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Feminist thinkers have been critically examining science for over a century; but who critiques the criticism?
This book approaches Hegel from the standpoint of what we might call the question of knowledge. Hegel, of course, had no "theory of knowledge" in the narrow and abstract sense in which it has come to be understood since Locke and Kant. "The examination of knowledge," he holds, "can only be carried out by an act of knowledge," and "to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim. " * While Hegel wrote no treatise exclusively devoted to epistemology, his entire philosophy is nonetheless a many-faceted theory of truth, and thus our title - Beyond Epistemology - is meant to suggest a return to the classical meaning and relation of the terms episteme and logos. I had originally planned to include a lengthy introduction for these essays, setting out Hegel's general view of philosophic truth. But as the papers came in, it became clear that I had chosen my contributors too well; indeed, they have all but put me out of business. In any case, it gives me great pleasure to have been able to gather this symposium of outstanding Hegel scholars, to provide for them a forum on a common theme of great importance, and especially, thanks to Arnold Miller, to have Hegel himself among them. Frederick G. Weiss Charlottesville, Va. • The Logic of Hegel, trans. from the Etu;yclopaedta by William Wallace. 2nd ed.
Much of the writing in Anglo-American epistemology in the twentieth century focused on the conditions for beliefs being "justified." In a book that seeks to shift the ground of debate within theory of knowledge, William P. Alston finds that the century-long search for a correct account of the nature and conditions of epistemic justification misses the point. Alston calls for that search to be suspended and for talk of epistemic justification to cease. He proposes instead an approach to the epistemology of belief that focuses on the evaluation of various "epistemic desiderata" that may be satisfied by beliefs.Alston finds that features of belief that are desirable for the goals of cognition include having an adequate basis, being formed in a reliable way, and coherence within bodies of belief. In Alston's view, a belief's being based on an adequate ground and its being formed in a reliable way, though often treated as competing accounts of justification, are virtually identical. Beyond "Justification" also contains discussions of fundamental questions about the epistemic status of principles and beliefs and appropriate responses to various kinds of skepticism.
This book approaches Hegel from the standpoint of what we might call the question of knowledge. Hegel, of course, had no "theory of knowledge" in the narrow and abstract sense in which it has come to be understood since Locke and Kant. "The examination of knowledge," he holds, "can only be carried out by an act of knowledge," and "to seek to know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim. " * While Hegel wrote no treatise exclusively devoted to epistemology, his entire philosophy is nonetheless a many-faceted theory of truth, and thus our title - Beyond Epistemology - is meant to suggest a return to the classical meaning and relation of the terms episteme and logos. I had originally planned to include a lengthy introduction for these essays, setting out Hegel's general view of philosophic truth. But as the papers came in, it became clear that I had chosen my contributors too well; indeed, they have all but put me out of business. In any case, it gives me great pleasure to have been able to gather this symposium of outstanding Hegel scholars, to provide for them a forum on a common theme of great importance, and especially, thanks to Arnold Miller, to have Hegel himself among them. Frederick G. Weiss Charlottesville, Va. • The Logic of Hegel, trans. from the Etu;yclopaedta by William Wallace. 2nd ed.
This book of 10 engaging and original essays brings Spinoza outside the realm of academic philosophy, and presents him as a thinker who is relevant to contemporary problems and questions across a variety of disciplines.
This is the third volume of the series Reinventing Social Emancipation: Towards New Manifestoes. Another Knowledge Is Possible explores the struggles against moral and cultural imperialism and neoliberal globalization that have taken place over the past few decades, and the alternatives that have emerged in countries throughout the developing world from Brazil and Colombia, to India, South Africa and Mozambique. In particular it looks at the issue of biodiversity, the confrontation between scientific and non-scientific knowledges, and the increasing difficulty experienced by great numbers of people in accessing information and scientific-technological knowledge.
