Download or read book Suggested Answers to Philosophical Puzzles written by Anguel S. Stefanov and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2022-10-06 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Questions about how we know the world and how it appears according to our knowledge have been of significant interest from ancient times up to the present day. Philosophy and science go hand-in-hand in order to give answers to these fundamental questions. Some aspects of these have been turned into philosophical problems, which provoke a long-lasting and vivid discussion. This book provides answers to such philosophical problems on the basis of a sound and clearly presented argumentation. It will provoke the interest of a broad reading public across the globe, including philosophers, scientists, university students, and inquisitive readers.
Download or read book Reason and the Rule of Faith written by Christopher J. Thompson and published by University Press of America. This book was released on 2010-11-04 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by the Catholic intellectual tradition, these essays are the fruit of a series of seminars sponsored by the Center for Catholic Studies and the Saint Paul Seminary School of Divinity at the University of St. Thomas in Saint Paul, Minnesota. With a special focus on the works of John Paul II (especially Veritatis Splendor and Fides et Ratio), the authors bring to light a host of considerations that set the work of his pontificate within the illuminating light of the living intellectual tradition.
Download or read book Philosophical Mysteries written by Stephen David Ross and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 1981-06-30 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This is my major thesis. Mystery is inherent in both the nature of things and the nature of rationality. I will sustain this thesis by a review of some of the central issues of philosophy to elucidate their mysterious qualities. More important, however, I will develop in detail an explanation of mystery and trace some of its important ramifications." "I will argue that an ordinal metaphysics, with its associated theory of query, provides an account of mystery that no other theory can provide. "While the theory presented here is a theory of philosophical mystery, it has fundamental implications for all branches of knowledge, including the physical and social sciences. "In short, I speak against a simplistic view of the world and of experience based on a simplistic and narrow conception of understanding and rationality. Mystery calls not for veneration and awe, but for a full and complex activity of mind, broaching all established conditions in its pursuit of answers....Reason is fulfilled as completely in mysteries which persevere throughout our efforts to resolve them as in mysteries which are resolved and dissipated, passing into new questions to which we must find new answers, in an unterminating process of rational interrogation." — From the Preface by Stephen David Ross
Download or read book Science Truth And Meaning From Wonder To Understanding written by Benjamin L J Webb and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2022-04-07 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Science, Truth, and Meaning presents a scientific and philosophical examination of our place in the world. It also celebrates how diverse, scientific knowledge is interconnected and reducible to common foundations.The book focuses on aspects of scientific truth that relate to our understanding of reality, and confronts whether truth is absolute or relative to what we are. Hence, it assesses the meaning of the scientific deductions we have made and how they have profoundly influenced our conception of life and existence.The subtitle is 'From Wonder to Understanding', which is a paraphrased quote from Einstein, who said that the search for scientific truth is ' ... a continual flight from wonder to understanding'.In addressing the goal of advancing our understanding of our place in the world, this book also reveals the development and details of diverse sciences, their connections and achievements, and that while perhaps the same fundamental questions exist, they are seen in the light of an ever-refined scientific perspective on reality.Why the book is needed: many popular science books have been written, aimed at different levels of subject expertise, and nearly all treat their specific subject in isolation. Few attempt to link different sciences to their common foundations, and those that do are written by physicists. Since human knowledge is derived by, and relates to, the biological organism that human beings are, then such a book written from a biological perspective represents a novel perspective on the integration of science, and addresses new questions. This is such a book.Impressive aspects: the depth, breadth, consistency, and clarity of the work.
Download or read book An Anthology of Essays by Ashraf written by Mirza Iqbal Ashraf and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2022-10-31 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An Anthology of Essays by Ashraf, is a rich and Intelligent tapestry of thoughts, which are woven in the dimension of time depicting the unity of human experience that every person has within himself/herself the entire human condition. Even if every thought appears as an afterthought, Ashraf has viewed and judged them in the present. It stays in the mind and as a collection of treatises it shares with others the knowledge argued in this work of landmark discerning and entertaining writing. This book is a work of vibrant literary form of essay writing representing the robust tradition of essay writing beginning from Classical Greek period, Ancient Rome, and the Golden Age of the Arabs of Baghdad, Cordova, and Cairo, right up to the modern age of artificial intelligence. In its Part -1, there are essays on the subjects of philosophy, science, human consciousness, artificial intelligence, humanities, origin of democracy, on war and peace. Part-2 contains essays about the world of Islam’s golden age when the knowledge of scientific researches and discoveries by the Muslims was transmitted to the Europeans laying the foundation of progression of knowledge in the Western world.
