Download or read book Scientific Inquiry written by Robert Klee and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of contemporary and classical readings in the philosophy of science aimed at undergraduates in philosophy and science. Focuses on the main issues in philosophy of science: the structure of theories, models of scientific explanation, reductionism, the objectivity of science, and the proper interpretation of mature scientific theories.
Download or read book Philosophy of Science and Historical Enquiry written by John Losee and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1987 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scientific philosophy and scientific history can be mutually exclusive, interdependent, or related by inclusion. In a provocative study of the relationship between these disciplines, Losee sheds new light on our understanding of those activities that constitute science.
Download or read book Our Knowledge of the Past written by Aviezer Tucker and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-04-26 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How do historians, comparative linguists, biblical and textual critics and evolutionary biologists establish beliefs about the past? How do they know the past? This book presents a philosophical analysis of the disciplines that offer scientific knowledge of the past. Using the analytic tools of contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science the book covers such topics as evidence, theory, methodology, explanation, determination and underdetermination, coincidence, contingency and counterfactuals in historiography. Aviezer Tucker's central claim is that historiography as a scientific discipline should be thought of as an effort to explain the evidence of past events. He also emphasizes the similarity between historiographic methodology to Darwinian evolutionary biology. This is an important, fresh approach to historiography and will be read by philosophers, historians and social scientists interested in the methodological foundations of their disciplines.
Download or read book The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations written by Patrick Thaddeus Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-07-19 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume ws the winner of The International Studies Association Theory Section Book Award 2013, presented by the International Studies Association and The Yale H. Ferguson Award 2012, presented by International Studies Association-Northeast. There are many different scientifically valid ways to produce knowledge. The field of International Relations should pay closer attention to these methodological differences, and to their implications for concrete research on world politics. The Conduct of Inquiry in International Relations provides an introduction to the philosophy of science issues and their implications for the study of global politics. The author draws attention to the problems caused by the misleading notion of a single unified scientific method, and proposes a framework that clarifies the variety of ways that IR scholars establish the authority and validity of their empirical claims. Jackson connects philosophical considerations with concrete issues of research design within neopositivist, critical realist, analyticist, and reflexive approaches to the study of world politics. Envisioning a pluralist science for a global IR field, this volume organizes the significant differences between methodological stances so as to promote internal consistency, public discussion, and worldly insight as the hallmarks of any scientific study of world politics. This important volume will be essential reading for all students and scholars of International Relations, Political Science and Philosophy of Science.
Download or read book Matter and Mind written by Mario Bunge and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-14 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book discusses two of the oldest and hardest problems in both science and philosophy: What is matter?, and What is mind? A reason for tackling both problems in a single book is that two of the most influential views in modern philosophy are that the universe is mental (idealism), and that the everything real is material (materialism). Most of the thinkers who espouse a materialist view of mind have obsolete ideas about matter, whereas those who claim that science supports idealism have not explained how the universe could have existed before humans emerged. Besides, both groups tend to ignore the other levels of existence—chemical, biological, social, and technological. If such levels and the concomitant emergence processes are ignored, the physicalism/spiritualism dilemma remains unsolved, whereas if they are included, the alleged mysteries are shown to be problems that science is treating successfully.
Download or read book The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation written by Paul A. Roth and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-15 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Philosophical Structure of Historical Explanation, Paul A. Roth resolves disputes persisting since the nineteenth century about the scientific status of history. He does this by showing why historical explanations must take the form of a narrative, making their logic explicit, and revealing how the rational evaluation of narrative explanation becomes possible. Roth situates narrative explanations within a naturalistic framework and develops a nonrealist (irrealist) metaphysics and epistemology of history—arguing that there exists no one fixed past, but many pasts. The book includes a novel reading of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, showing how it offers a narrative explanation of theory change in science. This book will be of interest to researchers in historiography, philosophy of history, philosophy of science, philosophy of social science, and epistemology.
