Philosophy Social Aspects category: 5622 books
Diamond & the Star
An Exploration of Their Symbolic Meaning in an Insecure Age
Language: English
Release Date: June 1, 2009
Describing the use of symbols in philosophy and religion, this book connects the Taoist symbol of the self—the diamond body—to the tetrahedron, as well as to the four valences of the carbon molecule, the basis of all life. Following these ideas further, the discussion details the close correspondence...
Philosophy and Modern Liberal Arts Education
Freedom is to Learn
Language: English
Release Date: January 8, 2014
This book argues for a modern version of liberal arts education, exploring first principles within the divine comedy of educational logic. By reforming the three philosophies of metaphysics, nature and ethics upon which liberal arts education is based, Tubbs offers a profound transatlantic philosophical and educational challenge to the subject.
The Laboratory of the Mind
Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences
Language: English
Release Date: January 25, 2012
Newton's bucket, Einstein's elevator, Schrödinger's cat – these are some of the best-known examples of thought experiments in the natural sciences. But what function do these experiments perform? Are they really experiments at all? Can they help us gain a greater understanding of the natural world? ...
Existentialism and Education
An Introduction to Otto Friedrich Bollnow
Language: English
Release Date: March 9, 2017
This volume examines Otto Friedrich Bollnow’s philosophical approach to education, which brought Heidegger’s existentialism together with other theories of what it is to be “human.” This introduction to Bollnow's work begins with a summary of the theoretical influences that Bollnow synthesized,...
Minding the Modern
Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge
Language: English
Release Date: February 15, 2015
In this brilliant study, Thomas Pfau argues that the loss of foundational concepts in classical and medieval Aristotelian philosophy caused a fateful separation between reason and will in European thought. Pfau traces the evolution and eventual deterioration of key concepts of human agency—will,...
A Philosophical Guide to Chance
Physical Probability
Language: English
Release Date: April 5, 2012
It is a commonplace that scientific inquiry makes extensive use of probabilities, many of which seem to be objective chances, describing features of reality that are independent of our minds. Such chances appear to have a number of paradoxical or puzzling features: they appear to be mind-independent...
Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ
German Romanticism between Leibniz and Marx
Language: English
Release Date: March 1, 2016
Around 1800, German romanticism developed a philosophy this study calls “Romantic organology.” Scientific and philosophical notions of biological function and speculative thought converged to form the discourse that Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ reconstructs—a metaphysics meant to theorize,...
Explaining Social Behavior
More Nuts and Bolts for the Social Sciences
Language: English
Release Date: July 28, 2015
In this new edition of his critically acclaimed book, Jon Elster examines the nature of social behavior, proposing choice as the central concept of the social sciences. Extensively revised throughout, the book offers an overview of key explanatory mechanisms, drawing on many case studies and experiments...
The Found and the Made
Science, Reason, and the Reality of Nature
Language: English
Release Date: July 5, 2017
This book critically examines how mathematical modelling shapes and limits a scientific approach to the natural world and affects how society views nature. It questions concepts such as determinism, reversibility, equilibrium, and the isolated system, and challenges the view of physical reality as...
The Cognitive Science of Science
Explanation, Discovery, and Conceptual Change
Language: English
Release Date: April 6, 2012
A cognitive science perspective on scientific development, drawing on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling.
Many disciplines, including philosophy, history, and sociology, have attempted to make sense of how science works. In this book, Paul Thagard examines scientific...
What? Where? When? Why?
Essays on Induction, Space and Time, Explanation
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2012
Only in fairly recent years has History and Philosophy of Science been recog nised - though not always under that name - as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour. Previously, in the Australasian region as elsewhere, those few individuals working within this broad area of inquiry found their base,...
The Problem of Reductionism in Science
(Colloquium of the Swiss Society of Logic and Philosophy of Science, Zürich, May 18–19, 1990)
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2012
The topic to which this book is devoted is reductionism, and not reduction. The difference in the adoption of these two denominations is not, contrary to what might appear at first sight, just a matter of preference between a more abstract (reductionism) or a more concrete (reduction) terminology...
by
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2012
Language: English
Release Date: December 6, 2012
Probability has become one of the most characteristic con cepts of modern culture, and a 'probabilistic way of thinking' may be said to have penetrated almost every sector of our in tellectual life. However it would be difficult to determine an explicit list of 'positive' features, to be proposed...
by Patrick Quinn
Language: English
Release Date: August 31, 2015
Language: English
Release Date: August 31, 2015
Wittgenstein is not generally thought of as a philosopher of education, yet his views on how we think, learn and teach have the potential to contribute significantly to our contemporary understanding of pedagogy. Wittgenstein himself was a lifelong learner whose method consisted of thinking intensely...