Download or read book Human Nature and the Limits of Science written by John Dupré and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. He claims it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do.
Download or read book Human Nature and the Limits of Science written by John Dupré and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2001-11-08 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Dupré warns that our understanding of human nature is being distorted by two faulty and harmful forms of pseudo-scientific thinking. Not just in the academic world but increasingly in everyday life, we find one set of experts seeking to explain the ends at which humans aim in terms of evolutionary theory, and another set of experts using economic models to give rules of how we act to achieve those ends. Dupré charges this unholy alliance of evolutionary psychologists and rational-choice theorists with scientific imperialism: they use methods and ideas developed for one domain of inquiry in others where they are inappropriate. He demonstrates that these theorists' explanations do not work, and furthermore that if taken seriously their theories tend to have dangerous social and political consequences. For these reasons, it is important to resist scientism - an exaggerated conception of what science can be expected to do for us. To say this is in no way to be against science - just against bad science. Dupré restores sanity to the study of human nature by pointing the way to a proper understanding of humans in the societies that are our natural and necessary environments. He shows how our distinctively human capacities are shaped by the social contexts in which we are embedded. And he concludes with a bold challenge to one of the intellectual touchstones of modern science: the idea of the universe as causally complete and deterministic. In an impressive rehabilitation of the idea of free human agency, he argues that far from being helpless cogs in a mechanistic universe, humans are rare concentrations of causal power in a largely indeterministic world. Human Nature and the Limits of Science is a provocative, witty, and persuasive corrective to scientism. In its place, Dupré commends a pluralistic approach to science, as the appropriate way to investigate a universe that is not unified in form. Anyone interested in science and human nature will enjoy this book, unless they are its targets.
Download or read book The Nature and Limits of Human Understanding written by Anthony Sanford and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2003-05-01 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exploration of human understanding, from the perspectives of psychology, philosophy, biology and theology. The six contributors are among the most internationally eminent in their fields. Though scholarly, the writing is non-technical. No background in psychology, philosophy or theology is presumed. No other interdisciplinary work has undertaken to explore the nature of human understanding. This book is unique, and highly significant for anyone interested in or concerned about the human condition.
Download or read book Beyond Evolution written by Anthony O'Hear and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1997-10-09 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthony O'Hear takes a stand against the fashion for explaining human behaviour in terms of evolution. He maintains, controversially, that while the theory of evolution is successful in explaining the development of the natural world in general, it is of limited value when applied to the human world. Because of our reflectiveness and our rationality we take on goals and ideals which cannot be justified in terms of survival-promotion or reproductive advantage. O'Hear examines the nature of human self-consciousness, and argues that evolutionary theory cannot give a satisfactory account of such distinctive facets of human life as the quest for knowledge, moral sense, and the appreciation of beauty; in these we transcend our biological origins. It is our rationality that allows each of us to go beyond not only our biological but also our cultural inheritance: as the author says in the Preface, 'we are prisoners neither of our genes nor of the ideas we encounter as we each make our personal and individual way through life'.
Download or read book Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction written by Gerald Alva Miller Jr. and published by Springer. This book was released on 2012-12-04 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and its uses both to question what it means to be human in digital era.
Download or read book The Island of Knowledge written by Marcelo Gleiser and published by Civitas Books. This book was released on 2014-06-03 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why discovering the limits to science may be the most powerful discovery of allHow much can we know about the world? In this book, physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence, the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge. In so doing, he reaches a provocative conclusion: science, like religion, is fundamentally limited as a tool for understanding the world. As science and its philosophical interpretations advance, we face the unsettling recognition of how much we don't know. Gleiser shows that by aband.
Download or read book The Limits of Science written by Peter Brian Medawar and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 108 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Defining Nature s Limits written by Neil Tarrant and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-11-18 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the history of censorship, science, and magic from the Middle Ages to the post-Reformation era. Neil Tarrant challenges conventional thinking by looking at the longer history of censorship, considering a five-hundred-year continuity of goals and methods stretching from the late eleventh century to well into the sixteenth. Unlike earlier studies, Defining Nature’s Limits engages the history of both learned and popular magic. Tarrant explains how the church developed a program that sought to codify what was proper belief through confession, inquisition, and punishment and prosecuted what they considered superstition or heresy that stretched beyond the boundaries of religion. These efforts were continued by the Roman Inquisition, established in 1542. Although it was designed primarily to combat Protestantism, from the outset the new institution investigated both practitioners of “illicit” magic and inquiries into natural philosophy, delegitimizing certain practices and thus shaping the development of early modern science. Describing the dynamics of censorship that continued well into the post-Reformation era, Defining Nature's Limits is revisionist history that will interest scholars of the history science, the history of magic, and the history of the church alike.
Download or read book Clashes of Knowledge written by Peter Meusburger and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do traditional distinctions between "belief" and "knowledge" still make sense? How are differences between knowledge and belief understood in different cultural contexts? This book explores conflicts between various types of knowledge, especially between orthodox and heterodox knowledge systems, ranging from religious fundamentalism to heresies within the scientific community itself. Beyond addressing many fields in the academy, the book discusses learned individuals interested in the often puzzling spatial and cultural disparities of knowledge and clashes of knowledge.
Download or read book Harmless Naturalism written by Robert F. Almeder and published by Open Court Publishing. This book was released on 1998 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific naturalism, or scientism, is the theory that science has all the answers. This book argues that not all philosophical explanations can be reduced to scientific ones. Refuting support for scientism, it suggests that reliabilist and causal theories of epistemic justification are unsound.
Download or read book The Nature and Limits of Political Science written by Maurice Cowling and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-04-20 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a fascinating and critical overview of the study of political subjects within English universities in the mid-twentieth-century, and the strengths and weaknesses of certain patterns of thinking.
