Download Free Irrationalism Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Irrationalism and write the review.

In fewer than two-hundred pages, David Stove leaves the well-established and widely regarded edifice of the academic philosophy of science in smoldering ruins. This book provides a modern history of scientific reasoning, from David Hume’s inductive skepticism to Karl Popper’s outright denial of induction, to the increasingly irrational and absurd scientific views that followed. When Popper untethered science from induction, Stove argues, he triggered a postmodernist nightmare of utter nonsense culminating in Paul Feyerabend’s summation that “anything goes” when it comes to defining or describing science. With undeniable logic, a deft analysis of the linguistic slight-of-hand that make absurd arguments seem reasonable, and regular displays of wit, Stove gives the reader a front row seat to one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of modern thought. Stove’s views are entirely consistent with the origins of scientific inference and logic, as well as modern advances in probability theory, and yet he remains largely unnoticed by most of the academic world. From Stove’s insider-outsider perspective, the train wreck that is academically accepted philosophy of science and “science studies” is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining subject of study. Scientific Irrationalism is the perfect place to begin any examination of what science is—and what it is not.
Russia, once compared to a giant sphinx, is often considered in the Anglophone world an alien culture, often threatening and always enigmatic. Although recognizably European, Russian culture also has mystical features, including the idiosyncratic phenomenon of Russian irrationalism. Historically, Russian irrationalism has been viewed with caution in the West, where it is often seen as antagonistic to, and subversive of, the rational foundations of Western speculative philosophy. Some of the remarkable achievements of the Russian irrationalist approach, however, especially in the artistic sphere, have been recognized and even admired, though not sufficiently investigated. Bridging the gap between intellectual cultures, Olga Tabachnikova discusses such fundamental irrationalist themes as language and the linguistic underpinning of culture; the power of illusion in national consciousness; the changing relationship between love and morality; the cultural roots of humour, as well as the relevance of various individual writers and philosophers from Pushkin to Brodsky to the construction of Russian irrationalism.
Russia is an enigmatic, mysterious country, situated between East and West not only spatially, but also mentally. Or so it is traditionally perceived in Western Europe and the Anglophone world at large. One of the distinctive features of Russian culture is its irrationalism, which revealed itself diversely in Russian life and thought, literature, music and visual arts, and has survived to the present day. Bridging the gap in existing scholarship, the current volume is an attempt at an integral and multifaceted approach to this phenomenon, and launches the study of Russian irrationalism in philosophy, theology, literature and the arts of the last two hundred years, together with its reflections in Russian reality. Contributors: Tatiana Chumakova, David Gillespie, Arkadii Goldenberg, Kira Gordovich, Rainer Grübel, Elizabeth Harrison, Jeremy Howard, Aleksandr Ivashkin, Elena Kabkova, Sergei Kibalnik, Oleg Kovalov, Alexander McCabe, Barbara Olaszek, Oliver Ready, Oliver Smith, Margarita Odesskaia, Ildikó Mária Rácz, Lyudmila Safronova, Marilyn Schwinn Smith, Henrieke Stahl, Olga Stukalova, Olga Tabachnikova, Christopher John Tooke, and Natalia Vinokurova.
This is the first detailed study, following the recent collapse of political Marxism in Eastern Europe, of twentieth-century Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukács and his position as the leading proponent of the Marxist theory of reason. Lukács's History and Class Consciousness has been called one of the three most influential philosophical works of this century, and he, the outstanding Marxist philosopher. Marxism has long suffered relative neglect in philosophical discussion as a result of its own invidious distinction between itself and the supposed irrationality of what it regards as bourgeois philosophy. Tom Rockmore offers a uniquely detailed philosophical analysis of Lukács's entire position as a theory of reason, based on the distinction between reason and unreason, or irrationalism. The author gives special emphasis to Lukács's connection to German neo-Kantianism, particularly Lask, and on his last, unfinished work. Rockmore begins with an account of the roots of Lukács's Marxism, followed by an in-depth analysis of his often mentioned, but still incompletely understood, seminal essay "Reification and the Class Consciousness of the Proletariat." He then traces the evolution and later demise of the distinction between reason and irrationalism in Lukács's final thought. The author thus makes available for the first time in English a strictly philosophical discussion of Georg Lukács's Marxist phase and brings consideration of his thought into the wider philosophical discussion.