Contemporary philosophers of mind tend to assume that the world of nature can be reduced to basic physics. Yet there are features of the mind consciousness, intentionality, normativity that do not seem to be reducible to physics or neuroscience. This explanatory gap between mind and brain has thus been a major cause of concern in recent philosophy of mind. Reductionists hold that, despite all appearances, the mind can be reduced to the brain. Eliminativists hold that it cannot, and that this implies that there is something illegitimate about the mentalistic vocabulary. Dualists hold that the mental is irreducible, and that this implies either a substance or a property dualism. Mysterian non-reductive physicalists hold that the mind is uniquely irreducible, perhaps due to some limitation of our self-understanding. In this book, Steven Horst argues that this whole conversation is based on assumptions left over from an outdated philosophy of science. While reductionism was part of the philosophical orthodoxy fifty years ago, it has been decisively rejected by philosophers of science over the past thirty years, and for good reason. True reductions are in fact exceedingly rare in the sciences, and the conviction that they were there to be found was an artifact of armchair assumptions of 17th century Rationalists and 20th century Logical Empiricists. The explanatory gaps between mind and brain are far from unique. In fact, in the sciences it is gaps all the way down.And if reductions are rare in even the physical sciences, there is little reason to expect them in the case of psychology. Horst argues that this calls for a complete re-thinking of the contemporary problematic in philosophy of mind. Reductionism, dualism, eliminativism and non-reductive materialism are each severely compromised by post-reductionist philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind is in need of a new paradigm. Horst suggests that such a paradigm might be found in Cognitive Pluralism: the view that human cognitive architecture constrains us to understand the world through a plurality of partial, idealized, and pragmatically-constrained models, each employing a particular representational system optimized for its own problem domain. Such an architecture can explain the disunities of knowledge, and is plausible on evolutionary grounds.
In 1996, Alan Sokal, a Professor of Physics at New York University, wrote a paper for the cultural-studies journal Social Text, entitled 'Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity'. It was reviewed, accepted and published. Sokal immediately confessed that the whole article was a hoax - a cunningly worded paper designed to expose and parody the style of extreme postmodernist criticism of science. The story became front-page news around the world and triggered fierce and wide-ranging controversy. Sokal is one of the most powerful voices in the continuing debate about the status of evidence-based knowledge. In Beyond the Hoax he turns his attention to a new set of targets - pseudo-science, religion, and misinformation in public life. 'Whether my targets are the postmodernists of the left, the fundamentalists of the right, or the muddle-headed of all political and apolitical stripes, the bottom line is that clear thinking, combined with a respect for evidence, are of the utmost importance to the survival of the human race in the twenty-first century.' The book also includes a hugely illuminating annotated text of the Hoax itself, and a reflection on the furore it provoked.
Does science have all the answers? Can it even deal with abstract reasoning beyond the world we experience? How can we ensure that the physical world is sufficiently ordered to be intelligible to humans? How can mathematics, a product of human minds, unlock the secrets of the physical universe? Should all such questions be considered inadmissible if science cannot settle them? Metaphysics has traditionally been understood as reasoning beyond the reach of science, sometimes even claiming realities beyond its grasp. Because of this, metaphysics is often contemptuously dismissed by scientists and philosophers who wish to remain within the bounds of what can be scientifically proven. Yet scientists at the frontiers of physics unwittingly engage in metaphysics, as they are now happy to contemplate whole universes that are, in principle, beyond human reach. Roger Trigg challenges those who deny that science needs philosophical assumptions. Trigg claims that the foundations of science themselves have to lie beyond science. It takes reasoning apart from experience to discover what is not yet known and this metaphysical reasoning to imagine realities beyond what can be accessed. “In Beyond Matter, Roger Trigg advances a powerful, persuasive, fair-minded argument that the sciences require a philosophical, metaphysical foundation. This is a brilliant book for newcomers to the philosophy of science and experts alike.” —Charles Taliaferro, professor of philosophy, St. Olaf College
This title was first published in 2002. This book builds on contemporary discussion of 'mysticism' and religious experience by examining the process and content of 'religious knowing' in classical and modern Advaita. Drawing from the work of William Alston and Alvin Plantinga, Thomas Forsthoefel examines key streams of Advaita with special reference to the conditions, contexts, and scope of epistemic merit in religious experience. Forsthoefel uniquely employs specific analytical categories of contemporary Western epistemologies as heuristics to examine the cognitive dimension of religious experience in Indian Vedanta. Showing the developing nuances in the analysis of religious experience in the thought of Shankara and his immediate disciples (Suresvara and Padmapada) as well as in the teaching of Ramana Maharshi, an understudied but important South Indian saint of the 20th century, this book offers a substantial contribution to studies of Indian philosophy as well as to contemporary philosophy of religion. Using the tools of exegesis and comparative philosophy, Forsthoefel argues for a careful justification of claims following religious experience, even if such claims involve, as they do in the Advaita, a paradoxical 'knowing beyond knowledge'.