Download or read book Explanation and Its Limits written by Dudley Knowles and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of new essays explores the nature of explanation and causality. It provides a stimulating and wide ranging debate on one of the central issues that has concerned philosophers and scientists alike--the epistemological nature of their enquiries. The volume not only sheds light on some of the general questions involved, but also addresses specific problems involved in explanation in different fields--physics, biology, psychology and the social sciences. Explanation and its Limits is an up-to-date, sharply focused and comprehensive review for all philosophers, scientists and social scientists interested in methodology.

Download or read book Space Time and the Limits of Human Understanding written by Shyam Wuppuluri and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-12-01 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compendium of essays, some of the world’s leading thinkers discuss their conceptions of space and time, as viewed through the lens of their own discipline. With an epilogue on the limits of human understanding, this volume hosts contributions from six or more diverse fields. It presumes only rudimentary background knowledge on the part of the reader. Time and again, through the prism of intellect, humans have tried to diffract reality into various distinct, yet seamless, atomic, yet holistic, independent, yet interrelated disciplines and have attempted to study it contextually. Philosophers debate the paradoxes, or engage in meditations, dialogues and reflections on the content and nature of space and time. Physicists, too, have been trying to mold space and time to fit their notions concerning micro- and macro-worlds. Mathematicians focus on the abstract aspects of space, time and measurement. While cognitive scientists ponder over the perceptual and experiential facets of our consciousness of space and time, computer scientists theoretically and practically try to optimize the space-time complexities in storing and retrieving data/information. The list is never-ending. Linguists, logicians, artists, evolutionary biologists, geographers etc., all are trying to weave a web of understanding around the same duo. However, our endeavour into a world of such endless imagination is restrained by intellectual dilemmas such as: Can humans comprehend everything? Are there any limits? Can finite thought fathom infinity? We have sought far and wide among the best minds to furnish articles that provide an overview of the above topics. We hope that, through this journey, a symphony of patterns and tapestry of intuitions will emerge, providing the reader with insights into the questions: What is Space? What is Time? Chapter [15] of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.

Download or read book The Limits of Critique written by Rita Felski and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do critics feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What is the rationale for their conviction that language is always withholding some important truth, that the critic's task is to unearth what is unsaid, naturalized, or repressed? These are the features of critique, a mode of thought that thoroughly dominates academic criticism. In this book, Rita Felski brilliantly exposes critique's more troubling qualities and proposes alternatives to it. Critique, she argues, is not just a method but also a sensibility--one best captured by Paul Ricoeur's phrase "the hermeneutics of suspicion." As the characteristic affect of critique, suspicion, Felski shows, helps us understand critique's seductions and limitations. The questions that Felski poses about critique have implications well beyond intramural debates among literary scholars. Literary studies, says Felski, is facing a legitimation crisis thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves the field struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? For Felski, the tendencies to make literary texts the object of suspicious reading or, conversely, impute to them qualities of critique, forecloses too many other possibilities. Felski offers an alternative model that she calls "postcritical reading." Rather than looking behind the text for its hidden causes, conditions, and motives, she suggests that literary scholars place themselves in front of a text, reflecting on what it calls forth and makes possible. Here Felski enlists the work of Bruno Latour to rethink reading as a co-production between actors, rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking. As a scholar with an abiding respect for theory who has long deployed elements of critique in her own work, Felski is able to provide an insider's account of critique's limits and alternatives that will resonate widely in the humanities.

Download or read book The Limits of Social Science written by Martyn Hammersley and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2014-06-16 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What forms of knowledge can social science claim to produce? Does it employ causal analysis, and if so what does this entail? What role should values play in the work of social scientists? These are the questions addressed in this book. They are closely interrelated, and the answers offered here challenge many currently prevailing assumptions. They carry implications both for research practice, quantitative or qualitative, and for the public claims that social scientists make about the value of their work. The arguments underpinning this challenge to conventional wisdom are laid out in detail in the first half of the book. In later chapters their implications are explored for two substantive areas of intrinsic importance: the study of social mobility and educational inequalities; and explanations for urban riots, notably those that took place in London and other English cities in the summer of 2011.

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 Space Perception and the Philosophy of Science written by Patrick A. Heelan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-07-28 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the phenomenological tradition in the philosophy of science and philosophy of nature, Patrick Heelan concludes that perception is a cognitive, world-building act, and is therefore never absolute or finished.

