Download or read book Science in the Beginning written by Jay Wile and published by . This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science in the context of the seven days of creation presented in the Bible. This textbook uses activities to reinforce scientific principles presented.
Download or read book Abduction Reason and Science written by L. Magnani and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-27 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book ties together the concerns of philosophers of science and AI researchers, showing for example the connections between scientific thinking and medical expert systems. It lays out a useful general framework for discussion of a variety of kinds of abduction. It develops important ideas about aspects of abductive reasoning that have been relatively neglected in cognitive science, including the use of visual and temporal representations and the role of abduction in the withdrawal of hypotheses.
Download or read book Reason in the Age of Science written by Hans-Georg Gadamer and published by Mit Press. This book was released on 1982 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays in this book deal broadly with the question of what form reasoning about life and society can take in a culture permeated by scientific and technical modes of thought. They attempt to identify certain very basic types of questions that seem to escape scientific resolution and call for, in Gadamer's view, philosophical reflection of a hermeneutic sort.In effect, Gadamer argues for the continued practical relevance of Socratic-Platonic modes of thought in respect to contemporary issues. As part of this argument, he advances his own views on the interplay of science, technology, and social policy.These essays, which are not available in any existing translation or collection of Gadamer's work, are remarkably up-to-date with respect to the present state of his thinking, and they address issues that are particularly critical to social theory and philosophy.Perhaps more than anyone else, Hans-Georg Gadamer, who is Professor Emeritus at the University of Heidelberg and Distinguished Visiting Professor at Boston College, is the doyen of German Philosophy. His previously translated works have been widely and enthusiastically received in this country. He is recognized as the chief theorist of hermeneutics, a strong and growing movement here in a number of disciplines, from theology and literary criticism to philosophy and social theory.A book in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.
Download or read book Science and Public Reason written by Sheila Jasanoff and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-07-26 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays by Sheila Jasanoff explores how democratic governments construct public reason, that is, the forms of evidence and argument used in making state decisions accountable to citizens. The term public reason as used here is not simply a matter of deploying principled arguments that respect the norms of democratic deliberation. Jasanoff investigates what states do in practice when they claim to be reasoning in the public interest. Reason, from this perspective, comprises the institutional practices, discourses, techniques and instruments through which governments claim legitimacy in an era of potentially unbounded risks—physical, political, and moral. Those legitimating efforts, in turn, depend on citizens’ acceptance of the forms of reasoning that governments offer. Included here therefore is an inquiry into the conditions that lead citizens of democratic societies to accept policy justification as being reasonable. These modes of public knowing, or “civic epistemologies,” are integral to the constitution of contemporary political cultures. Methodologically, the book is grounded in the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). It uses in-depth qualitative studies of legal and political practices to shed light on divergent cross-cultural constructions of public reason and the reasoning political subject. The collection as a whole contributes to democratic theory, legal studies, comparative politics, geography, and ethnographies of modernity, as well as STS.
Download or read book God in the Age of Science written by Herman Philipse and published by Oxford University Press (UK). This book was released on 2012-02-23 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Herman Philipse puts forward a powerful new critique of belief in God. He examines the strategies that have been used for the philosophical defence of religious belief, and by careful reasoning casts doubt on the legitimacy of relying on faith instead of evidence, and on probabilistic arguments for the existence of God.
Download or read book Science and the Retreat from Reason written by Manjit Kumar and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Outer Limits of Reason written by Noson S. Yanofsky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-11-04 with total page 419 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exploration of the scientific limits of knowledge challenges our deep-seated beliefs about our universe, our rationality, and ourselves. “A must-read for anyone studying information science.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review Many books explain what is known about the universe. This book investigates what cannot be known. Rather than exploring the amazing facts that science, mathematics, and reason have revealed to us, this work studies what science, mathematics, and reason tell us cannot be revealed. In The Outer Limits of Reason, Noson Yanofsky considers what cannot be predicted, described, or known, and what will never be understood. He discusses the limitations of computers, physics, logic, and our own intuitions about the world—including our ideas about space, time, and motion, and the complex relationship between the knower and the known. Yanofsky describes simple tasks that would take computers trillions of centuries to complete and other problems that computers can never solve: • perfectly formed English sentences that make no sense • different levels of infinity • the bizarre world of the quantum • the relevance of relativity theory • the causes of chaos theory • math problems that cannot be solved by normal means • statements that are true but cannot be proven Moving from the concrete to the abstract, from problems of everyday language to straightforward philosophical questions to the formalities of physics and mathematics, Yanofsky demonstrates a myriad of unsolvable problems and paradoxes. Exploring the various limitations of our knowledge, he shows that many of these limitations have a similar pattern and that by investigating these patterns, we can better understand the structure and limitations of reason itself. Yanofsky even attempts to look beyond the borders of reason to see what, if anything, is out there.