Download or read book The Nature of Philosophical Problems written by John Kekes and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2014-05-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical, context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.
Download or read book Method and Metaphysics written by Jonathan Barnes and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 590 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Method and Metaphysics presents twenty-six essays in ancient philosophy by Jonathan Barnes, one of the most admired and influential scholars of his generation. The essays span four decades of his career, and are drawn from a wide variety of sources: many of them will be relatively unknown even to specialists in ancient philosophy. Several essays are now translated from the original French and made available in English for the first time; others have been substantially revised for republication here. The volume opens with eight essays about the interpretation of ancient philosophical texts, and about the relationship between philosophy and its history. The next five essays examine the methods of ancient philosophers. The third section comprises thirteen essays about metaphysical topics, from the Presocratics to the late Platonists. This collection will be a rich feast for students and scholars of ancient philosophy.
Download or read book Modern Science Fiction A Critical Analysis written by James Gunn and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2018-06-07 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: James Gunn--one of the founding figures of science fiction scholarship and teaching--wrote in 1951 what is likely the first master's thesis on modern science fiction. Portions were in the short-lived pulp magazine Dynamic but it has otherwise remained unavailable. Here in its first full publication, the thesis explores many of the classic Golden Age stories of the 1940s and the critical perspective that informed Gunn's essential genre history Alternate Worlds and his anthology series The Road to Science Fiction. The editor's introduction and commentary show the historical significance of Gunn's work and its relevance to today's science fiction studies.
Download or read book Mass Terms Some Philosophical Problems written by Francis Jeffrey Pelletier and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2007-11-08 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: I. MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of mass terms are easy to come by. 'Water', 'smoke', 'gold', etc. , differ in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from count terms such as 'man', 'star', 'wastebasket', etc. Syntactically, it seems, mass terms do, but singular count terms do not, admit the quantifier phrases 'much', 'an amount of', 'a little', etc. The typical indefinite article for them is 'some' (unstressed)!, and this article cannot be used with singular count terms. Count terms, but not mass terms, use the quantifiers 'each', 'every', 'some', 'few', 'many'; and they use 'a(n)' as the indefinite article. They can, unlike the mass terms, take numerals as prefixes. Mass terms seem not to have a plural. Semantically, philo sophers have characterized count terms as denoting (classes of?) indi vidual objects, whereas what mass terms denote are cumulative and dissective. (That is, a mass term is supposed to be true of any sum of things (stuff) it is true of, and true of any part of anything of which it is true). Pragmatically, it seems that speakers use count terms when they wish to refer to individual objects, or when they wish to reidentify a particular already introduced into discoursc. Given a "space appropriate" to a count term C, it makes sense to ask how many C's there are in that space.
Download or read book Collected Essays 1929 1968 written by Gilbert Ryle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-06-16 with total page 816 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gilbert Ryle was one of the most important and yet misunderstood philosophers of the Twentieth Century. Long unavailable, Collected Essays 1929-1968: Collected Papers Volume 2 stands as testament to the astonishing breadth of Ryle’s philosophical concerns. This volume showcases Ryle’s deep interest in the notion of thinking and contains many of his major pieces, including his classic essays ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’, ‘Philosophical Arguments’, ‘Systematically Misleading Expressions’, and ‘A Puzzling Element in the Notion of Thinking’. He ranges over an astonishing number of topics, including feelings, pleasure, sensation, forgetting and concepts and in so doing hones his own philosophical stance, steering a careful path between behaviourism and Cartesianism. Together with the Collected Papers Volume 1 and the new edition of The Concept of Mind, these outstanding essays represent the very best of Ryle’s work. Each volume contains a substantial preface by Julia Tanney, and both are essential reading for any student of twentieth-century philosophies of mind and language. Gilbert Ryle (1900 -1976) was Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics and Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford, an editor of Mind, and a president of the Aristotelian Society. Julia Tanney is Senior Lectuer at the University of Kent, and has held visiting positions at the University of Picardie and Paris-Sorbonne.
Download or read book A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities written by Roy A. Sorensen and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Cabinet of Philosophical Curiosities is a collection of puzzles, paradoxes, riddles, and miscellaneous logic problems. Depending on taste, one can partake of a puzzle, a poem, a proof, or a pun.