Download or read book What Money Can t Buy written by Michael J. Sandel and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2012-04-24 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Should we pay children to read books or to get good grades? Should we allow corporations to pay for the right to pollute the atmosphere? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars? Auctioning admission to elite universities? Selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? In What Money Can't Buy, Michael J. Sandel takes on one of the biggest ethical questions of our time: Is there something wrong with a world in which everything is for sale? If so, how can we prevent market values from reaching into spheres of life where they don't belong? What are the moral limits of markets? In recent decades, market values have crowded out nonmarket norms in almost every aspect of life—medicine, education, government, law, art, sports, even family life and personal relations. Without quite realizing it, Sandel argues, we have drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. Is this where we want to be?In his New York Times bestseller Justice, Sandel showed himself to be a master at illuminating, with clarity and verve, the hard moral questions we confront in our everyday lives. Now, in What Money Can't Buy, he provokes an essential discussion that we, in our market-driven age, need to have: What is the proper role of markets in a democratic society—and how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets don't honor and that money can't buy?

Download or read book Explanation written by Giora Hon and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 348 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For some years we have been conducting at the University of Haifa an interdisciplinary seminar on explanation in philosophy and psychology. We habitually begin the seminar with some philosophical reflections on explanation - an analysis of the concept and its metaphysical underpinnings. We discuss the various models and proceed to examine explanation in the setting of psychology. Thus, from the outset, we have focused not only on the concept itself but also on its application. The objective that we have set for the seminar, attended by students from both departments, Philosophy and Psychology, has been a critical understanding of the concept of explanation, its use and limitations. We were keen on deepening our understanding of the concept and on exploring its applications in fields of knowledge other than psychology. This was the motivation for convening an international conference on explanation and its application. The conference took place in the spring of 1998 under the auspices of the University of Haifa. The present book is the fruit of this meeting. The reader should note that the second part of the Introduction presents a detailed analytical account of the book. We hope that this overview will facilitate efficient use of the book by directing the reader's attention to those issues that might be of interest to him or her.

Download or read book Overcriminalization written by Douglas Husak and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-01-08 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The United States today suffers from too much criminal law and too much punishment. Husak describes the phenomena in some detail and explores their relation, and why these trends produce massive injustice. His primary goal is to defend a set of constraints that limit the authority of states to enact and enforce penal offenses. The book urges the weight and relevance of this topic in the real world, and notes that most Anglo-American legal philosophers have neglected it. Husak's secondary goal is to situate this endeavor in criminal theory as traditionally construed. He argues that many of the resources to reduce the size and scope of the criminal law can be derived from within the criminal law itself-even though these resources have not been used explicitly for this purpose. Additional constraints emerge from a political view about the conditions under which important rights such as the right implicated by punishment-may be infringed. When conjoined, these constraints produce what Husak calls a minimalist theory of criminal liability. Husak applies these constraints to a handful of examples-most notably, to the justifiability of drug proscriptions.

Download or read book Fact and Method written by Richard W. Miller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 628 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this bold work, of broad scope and rich erudition, Richard Miller sets out to reorient the philosophy of science. By questioning both positivism and its leading critics, he develops new solutions to the most urgent problems about justification, explanation, and truth. Using a wealth of examples from both the natural and the social sciences, Fact and Method applies the new account of scientific reason to specific questions of method in virtually every field of inquiry, including biology, physics, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, and literary theory. Explicit and up-to-date analysis of leading alternative views and a wealth of examples make it an ideal introduction to the philosophy of science, as well as a powerful attempt to change the field. Like the works of Hempel, Reichenbach, and Nagel in an earlier generation, it will challenge, instruct, and help anyone with an interest in science and its limits. For the past quarter-century, the philosophy of science has been in a crisis brought on by the failure of the positivist project of resolving all basic methodological questions by applying absolutely general rules, valid for all fields at all times. Professor Miller presents a new view in which what counts as an explanation, a cause, a confirming test, or a compelling case for the existence of an unobservable is determined by frameworks of specific substantive principles, rationally adopted in the light of the actual history of inquiry. While the history of science has usually been the material for relativism, Professor Miller uses arguments of Darwin, Newton, Einstein, Galileo, and others both to undermine positivist conceptions of rationality and to support the positivists' optimism that important theoretical findings are often justifiable from all reasonable perspectives.

Download or read book The Last Word written by Thomas Nagel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2001-11-01 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If there is such a thing as reason, it has to be universal. Reason must reflect objective principles whose validity is independent of our point of view--principles that anyone with enough intelligence ought to be able to recognize as correct. But this generality of reason is what relativists and subjectivists deny in ever-increasing numbers. And such subjectivism is not just an inconsequential intellectual flourish or badge of theoretical chic. It is exploited to deflect argument and to belittle the pretensions of the arguments of others. The continuing spread of this relativistic way of thinking threatens to make public discourse increasingly difficult and to exacerbate the deep divisions of our society. In The Last Word, Thomas Nagel, one of the most influential philosophers writing in English, presents a sustained defense of reason against the attacks of subjectivism, delivering systematic rebuttals of relativistic claims with respect to language, logic, science, and ethics. He shows that the last word in disputes about the objective validity of any form of thought must lie in some unqualified thoughts about how things are--thoughts that we cannot regard from outside as mere psychological dispositions.