Download or read book Radiation and Reason written by Wade Allison and published by YPD-BOOKS. This book was released on 2009 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a positive and accessible account of the effect of radiation on life that brings good news for the future of mankind. For more than half a century the view that radiation represents an extreme hazard has been accepted. This book challenges that view by facing the question "How dangerous is ionising radiation?" Briefly the answer is that radiation is about a thousand times less hazardous than suggested by current safety standards. For many this will come as a surprise and then quickly raise a second question "Why are people so worried about radiation?" This is the out-of-date result of Cold War politics combined with a concern about radiation that was appropriate in an earlier age when the scientific understanding was limited. In the book these answers are explained in accessible language and related directly to modern scientific evidence and understanding, for instance the high levels of radiation used to the benefit of health in every major hospital. Four facts illustrate the need for a new understanding. 1. The radiation levels in the nuclear waste storage hall at Sellafield, UK are so low (1 micro-sievert per hour) that anyone would have to stay there for a million hours to receive the same dose that any patient on a course of radiotherapy treatment receives to their healthy tissue in a single day (1 sievert or gray). 2. The radiation dose experienced by the survivors of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs caused 0.6% to die of radiation-induced cancer between 1950 and 2000, that is about 1/20 of the chance of dying of cancer anyway and less than the chance of being killed on US highways in that period. 3. The wildlife at Chernobyl today is reported to be thriving, despite being radioactive. 4. The mortality of UK radiation workers before age 85 from all cancers is 15-20% lower than comparable groups. The case for a complete change in attitude towards radiation safety is unrelated to the effects of climate change. But the realisation that radiation and nuclear energy are much safer than is usually supposed is of extreme importance to the current discussion of alternatives to fossil fuels and their relative costs.
Download or read book Faith Science and Reason written by Christopher T. Baglow and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Another Reason written by Gyan Prakash and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-16 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Another Reason is a bold and innovative study of the intimate relationship between science, colonialism, and the modern nation. Gyan Prakash, one of the most influential historians of India writing today, explores in fresh and unexpected ways the complexities, contradictions, and profound importance of this relationship in the history of the subcontinent. He reveals how science served simultaneously as an instrument of empire and as a symbol of liberty, progress, and universal reason--and how, in playing these dramatically different roles, it was crucial to the emergence of the modern nation. Prakash ranges over two hundred years of Indian history, from the early days of British rule to the dawn of the postcolonial era. He begins by taking us into colonial museums and exhibitions, where Indian arts, crafts, plants, animals, and even people were categorized, labeled, and displayed in the name of science. He shows how science gave the British the means to build railways, canals, and bridges, to transform agriculture and the treatment of disease, to reconstruct India's economy, and to transfigure India's intellectual life--all to create a stable, rationalized, and profitable colony under British domination. But Prakash points out that science also represented freedom of thought and that for the British to use it to practice despotism was a deeply contradictory enterprise. Seizing on this contradiction, many of the colonized elite began to seek parallels and precedents for scientific thought in India's own intellectual history, creating a hybrid form of knowledge that combined western ideas with local cultural and religious understanding. Their work disrupted accepted notions of colonizer versus colonized, civilized versus savage, modern versus traditional, and created a form of modernity that was at once western and indigenous. Throughout, Prakash draws on major and minor figures on both sides of the colonial divide, including Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, the nationalist historian and novelist Romesh Chunder Dutt, Prafulla Chandra Ray (author of A History of Hindu Chemistry), Rudyard Kipling, Lord Dalhousie, and John Stuart Mill. With its deft combination of rich historical detail and vigorous new arguments and interpretations, Another Reason will recast how we understand the contradictory and colonial genealogy of the modern nation.