Download or read book Transition to Neo Confucianism written by Anne D. Birdwhistell and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1989-08-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sung Neo-Confucian synthesis is one of the two great formative periods in the history of Confucianism. Shao Yung (1011-77) was a key contributor to this synthesis, and this study attempts to make understandable the complex and highly theoretical thought of a philosopher who has been, for the most part, misunderstood for a thousand years. It is the first full-length study in any language of Shao Yung's philosophy. Using an explicit metaphilosophical approach, the author examines the implicit and assumed aspects of Shao Yung's thought and shows how it makes sense to view his philosophy as an explanatory theory. Shao Yung explained all kinds of change and activity in the universe with six fundamental concepts that he applied to three realms of reality: subsensorial "matter," the phenomenal world of human experience, and the theoretical realm of symbols. The author also analyzes the place of the sage in Shao's philosophy. Not only would the sage restore political and moral unity in society, but through his special kind of knowing he also would restore cosmological unity. Shao's recognition that the perceiver had a critical role in making and shaping reality led to his ideal of the sage as the perfect knower. Utilizing Shao's own device of a moving observational viewpoint, the study concludes with an examination of the divergent interpretations of Shao's philosophy from the eleventh to the twentieth century. Because Shao took very seriously numerological aspects of Chinese thought that are often greatly misunderstood in the West (e.g., the I Ching), the study is also a very good introduction to the epistemological implications of an important strand of all traditional Chinese philosophical thought.
Download or read book Debates in Modern Philosophy written by Stewart Duncan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-09-13 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Debates in Modern Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses provides an in-depth, engaging introduction to important issues in modern philosophy. It presents 13 key interpretive debates to students, and ranges in coverage from Descartes' Meditations to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Debates include: Did Descartes have a developed and consistent view about how the mind interacts with the body? Was Leibniz an idealist, or did he believe in corporeal substances? What is Locke's theory of personal identity? Could there be a Berkeleian metaphysics without God? Did Hume believe in causal powers? What is Kant's transcendental idealism? Each of the thirteen debates consists of a well known article or book chapter from a living philosopher, followed by a new response from a different scholar, specially commissioned for this volume. Every debate is prefaced by an introduction written for those coming upon the debates for the first time and followed by an annotated list for further reading. The volume starts with an introduction that explains the importance and relevance of the modern period and its key debates to philosophy and ends with a glossary that covers terms from both the modern period and the study of the history of philosophy in general. Debates in Modern Philosophy will help students evaluate different interpretations of key texts from modern philosophy, and provide a model for constructing their own positions in these debates.
Download or read book Analysis of Logic and Sanity written by Andreas Sofroniou and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2017 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Through the ages man has been pre-occupied with logic, sanity and moral standards, probably more than other concepts. Societies through their various stages of evolution varied the theme with distinct differences in their demands on standards, dogmas, and regional culture. These variations of morality place a big demand on science. Individuals from different cultures, social groups, of known and unknown social norms may occupy the practitioner's couch; the significance of this being the understanding demanded of the therapist. People live in groups and humans choose to live in groups, simply for what they can get out of society. Those who choose to live in solitude become recluse in monasteries and nunneries, or become thinkers in isolation high up in mountains. The causation theory regarding the logic and sanity analysis in this book includes the seemingly necessary connection between one event (the cause) and the other (the effect).
Download or read book Isaiah Berlin and his Philosophical Contemporaries written by Johnny Lyons and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book sets out to identify the nature and implications of a proper understanding of pluralism in a original and illuminating way. Isaiah Berlin believed that a recognition of pluralism is vital to a free, decent and civilised society. By looking below at the often neglected foundations of Berlin’s celebrated account of moral pluralism, Lyons reveals the more philosophically profound aspects of his undogmatic and humanistic liberal vision. He achieves this by comparing Berlin’s core ideas with those of several of his most distinguished philosophical contemporaries, an exercise which yields not only a deeper grasp of Berlin and several major twentieth-century thinkers, principally A. J. Ayer, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, Bernard Williams and Quentin Skinner, but, more broadly, a keener appreciation of the power of history and philosophy to help us make sense of our predicament.
Download or read book Linguistic Philosophy written by Garth Hallett and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2008-02-28 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the role language plays in the relationship between reality and utterance.
Download or read book Philosophy for Everyone written by Matthew Chrisman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-08-29 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject. Key topics and their areas of focus include: Epistemology - what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it; Philosophy of Science - foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice; Philosophy of Mind - what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained; Moral Philosophy - the nature of our moral judgements and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences, and; Metaphysics - fundamental conceptual questions about the nature of reality. Designed to be used on the corresponding Introduction to Philosophy online course offered by The University of Edinburgh, this book is also highly recommended for anyone looking for a short overview of this fascinating discipline.