Download or read book The Nature of Explanation written by Peter Achinstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1985-10-31 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a new approach to scientific explanation, this book focuses initially on the explaining act itself. From that act, a "product" emerges: an explanation. To understand what that product is, as well as how it can be evaluated in the sciences, reference must be made to the concept of the explaining act. Following an account of the explaining act, its product, and the evaluation of explanations, the theory is brought to bear on these issues: Why have the standard models of scientific explanation been unsuccessful, and can there be a model of the type sought? What is causal explanation, and must explanation in the sciences be causal? What is a functional explanation? The "illocutionary" theory of explanation developed at the outset is used in discussing these issues, and contrasting philosophical viewpoints are assessed.

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 The Meaning and Explanation of the Glorious Qur an written by Muhammad Saed Abdul-Rahman and published by MSA Publication Limited. This book was released on 2008-02-01 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is volume five of ten volumes. Our mission is to gather in one place, for the English-speaking public, all relevant information needed to make the Qur'an more understandable and easier to study. This book tries to do this by providing the following: 1. The Arabic Text for those who are able to read Arabic 2. Transliteration of the Arabic text for those who are unable to read the Arabic script. This will give them a sample of the sound of the Qur'an, which they could not otherwise comprehend from reading the English meaning. 3. The meaning of the qur'an (translated by Dr. Muhammad Taqi-ud-Din Al-Hilali, Ph.D. and Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan) 4. Background introductions by two famous Islamic scholars, Maududi and Ibn Kathir 5. Explanation (abridged Tafsir) by Ibn Kathir (translated by Safi-ur-Rahman al-Mubarakpuri) We hope that by doing this an ordinary English-speaker will be able to pick up a copy of this book and study and comprehend The Glorious Qur'an in a way that is acceptable to the understanding of the Rightly-guided Muslim Ummah (Community).

Download or read book Explanation Causation and Deduction written by Fred Wilson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The purpose of this essay is to defend the deductive-nomological model of explanation against a number of criticisms that have been made of it. It has traditionally been thought that scientific explanations were causal and that scientific explanations involved deduction from laws. In recent years, however, this three-fold identity has been challenged: there are, it is argued, causal explanations that are not scientific, scientific explanations that are not deductive, deductions from laws that are neither causal explanations nor scientific explanations, and causal explanations that involve no deductions from laws. The aim of the present essay is to defend the traditional identities, and to show that the more recent attempts at invalidating them fail in their object. More specifically, this essay argues that a Humean version of the deductive-nomological model of explanation can be defended as (1) the correct account of scientific explanation of individual facts and processes, and as (2) the correct account of causal explanations of individual facts and processes. The deductive-nomological model holds that to explain an event E, say that a is G, one must find some initial conditions C, say that a is F, and a law or theory T such that T and C jointly entail E, and both are essential to the deduction.

Download or read book Explanation in the Sciences written by Émile Meyerson and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 650 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Emile Meyerson's writings on the philosophy of science are a rich source of ideas and information concerning many philosophical and historical aspects of the development of modem science. Meyerson's works are not widely read or cited today by philosophers or even philosophers of science, in part because they have long been out of print and are often not available even in research libraries. There are additional chevaux de !rise for all but the hardiest scholars: Meyerson's books are written in French (and do not all exist in English versions) and deal with the subject matter of science - ideas or concepts, laws or principles, theories - and epis temological questions rather than today's more fashionable topics of the social matrix and external influences on science with the concomitant neglect of the intellectual content of science. Born in Lublin, Poland, in 1859, Meyerson received most of his education in Germany, where he studied from the age of 12 to 23, preparing himself for a career in chemistry. ! He moved to Paris in 1882, where he began a career as an industrial chemist. Changing his profession, he then worked for a time as the foreign news editor of the HAVAS News Agency in Paris. In 1898 he joined the agency established by Edmond Rothschild that had as its purpose the settling of Jews in Palestine and became the Director of the Jewish Colonization Association for Europe and Asia Minor. These activities represent Meyerson's formal career.

Download or read book Gilles Deleuze s Difference and Repetition written by James Williams and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A revised, expanded and fully up-to-date critical introduction to Deleuze's most important work of philosophyBy critically analysing Deleuze's methods, principles and arguments, James Williams helps readers to engage with the revolutionary core of Deleuze's philosophy and take up positions for or against its most innovative and controversial ideas.