Download or read book Reason and the Search for Knowledge written by D. Shapere and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An impressive characteristic of Dudley Shapere's studies in the philosophy of the sciences has been his dogged reasonableness. He sorts things out, with logical care and mastery of the materials, and with an epistemological curiosity for the historical happenings which is both critical and respectful. Science changes, and the philosopher had better not link philosophical standards too tightly to either the latest orthodox or the provocative up start in scientific fashions; and yet, as critic, the philosopher must not only master the sciences but also explicate their meanings, not those of a cognitive never-never land. Neither dreamer nor pedant, Professor Shapere has been able to practice the modern empiricist's exercises with the sober and stimulat ing results shown in this volume: he sees that he can be faithful to philosoph ical analysis, engage in the boldest 'rational reconstruction' of theories and experimental measurements, and faithful too, empirically faithful we may say, to both the direct super-highways and the winding pathways of conceptual evolutions and metaphysical revolutions. Not least, Shapere listens! To Einstein and Calileo of course, but to the workings of the engineers and the scientific apprentices too, and to the various philosophers, now and of old, who have also worked to make sense of what has been learned and how that has happened and where we might go wrong.
Download or read book Betrayal of Science and Reason written by Paul R. Ehrlich and published by . This book was released on 1996-08 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite widespread public support for environmental protection, a backlash against environmental policies is developing. Fueled by outright distortions of fact and disregard for the methodology of science, this backlash appears as an outpouring of seemingly authoritative opinions by so-called experts in books, articles, and appearances on television and radio that greatly distort what is or is not known by environmental scientists. Through relentless repetition, the flood of anti-environmental sentiment has acquired an unfortunate aura of credibility, and is now threatening to undermine thirty years of progress in defining, understanding, and seeking solutions to global environmental problems. In this hard-hitting and timely book, world-renowned scientists and writers Paul R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich speak out against what they call the "brownlash." Brownlash rhetoric, created by public relations spokespersons and a few dissident scientists, is a deliberate misstatement of scientific findings designed to support an anti-environmental world view and political agenda. As such, it is deeply disturbing to environmental scientists across the country. The agenda of brownlash proponents is rarely revealed, and the confusion and distraction its rhetoric creates among policymakers and the public prolong an already difficult search for realistic and equitable solutions to global environmental problems. In Betrayal of Science and Reason, the Ehrlichs explain clearly and with scientific objectivity the empirical findings behind environmental issues including population growth, desertification, food production, global warming, ozone depletion, acid rain, and biodiversity loss. They systematically debunk revisionist "truths" such as: population growth does not cause environmental damage, and may even be beneficial humanity is on the verge of abolishing hunger; food scarcity is a local or regional problem and is not indicative of overpopulation there is no extinction crisis natural resources are superabundant, if not infinite global warming and acid rain are not serious threats to humanity stratospheric ozone depletion is a hoax risks posed by toxic substances are vastly exaggerated The Ehrlichs counter the erroneous information and misrepresentation put forth by the brownlash, presenting accurate scientific information about current environmental threats that can be used to evaluate critically and respond to the commentary of the brownlash. They include important background material on how science works and provide extensive references to pertinent scientific literature. In addition, they discuss how scientists can speak out on matters of societal urgency yet retain scientific integrity and the support of the scientific community. Betrayal of Science and Reason is an eye-opening look at current environmental problems and the fundamental importance of the scientific process in solving them. It presents unique insight into the sources and implications of anti-environmental rhetoric, and provides readers with a valuable means of understanding and refuting the feel-good fables that constitute the brownlash.
Download or read book Suffering For Science written by Rebecca Herzig and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2005-10-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From gruesome self-experimentation to exhausting theoretical calculations, stories abound of scientists willfully surrendering health, well-being, and personal interests for the sake of their work. What accounts for the prevalence of this coupling of knowledge and pain-and for the peculiar assumption that science requires such suffering? In this lucid and absorbing history, Rebecca M. Herzig explores the rise of an ethic of "self-sacrifice" in American science. Delving into some of the more bewildering practices of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, she describes when and how science-the supposed standard of all things judicious and disinterested-came to rely on an enthralled investigator willing to embrace toil, danger, and even lethal dismemberment. With attention to shifting racial, sexual, and transnational politics, Herzig examines the suffering scientist as a way to understand the rapid transformation of American life between the Civil War and World War I.3 Suffering for Science reveals more than the passion evident in many scientific vocations; it also illuminates a nation's changing understandings of the purposes of suffering, the limits of reason, and the nature of freedom in the aftermath of slavery.