Download or read book The Altruistic Brain written by Donald W. Pfaff and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2015 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Unlike any other study in its field, The Altruistic Brain synthesizes into one theory the most important research into how and why - by purely physical mechanisms - humans empathize with one another and respond altruistically."--Jacket.
Download or read book The End Of Science written by John Horgan and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-04-14 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As staff writer for Scientific American, John Horgan has a window on contemporary science unsurpassed in all the world. Who else routinely interviews the likes of Lynn Margulis, Roger Penrose, Francis Crick, Richard Dawkins, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Hawking, Thomas Kuhn, Chris Langton, Karl Popper, Stephen Weinberg, and E.O. Wilson, with the freedom to probe their innermost thoughts? In The End Of Science, Horgan displays his genius for getting these larger-than-life figures to be simply human, and scientists, he writes, "are rarely so human . . . so at there mercy of their fears and desires, as when they are confronting the limits of knowledge."This is the secret fear that Horgan pursues throughout this remarkable book: Have the big questions all been answered? Has all the knowledge worth pursuing become known? Will there be a final "theory of everything" that signals the end? Is the age of great discoverers behind us? Is science today reduced to mere puzzle solving and adding detains to existing theories? Horgan extracts surprisingly candid answers to there and other delicate questions as he discusses God, Star Trek, superstrings, quarks, plectics, consciousness, Neural Darwinism, Marx's view of progress, Kuhn's view of revolutions, cellular automata, robots, and the Omega Point, with Fred Hoyle, Noam Chomsky, John Wheeler, Clifford Geertz, and dozens of other eminent scholars. The resulting narrative will both infuriate and delight as it mindless Horgan's smart, contrarian argument for "endism" with a witty, thoughtful, even profound overview of the entire scientific enterprise. Scientists have always set themselves apart from other scholars in the belief that they do not construct the truth, they discover it. Their work is not interpretation but simple revelation of what exists in the empirical universe. But science itself keeps imposing limits on its own power. Special relativity prohibits the transmission of matter or information as speeds faster than that of light; quantum mechanics dictates uncertainty; and chaos theory confirms the impossibility of complete prediction. Meanwhile, the very idea of scientific rationality is under fire from Neo-Luddites, animal-rights activists, religious fundamentalists, and New Agers alike. As Horgan makes clear, perhaps the greatest threat to science may come from losing its special place in the hierarchy of disciplines, being reduced to something more akin to literaty criticism as more and more theoreticians engage in the theory twiddling he calls "ironic science." Still, while Horgan offers his critique, grounded in the thinking of the world's leading researchers, he offers homage too. If science is ending, he maintains, it is only because it has done its work so well.
Download or read book Human Nature as Capacity written by Nigel Rapport and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2010 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it to be human? What are our specifically human attributes, our capacities and liabilities? Such questions gave birth to anthropology as an Enlightenment science. This book argues that it is again appropriate to bring "the human" to the fore, to reclaim the singularity of the word as central to the anthropological endeavor, not on the basis of the substance of a human nature - "To be human is to act like this and react like this, to feel this and want this" - but in terms of species-wide capacities: capabilities for action and imagination, liabilities for suffering and cruelty. The contributors approach "the human" with an awareness of these complexities and particularities, rendering this volume unique in its ability to build on anthropology's ethnographic expertise.
Download or read book What s Left of Human Nature written by Maria Kronfeldner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against dehumanization, Darwinian, and developmentalist challenges. Human nature has always been a foundational issue for philosophy. What does it mean to have a human nature? Is the concept the relic of a bygone age? What is the use of such a concept? What are the epistemic and ontological commitments people make when they use the concept? In What's Left of Human Nature? Maria Kronfeldner offers a philosophical account of human nature that defends the concept against contemporary criticism. In particular, she takes on challenges related to social misuse of the concept that dehumanizes those regarded as lacking human nature (the dehumanization challenge); the conflict between Darwinian thinking and essentialist concepts of human nature (the Darwinian challenge); and the consensus that evolution, heredity, and ontogenetic development result from nurture and nature. After answering each of these challenges, Kronfeldner presents a revisionist account of human nature that minimizes dehumanization and does not fall back on outdated biological ideas. Her account is post-essentialist because it eliminates the concept of an essence of being human; pluralist in that it argues that there are different things in the world that correspond to three different post-essentialist concepts of human nature; and interactive because it understands nature and nurture as interacting at the developmental, epigenetic, and evolutionary levels. On the basis of this, she introduces a dialectical concept of an ever-changing and “looping” human nature. Finally, noting the essentially contested character of the concept and the ambiguity and redundancy of the terminology, she wonders if we should simply eliminate the term “human nature” altogether.
Download or read book Science And Human Behavior written by B.F Skinner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-18 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The psychology classic—a detailed study of scientific theories of human nature and the possible ways in which human behavior can be predicted and controlled—from one of the most influential behaviorists of the twentieth century and the author of Walden Two. “This is an important book, exceptionally well written, and logically consistent with the basic premise of the unitary nature of science. Many students of society and culture would take violent issue with most of the things that Skinner has to say, but even those who disagree most will find this a stimulating book.” —Samuel M. Strong, The American Journal of Sociology “This is a remarkable book—remarkable in that it presents a strong, consistent, and all but exhaustive case for a natural science of human behavior…It ought to be…valuable for those whose preferences lie with, as well as those whose preferences stand against, a behavioristic approach to human activity.” —Harry Prosch, Ethics
Download or read book Human Nature Fact and Fiction written by Robin Headlam Wells and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2006-05-30 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
