Showing titles in Epistemology

The New Organon is the second part of Bacon's philosophical work, The Great Instauration on the renewal of the sciences, which was published in 1620. The title refers to Aristotle's work Organon - meaning “trumpeter” - a treatise on logic and syllogism. Bacon’s work offers a new method of investigating nature, named “the Interpretation of Nature”.

Charles Sanders Peirce is perhaps the greatest philosophical mind to emerge from the United States. He was hugely influential on William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and many other eminent thinkers. This small volume includes two famous essays by Peirce, "The Fixation of Belief" and "Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man." Also included is a short, intellectual biography of Peirce which focuses on his many contributions to science and philosophy. Chosen and very slightly edited by Professor David Christopher Lane, PhD.

Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefs about objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about other people, and we believe that they have beliefs as well. We use beliefs to predict, to explain, to create, to console, to entertain. Some of our beliefs we call theories, and we are extraordinarily creative at constructing them. Theories of quantum mechanics, evolution, and relativity are examples.

The basic precepts of the discipline of analytic philosophy are covered both briskly and thoroughly. Special attention is paid to the philosophy of language and to relation of logical consequence.

With his feet firmly on the ground, he challenged the speculative ideas of David Hume and George Berkeley who regarded ideas in the mind as a basis for the external world. Instead, the pugnacious but lively Reid took a much more ‘common sense’ view in basing his ideas of reality on sensus communis. Starting from a Ciceronian, stoical platform, he developed his views on more rational attitudes towards reality - ‘direct realism’. 

In this work, Descartes' metaphysics and epistemology are clearly stated and assiduously analyzed. It is shown that Descartes' epistemic foundationalism is tenable, and that his mind-body dualism is correct if taken to concern the relationship of mentalistic (mind-related) data to physicalistic data, even though it is incorrect if taken to concern the relationship of mind per se to body per se. Descartes' analysis of causation is shown to be correct, notwithstanding the copious criticism to which centuries have subjected it.

This book examines how the human mind has constructed Western philosophy. What would a new history of Western philosophy be? Aren't there so many studies like that on the market already? Most histories of Western philosophy go in chronological order from the pre-Socratics up to the modern philosophers. But why does it have to be that way?

A thoroughly updated introduction to the concepts, methods, and standards of critical thinking, A Practical Guide to Critical Thinking: Deciding What to Do and Believe, Second Edition is a unique presentation of the formal strategies used when thinking through reasons and arguments in many areas of expertise. Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach to critical thinking, the audiobook offers a broad conception of critical thinking and explores the practical relevance to conducting research across fields such as, business, education, and the biological sciences.   

How much can we know about the world? In this audiobook physicist Marcelo Gleiser traces our search for answers to the most fundamental questions of existence, the origin of the universe, the nature of reality, and the limits of knowledge. In so doing he reaches a provocative conclusion: Science, like religion, is fundamentally limited as a tool for understanding the world. As science and its philosophical interpretations advance, we face the unsettling recognition of how much we don't know.

Kant's Prolegomena, although a small book, is without doubt the most important of his writings, writes the translator, Paul Carus. Prolegomena means, literally, prefatory or introductory remarks, and it furnishes us with a key to his main work, The Critique of Pure Reason; in fact, it is an extract containing all the salient ideas of Kant's system. It approaches the subject in the simplest and most direct way and is therefore best adapted as an introduction into his philosophy.

The digital revolution has been corrupted. What began as a celebration of freedom has become a machine for monitoring and control. What began as history’s greatest dream of enlightenment has been twisted into an anti-intellectual nightmare of indoctrination. In 12 essays, several already well-known but newly revised in this volume, Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger stakes out a hard-headed position in favor of the ideals of the digital revolution. 

I first encountered the mystical logic of Nicholas of Cusa when I read S.L. Frank's magnificent (and underappreciated) volume, The Unknowable. I was both mesmerized and haunted by Cusa's koan-like summation of his philosophy when he wrote, "The unattainable is attained by its unattainment." As Socrates and other mystic-philosophers before him, Nicholas of Cusa had realized through mathematics and geometry that infinity cannot be comprehended by that which is finite.

Here is your invitation to an extraordinary journey through the intersections of philosophy and law. In this captivating book, Paul McKeever presents a powerful new method of considering the world's most famously long-standing, unresolved philosophical problems. He also demonstrates, in an entertaining and convincing way, the practical importance of achieving solutions to such problems. In each chapter, McKeever places you in the role of a presiding judge, meticulously analyzing a vexing legal dispute rooted in a long-standing philosophical paradox or dilemma.

Observation apprises us of what is, but not of what must be. It therefore does not apprise us of logical norms or of relations of logical dependence. In addition, the transformation of sensory information (pictorial) information into propositional (conceptual, non-pictorial) information presupposes knowledge of how to convert information of one kind into information of some other kind, and it therefore presupposes knowledge of logical equivalencies.

Key terms of analytic philosophy defined.

The grounds for inductive inference, and therewith for all forms epistemic realism, are identified. Skepticism concerning induction is shown to be incompatible with the datum that our experiences are temporally collocated and otherwise cohesive. Skepticism concerning the veridicality of our senses is shown to fail for the same reason.

In Stop Being Reasonable, philosopher and journalist Eleanor Gordon-Smith tells six lucid, gripping stories that show the limits of human reason. From the woman who realised her husband harboured a terrible secret, to the man who left the cult he had been raised in since birth, and the British reality TV contestant who, having impersonated someone else for a month, discovered he could no longer return to his former identity, all of the people interviewed radically altered their beliefs about the things that matter most.

A system can describe what we see (the solar system), operate a computer (Windows 10), or be made on a page (the 14 engineered lines of a sonnet). In this book, Clifford Siskin shows that system is best understood as a genre - a form that works physically in the world to mediate our efforts to understand it. Indeed, many Enlightenment authors published works they called "system" to compete with the essay and the treatise.

"Truth is discoverable. I'm certain of it. It's not popular to say. It's not popular to think. But I know it's true."

So begins an examination into the most fundamental questions in philosophy. Does objective truth exist? Can we know anything with certainty? Are there true logical contradictions?

Steve Patterson answers emphatically, "We can know absolute, certain, and objective truths. These truths serve as the foundation for the rest of our knowledge."

Ignorance, whether passive or active, conscious or unconscious, has always been a part of the human condition, Renata Salecl argues. What has changed in our post-truth, postindustrial world is that we often feel overwhelmed by the constant flood of information and misinformation. It sometimes seems impossible to differentiate between truth and falsehood and, as a result, there has been a backlash against the idea of expertise, and a rise in the number of people actively choosing not to know.