows readers to grasp the big picture of Western culture for the first time." SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE Here are the great minds of Western civilization and their pivotal ideas, from Plato to Hegel, from Augustine to Nietzsche, from Copernicus to Freud. Richard Tarnas performs the near-miracle of describing profound philosophical concepts simply but without simplifying them. Ten years in the making and already hailed as a classic, THE PASSION OF THE WESERN MIND is truly a complete liberal education in a single volume.
Download or read book The Logic of Legal Requirements written by Jordi Ferrer Beltrán and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-09-13 with total page 434 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When a legal rule requires us to drive on the right, notarize our wills, or refrain from selling bootleg liquor, how are we to describe and understand that requirement? In particular, how does the logical form of such a requirement relate to the logical form of other requirements, such as moral requirements, or the requirements of logic itself? When a general legal rule is applied or distinguished in a particular case, how can we describe that process in logical form? Such questions have come to preoccupy modern legal philosophy as its methodology, drawing on the philosophy of logic, becomes ever more sophisticated. This collection gathers together some of the most prominent legal philosophers in the Anglo-American and civil law traditions to analyse the logical structure of legal norms. They focus on the issue of defeasibility, which has become a central concern for both logicians and legal philosophers in recent years. The book is divided into four parts. The first section is devoted to unravelling the basic concepts related to legal defeasibility and the logical structure of legal norms, focusing on the idea that law, or its components, are liable to implicit exceptions, which cannot be specified before the law's application to particular cases. Part two aims to disentangle the main relations between the issue of legal defeasibility and the issue of legal interpretation, exploring the topic of defeasibility as a product of certain argumentative techniques in the law. Section 3 of the volume is dedicated to one of the most problematic issues in the history of jurisprudence: the connections between law and morality. Finally, section 4 of the volume is devoted to analysing the relationships between defeasibility and legal adjudication.
Download or read book Essays in Skepticism written by Bertrand Russell and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-12-02 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century: A collection of accessible and enlightening essays on topics from envy to intellectual rubbish. Russell, the sage non-conformist, is always meaningful, no matter what the topic or the issue. In this small book are some of his old but nonetheless remarkable observations, and some of the thoughts he expressed on his 90th birthday. Here are titles, taken at random from the Table of Contents: Psychoanalysis Takes a Look; Envy and Belief; On Male Superiority; What Social Science Can Do; Intellectual Rubbish; Don’t Be Too Certain; On Being Old.
Download or read book Philosophical Progress written by Daniel Stoljar and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many people believe that philosophy makes no progress. Members of the general public often find it amazing that philosophers exist in universities at all, at least in research positions. Academics who are not philosophers often think of philosophy either as a scholarly or interpretative enterprise, or else as a sort of pre-scientific speculation. And - amazingly - many well-known philosophers argue that there is little genuine progress in philosophy. Daniel Stoljar arguesargues that this is all a big mistake. When you think through exactly what philosophical problems are, and what it takes to solve them, the pattern of success and failure in philosophy is similar to that in other fields. In philosophy, as elsewhere, there is a series of overlapping topics that determine what the subject is about. In philosophy, as elsewhere, different people in different historical epochs and different cultures ask different big questions about these topics. And in philosophy, as elsewhere, big questions asked in the past have often been solved: Stoljar provides examples. Philosophical Progress presents a strikingly optimistic picture of philosophy - not a radical optimism that says that there is some key that unlocks all philosophical problems, and not the kind of pessimism that dominates both professional and non-professional thinking about philosophy, but a reasonable optimism that views philosophy as akin to other fields.
Download or read book Understanding Philosophy of Science written by James Ladyman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-06 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few can imagine a world without telephones or televisions; many depend on computers and the Internet as part of daily life. Without scientific theory, these developments would not have been possible. In this exceptionally clear and engaging introduction to philosophy of science, James Ladyman explores the philosophical questions that arise when we reflect on the nature of the scientific method and the knowledge it produces. He discusses whether fundamental philosophical questions about knowledge and reality might be answered by science, and considers in detail the debate between realists and antirealists about the extent of scientific knowledge. Along the way, central topics in philosophy of science, such as the demarcation of science from non-science, induction, confirmation and falsification, the relationship between theory and observation and relativism are all addressed. Important and complex current debates over underdetermination, inference to the best explaination and the implications of radical theory change are clarified and clearly explained for those new to the subject.