Download or read book Materialism written by Robin Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-04-29 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The doctrine of materialism is one of the most controversial in the history of ideas. For much of its history it has been aligned with toleration and enlightened thinking, but it has also aroused strong, often violent, passions amongst both its opponents and proponents. This book explores the development of materialism in an engaging and thought-provoking way and defends the form it takes in the twenty-first century. Opening with an account of the ideas of some of the most important thinkers in the materialist tradition, including Epicurus, Lucretius, Hobbes, Hume, Darwin and Marx, the authors discuss materialism’s origins, as an early form of naturalistic explanation and as an intellectual outlook about life and the world in general. They explain how materialism’s beginnings as an imaginative vision of the true nature of things faced a major challenge from the physics it did so much to facilitate, which now portrays the microscopic world in a way incompatible with traditional materialism. Brown and Ladyman explain how out of this challenge materialism developed into the new doctrine of physicalism. Drawing on a wide range of colourful examples, the authors argue that although materialism does not have all the answers, its humanism and commitment to naturalistic explanation and the scientific method is our best philosophical hope in the ideological maelstrom of the modern world.
Download or read book The Emergence of a Scientific Culture written by Stephen Gaukroger and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2008-10-23 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why did science emerge in the West and how did scientific values come to be regarded as the yardstick for all other forms of knowledge? Stephen Gaukroger shows just how bitterly the cognitive and cultural standing of science was contested in its early development. Rejecting the traditional picture of secularization, he argues that science in the seventeenth century emerged not in opposition to religion but rather was in many respects driven by it. Moreover, science did not present a unified picture of nature but was an unstable field of different, often locally successful but just as often incompatible, programmes. To complicate matters, much depended on attempts to reshape the persona of the natural philosopher, and distinctive new notions of objectivity and impartiality were imported into natural philosophy, changing its character radically by redefining the qualities of its practitioners. The West's sense of itself, its relation to its past, and its sense of its future, have been profoundly altered since the seventeenth century, as cognitive values generally have gradually come to be shaped around scientific ones. Science has not merely brought a new set of such values to the task of understanding the world and our place in it, but rather has completely transformed the task, redefining the goals of enquiry. This distinctive feature of the development of a scientific culture in the West marks it out from other scientifically productive cultures. In The Emergence of a Scientific Culture, Stephen Gaukroger offers a detailed and comprehensive account of the formative stages of this development—-and one which challenges the received wisdom that science was seen to be self-evidently the correct path to knowledge and that the benefits of science were immediately obvious to the disinterested observer.
Download or read book Approaches to Social Enquiry written by Norman Blaikie and published by Polity. This book was released on 2007-09-24 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its initial publication, this highly respected text has provided students with a critical review of the major research paradigms in the social sciences and the logics or strategies of enquiry associated with them. This second edition has been revised and updated.
Download or read book The History of Philosophy written by A. C. Grayling and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2019-06-20 with total page 559 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AUTHORITATIVE AND ACCESSIBLE, THIS LANDMARK WORK IS THE FIRST SINGLE-VOLUME HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY SHARED FOR DECADES 'A cerebrally enjoyable survey, written with great clarity and touches of wit' Sunday Times The story of philosophy is an epic tale: an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But there has been no comprehensive history of this great intellectual journey since 1945. Intelligible for students and eye-opening for philosophy readers, A. C. Grayling covers with characteristic clarity and elegance subjects like epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, logic, and the philosophy of mind, as well as the history of debates in these areas, through the ideas of celebrated philosophers as well as less well-known influential thinkers. The History of Philosophy takes the reader on a journey from the age of the Buddha, Confucius and Socrates. Through Christianity's dominance of the European mind to the Renaissance and Enlightenment. On to Mill, Nietzsche, Sartre, then the philosophical traditions of India, China and the Persian-Arabic world. And finally, into philosophy today.
Download or read book Human Nature and Historical Knowledge written by Leon Pompa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a challenging book about the presuppositions of historical knowledge.