Download or read book Screams of Reason written by David J. Skal and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 1998 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of "Hollywood Gothic" and "The Monster Show" comes the definitive book on the men in white coats who haunt our technological dreams and nightmares: mad scientists. 100 photos. College lectures.
Download or read book Defending Science within Reason written by Susan Haack and published by . This book was released on 2007-01 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweeping in scope, penetrating in analysis, and generously illustrated with examples from the history of science, this new and original approach to familiar questions about scientific evidence and method tackles vital questions about science and its place in society. Avoiding the twin pitfalls of scientism and cynicism, noted philosopher Susan Haack argues that, fallible and flawed as they are, the natural sciences have been among the most successful of human enterprises-valuable not only for the vast, interlocking body of knowledge they have discovered, and not only for the technological advances that have improved our lives, but as a manifestation of the human talent for inquiry at its imperfect but sometimes remarkable best. This wide-ranging, trenchant, and illuminating book explores the complexities of scientific evidence, and the multifarious ways in which the sciences have refined and amplified the methods of everyday empirical inquiry; articulates the ways in which the social sciences are like the natural sciences, and the ways in which they are different; disentangles the confusions of radical rhetoricians and cynical sociologists of science; exposes the evasions of apologists for religious resistance to scientific advances; weighs the benefits and the dangers of technology; tracks the efforts of the legal system to make the best use of scientific testimony; and tackles predictions of the eventual culmination, or annihilation, of the scientific enterprise. Writing with verve and wry humor, in a witty, direct, and accessible style, Haack takes readers beyond the "Science Wars" to a balanced understanding of the value, and the limitations, of the scientific enterprise.
Download or read book The Limits of Scientific Reason written by John McIntyre and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-27 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critically and comprehensively examining the works of Habermas and Foucault, two giants of 20th century continental philosophy, this book illuminates the effects of scientific reason as it migrates from its specialized institutions into society. It explores how science permeates shared human consciousness, to produce effects that ripple through the entire social body to restructure relations between persons, discourses, institutions, and power in ways which we are barely conscious of. The book shows how science, through its entwinement with power, discourses, and practices, presents certain social arrangements as natural and certain courses of action as beyond question. By arguing for a non-reductive, liberal scientific naturalism that sees science as one form of rationality amongst others, it opens possibilities for thought and action beyond scientific knowledge. Examining the shifting relations between science and other social institutions, discourses and power, the book addresses the narrowing of freedom by the instrumental modes of thinking that accompany scientific and technological change. McIntyre simultaneously raises the question of the good life and the question of a philosophical critique both directed towards science and, at the same time, shaped by, and responsive to it. By analysing the works of Foucault and Habermas in terms of their social, political, and historical contexts it reveals the two thinkers as linked by a commitment to the Enlightenment tradition and its emancipatory telos. The significant differences between the two are seen to result from Foucault’s radicalization of this tradition, a radicalization which is, at the same time, implicit within the Enlightenment project itself.
Download or read book Reinventing the Sacred written by Stuart A Kauffman and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2008-01-10 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Consider the woven integrated complexity of a living cell after 3.8 billion years of evolution. Is it more awe-inspiring to suppose that a transcendent God fashioned the cell, or to consider that the living organism was created by the evolving biosphere? As the eminent complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman explains in this ambitious and groundbreaking new book, people who do not believe in God have largely lost their sense of the sacred and the deep human legitimacy of our inherited spirituality. For those who believe in a Creator God, no science will ever disprove that belief. In Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman argues that the science of complexity provides a way to move beyond reductionist science to something new: a unified culture where we see God in the creativity of the universe, biosphere, and humanity. Kauffman explains that the ceaseless natural creativity of the world can be a profound source of meaning, wonder, and further grounding of our place in the universe. His theory carries with it a new ethic for an emerging civilization and a reinterpretation of the divine. He asserts that we are impelled by the imperative of life itself to live with faith and courage-and the fact that we do so is indeed sublime. Reinventing the Sacred will change the way we all think about the evolution of humanity, the universe, faith, and reason.
