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"Munz argues that the later Wittgenstein and Popper ought to be seen as complementing one another. Popper believed that when truth is discovered meaning will take care of itself. However, since, in Popper's view, we can never verify a general proposition, we can never be certain of its truth. There must therefore be a way of understanding what it means even though we cannot be sure of its truth. The post-Tractatus Wittgenstein enables us to see how propositions are meaningful regardless of whether we can ascertain their truth and thus fills a gap in Popper's philosophy." "At the same time, Popper was able to make up a deficiency in Wittgenstein's later philosophy. While Wittgenstein had had it that meaningful propositions can be generated in any social order, Popper showed that if propositions are to be true as well as have meaning, the socio-political order in which they are put forward, has to be free and open.".
On October 25, 1946, in a crowded room in Cambridge, England, the great twentieth-century philosophers Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper came face to face for the first and only time. The meeting -- which lasted ten minutes -- did not go well. Their loud and aggressive confrontation became the stuff of instant legend, but precisely what happened during that brief confrontation remained for decades the subject of intense disagreement. An engaging mix of philosophy, history, biography, and literary detection, Wittgenstein's Poker explores, through the Popper/Wittgenstein confrontation, the history of philosophy in the twentieth century. It evokes the tumult of fin-de-siécle Vienna, Wittgentein's and Popper's birthplace; the tragedy of the Nazi takeover of Austria; and postwar Cambridge University, with its eccentric set of philosophy dons, including Bertrand Russell. At the center of the story stand the two giants of philosophy themselves -- proud, irascible, larger than life -- and spoiling for a fight.
In nine lively essays, bioethicist J. David Velleman challenges the prevailing consensus about assisted suicide and reproductive technology, articulating an original approach to the ethics of creating and ending human lives. He argues that assistance in dying is appropriate only at the point where talk of suicide is not, and he raises moral objections to anonymous donor conception. In their place, Velleman champions a morality of valuing personhood over happiness in making end-of-life decisions, and respecting the personhood of future children in making decisions about procreation. These controversial views are defended with philosophical rigor while remaining accessible to the general reader. Written over Velleman's 30 years of undergraduate teaching in bioethics, the essays have never before been collected and made available to a non-academic audience. They will open new lines of debate on issues of intense public interest.
From the bestselling coauthor of Wittgenstein's Poker, a fascinating tour through the history of moral philosophy A runaway train is racing toward five men who are tied to the track. Unless the train is stopped, it will inevitably kill all five men. You are standing on a footbridge looking down on the unfolding disaster. However, a fat man, a stranger, is standing next to you: if you push him off the bridge, he will topple onto the line and, although he will die, his chunky body will stop the train, saving five lives. Would you kill the fat man? The question may seem bizarre. But it's one variation of a puzzle that has baffled moral philosophers for almost half a century and that more recently has come to preoccupy neuroscientists, psychologists, and other thinkers as well. In this book, David Edmonds, coauthor of the bestselling Wittgenstein's Poker, tells the riveting story of why and how philosophers have struggled with this ethical dilemma, sometimes called the trolley problem. In the process, he provides an entertaining and informative tour through the history of moral philosophy. Most people feel it's wrong to kill the fat man. But why? After all, in taking one life you could save five. As Edmonds shows, answering the question is far more complex—and important—than it first appears. In fact, how we answer it tells us a great deal about right and wrong.
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • A vibrant portrait of four college friends—Iris Murdoch, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Mary Midgley—who formed a new philosophical tradition while Oxford's men were away fighting World War II. The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative. In the mid-twentieth century Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Iris Murdoch were philosophy students at Oxford when most male undergraduates and many tutors were conscripted away to fight in the Second World War. Together, these young women, all friends, developed a philosophy that could respond to the war’s darkest revelations. Neither the great Enlightenment thinkers of the past, the logical innovators of the early twentieth century, or the new Existentialist philosophy trickling across the Channel, could make sense of this new human reality of limitless depravity and destructive power, the women felt. Their answer was to bring philosophy back to life. We are metaphysical animals, they realized, creatures that can question their very being. Who am I? What is freedom? What is human goodness? The answers we give, they believed, shape what we will become. Written with expertise and flair, Metaphysical Animals is a lively portrait of women who shared ideas, but also apartments, clothes and even lovers. Mac Cumhaill and Wiseman show how from the disorder and despair of the war, four brilliant friends created a way of ethical thinking that is there for us today.
How would Plato have responded if his student Aristotle had ever challenged his idea that our senses perceive nothing more than the shadows cast upon a wall by a true world of perfect ideals? What would Charles Darwin have said to Karl Marx about his claim that dialectical materialism is a scientific theory of evolution? How would Jean-Paul Sartre have reacted to Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that the Marquis de Sade was a philosopher worthy of serious attention? This light-hearted book proposes answers to such questions by imagining dialogues between thirty-three pairs of philosophical sages who were alive at the same time. Sometime famous sages get a much rougher handling than usual, as when Adam Smith beards Immanuel Kant in his Konigsberg den. Sometimes neglected or maligned sages get a chance to say what they really believed, as when Epicurus explains that he wasn’t epicurean. Sometimes the dialogues are about the origins of modern concepts, as when Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat discuss their invention of probability, or when John Nash and John von Neumann discuss the creation of game theory. Even in these scientific cases, the intention is that the protagonists come across as fallible human beings like the rest of us, rather than the intellectual paragons of philosophical textbooks.