Download or read book History of Science and Philosophy of Science written by Pradip Kumar Sengupta and published by Pearson Education India. This book was released on 2010 with total page 780 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Science written by R. V. G. Menon and published by Pearson Education India. This book was released on 2009 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aimed at students from all disciplines,
Download or read book Philosophy of History and Action written by Y. Yovel and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the proceedings of the First Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter - started by the Hebrew University Institute of Philosophy (now the S. H. Bergman Centre for Philosophical Studies), which took place on December 28-31, 1974. In recent years the culture-gap that separates philosophers seems slowly - indeed much too slowly - to be narrowing. Although short circuits in communication still do happen and mutual disrespect has not vanished, it is becoming unfashionable to demonstrate ignorance of another philosophical tradition or to shrug it off with a supercilious smile. Perhaps dialectically, the insufficiency of any self-centred view that tries to immunize itself to challenges from without starts to disturb it from within. Moreover, as the culture- (and language-) bound nature of many philosophical divergencies is sinking more deeply into consciousness, the irony of an attitude of intolerance to them becomes more apparent. Our aim was to make a modest contribution to this development. We did not, however, mean to confuse genuine differences and problems in communication. Consequently, the more realistic term "encounter" was preferred to the idealizing "dialogue. " The Israeli hosts, themselves trained in a variety of philosophical traditions, felt that there is something in between real dialogue on the one hand and mutual estrangement on the other, and wished to provide a meeting place for it.
Download or read book The Nature of Historical Inquiry written by Leonard Mendes Marsak and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Philosophy in the Age of Science written by Julia Hermann and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Current academic philosophy is being challenged from several angles. Subdisciplinary specialisations often make it challenging to articulate philosophy’s relevance for the societal questions of our day.Additionally, the success of the ‘scientific method’ puts pressure on philosophers to articulate their methods and specify how these can be successful. How does philosophical progress come about? What can philosophy contribute to our understanding of today’s world? Moreover, can it also contribute to resolving urgent societal challenges, such as anthropogenic climate change? This edited volume evaluates the place of philosophy in the age of science. It addresses three related sub-themes: philosophical progress, philosophical method and philosophy’s societal relevance. Fourteen authors engage with these sub-themes, focusing on the topics of their philosophical expertise, such as the philosophy of religion, evolutionary ethics and the nature of free will. In doing so, they explore their methods of enquiry, and look at how progress in their research comes about.
Download or read book The Spirit of Inquiry written by Susannah Gibson and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-15 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cambridge is now world-famous as a centre of science, but it wasn't always so. Before the nineteenth century, the sciences were of little importance in the University of Cambridge. But that began to change in 1819 when two young Cambridge fellows took a geological fieldtrip to the Isle of Wight. Adam Sedgwick and John Stevens Henslow spent their days there exploring, unearthing dazzling fossils, dreaming up elaborate theories about the formation of the earth, and bemoaning the lack of serious science in their ancient university. As they threw themselves into the exciting new science of geology - conjuring millions of years of history from the evidence they found in the island's rocks - they also began to dream of a new scientific society for Cambridge. This society would bring together like-minded young men who wished to learn of the latest science from overseas, and would encourage original research in Cambridge. It would be, they wrote, a society "to keep alive the spirit of inquiry". Their vision was realised when they founded the Cambridge Philosophical Society later that same year. Its founders could not have imagined the impact the Cambridge Philosophical Society would have: it was responsible for the first publication of Charles Darwin's scientific writings, and hosted some of the most heated debates about evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century; it saw the first announcement of x-ray diffraction by a young Lawrence Bragg - a technique that would revolutionise the physical, chemical and life sciences; it published the first paper by C.T.R. Wilson on his cloud chamber - a device that opened up a previously-unimaginable world of sub-atomic particles. 200 years on from the Society's foundation, this book reflects on the achievements of Sedgwick, Henslow, their peers, and their successors. Susannah Gibson explains how Cambridge moved from what Sedgwick saw as a "death-like stagnation" (really little more than a provincial training school for Church of England clergy) to being a world-leader in the sciences. And she shows how science, once a peripheral activity undertaken for interest by a small number of wealthy gentlemen, has transformed into an enormously well-funded activity that can affect every aspect of our lives.