Beyond Description brings anthropologists and other social scientists together to examine the problem of explanation. What is "an explanation?" What can it add? What makes it authoritative, clarifying, or misleading? Whom does it serve and how is it produced? These questions lie at the heart of recent public crises of confidence in expertise, political representation, and classic liberal visions of whom we can rely on for true and trustworthy accounts. In a world beset by events and processes that seem to defy expert predictions of their impossibility, and in which post-hoc accounts can often feel more like rationalizations than explanations, competing voices vie for public presence and seek to silence one another. Anthropology and the social sciences face such questions too, making contemporary explanatory practice both an empirical and a reflexive challenge. By combining ethnographic studies of practices of explanation in a range of contemporary political, medical, artistic, religious, and bureaucratic settings, the essays in Beyond Description offer critical examinations of changing norms and forms of explanation in the world and within anthropology itself.
From the author of Wittgenstein's Poker and Would You Kill the Fat Man?, the story of an extraordinary group of philosophers during a dark chapter in Europe's history On June 22, 1936, the philosopher Moritz Schlick was on his way to deliver a lecture at the University of Vienna when Johann Nelböck, a deranged former student of Schlick's, shot him dead on the university steps. Some Austrian newspapers defended the madman, while Nelböck himself argued in court that his onetime teacher had promoted a treacherous Jewish philosophy. David Edmonds traces the rise and fall of the Vienna Circle—an influential group of brilliant thinkers led by Schlick—and of a philosophical movement that sought to do away with metaphysics and pseudoscience in a city darkened by fascism, anti-Semitism, and unreason. The Vienna Circle's members included Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap, and the eccentric logician Kurt Gödel. On its fringes were two other philosophical titans of the twentieth century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. The Circle championed the philosophy of logical empiricism, which held that only two types of propositions have cognitive meaning, those that can be verified through experience and those that are analytically true. For a time, it was the most fashionable movement in philosophy. Yet by the outbreak of World War II, Schlick's group had disbanded and almost all its members had fled. Edmonds reveals why the Austro-fascists and the Nazis saw their philosophy as such a threat. The Murder of Professor Schlick paints an unforgettable portrait of the Vienna Circle and its members while weaving an enthralling narrative set against the backdrop of economic catastrophe and rising extremism in Hitler's Europe.
Essays from a master critic on how artistic giants from modernism onward confronted mortality—forging unexpected links between Twain, Woolf, Mahler, Wittgenstein, Beckett, Toni Morrison, and more While much about modernism remains up for debate, there can be no dispute about the connection between modernist art and death. The long modern moment was and is an age of war, genocide, and annihilation. Two world wars killed perhaps as many as 100 million people, through combat, famine, holocaust, and ghastly attacks on civilians. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is the fifth global pandemic since 1918, with more than a half-million American deaths and counting. It can hardly come as a surprise, then, that many of the touchstones of modernism reflect on death and devastation. In Philip D. Beidler’s exploration of the modernist canon, he illuminates how these singular voices looked extinction in the eye and tried to reckon with our finitude—and their own. The Great Beyond:Art in the Age of Annihilation catalogs through lively prose an eclectic selection of artists, writers, and thinkers. In 16 essays, Beidler takes nuanced and surprising approaches to well-studied figures—the haunting sculpture by Saint-Gaudens commissioned by Henry Adams for his late wife; Luchino Visconti’s adaptation of Mann’s Death in Venice; and the author’s own long fascination with Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The threads and recurring motifs that emerge through Beidler’s analysis bridge the different media, genres, and timeframes of the works under consideration. Protomodernists Crane and Twain connect with near-contemporary voices like Sebald and Morrison. Robert MacFarlane’s 21st-century nonfiction about what lies underneath the earth echoes the Furerbunker and the poetry of Gertrud Kolmar. Learned but lively, somber but not grim, The Great Beyond is not a comfortable read, but it is in a way comforting. In tracing how his subjects confronted nothingness, be it personal or global, Beidler draws a brilliant map of how we see the end of the road.
In 1766 philosopher, novelist, composer, and political provocateur Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a fugitive, decried by his enemies as a dangerous madman. Meanwhile David Hume—now recognized as the foremost philosopher in the English language—was being universally lauded as a paragon of decency. And so Rousseau came to England with his beloved dog, Sultan, and willingly took refuge with his more respected counterpart. But within months, the exile was loudly accusing his benefactor of plotting to dishonor him—which prompted a most uncharacteristically violent response from Hume. And so began a remarkable war of words and actions that ensnared many of the leading figures in British and French society, and became the talk of intellectual Europe. Rousseau's Dog is the fascinating true story of the bitter and very public quarrel that turned the Age of Enlightenment's two most influential thinkers into deadliest of foes—a most human tale of compassion, treachery, anger, and revenge; of celebrity and its price; of shameless spin; of destroyed reputations and shattered friendships.