Izydora Dąmbska (1904-1982) was a Polish philosopher; a student of Kazimierz Twardowski, and his last assistant. Her output consists of almost 300 publications. The main domains of her research were semiotics, epistemology and broadly understood methodology as well as axiology and history of philosophy. Dąmbska’s approach to philosophical problems reflected tendencies that were characteristic of the Lvov-Warsaw School. She applied high methodological standards but has never limited the domain of analyzed problems in advance. The present volume includes twenty-eight translations of her representative papers. As one of her pupils rightly wrote: “Dąmbska’s works may help everyone [...] to think clearly. Her attitude of an unshaken philosopher may help anyone to hold oneself straight, and, if necessary, to get up after a fall”.
The Rationalism of Georg Lukács is a collection of essays and engaging scholarship which uncovers new dimensions of the philosopher's work. The relevance of Lukacs's ideas should be seen in the light of a sharp decline in critical thought as well the continued need to rehabilitate a thinker that was representative of a rational radical perspective.
Drawing on debates from traditional and postmodern thoughts on science and technology, the title builds a new theoretical framework to reconsider science and technology, integrating the opposing viewpoints that either justify science or negate it. As the third volume of a three-volume set that proposes to reconsider science and technology and explores how the philosophy of science and technology responds to an ever-changing world, this final volume seeks to restore the cultural implications of science. Across the six chapters, the authors probe the prospect of a pluralistic scientific culture, including discussions of diversified value choices, the tension between reason and unreason, other binary characteristics of scientific knowledge, including objectivity and uniqueness, universality and locality, as well as the loss, awakening and reconstruction of scientific culture. The authors call for a transformation of scientific culture from a dominant culture to an affirmative one and envision a free and open world of science and technology. The volume will appeal to scholars and students interested in the philosophy of science and technology, the ideology of scientism and anti-scientism, modernism and postmodernism, Marxist philosophy and topics related to scientific culture.
Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists focuses on a tendency in the philosophy of science, of which the leading representatives are Professor Sir Karl Popper, the late Professor Imre Lakatos, and Professors T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend. Their philosophy of science is in substance irrationalist. They doubt, or deny outright, that there can be any reason to believe any scientific theory; and a fortiori they doubt or deny, for example, that there has been any accumulation of knowledge in recent centuries. The book is composed of two parts and Part One explains how these writers succeeded in making irrationalism about science acceptable to readers. Part Two explores the intellectual influence that led these writers to embrace irrationalism about science.
This is a book about the one objective truth of existence, and the countless subjective falsehoods accepted as true by the vast majority of humanity. This book focuses especially on New Age guru Ken Wilber's fallacious system, known as Integral Theory, his "theory of everything", where he attempts to place a wide diversity of mystical theories and the teachings of various gurus into a single framework that supposedly explains everything. Wilber's system is best summed up in his statement, "I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody – including me – has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honored, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace." It is exactly this sentiment that underlies the New Age hegemony of relativism and subjectivism, of everyone having their own experiences, their own path, their own truth. In such a system, it becomes impossible for people to reach the one, absolute, objective truth of existence which grounds everything. In order to reach the Truth, the task is not to pretend to people that they are all right, but to show where they have gone wrong, where they have strayed from reason and logic, where they have succumbed to irrationalism via emotionalism, sensory empiricism, faith, and mysticism. Wilber adopts a fully irrationalist stance when he claims that the "enlightened" are what he calls "trans-rational", i.e. they have somehow transcended reason and logic and thus reached the zone, according to Wilber, where they can apprehend Absolute Reality. In fact, Absolute Reality, insofar as it is intelligible, is nothing but the expression of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and its corollary, Occam's razor. How do we eliminate the infinite wrong answers to existence and reach the one, infallible right answer to existence? It's simplicity itself. The answer to existence is the simplest and most rational possible. Any answer that is not rational is irrational, hence false. Any answer that is not the simplest is wrong because reality would never privilege complexity over simplicity. Reality necessarily follows the path of least resistance, the most economic path. It does not know how to introduce superfluous, needless and pointless complexity. You will never understand the answer to existence if the "answer" you support is against rationalism and against rational simplicity.
Analyses of the dynamics of change present in Europe are not complete without taking into account the role and function of the critical approach as a founding element of European culture. An appreciation of critical thinking must go hand-in-hand with reflection on its essence, forms, and centuries-long tradition. The European philosophical tradition has thematized the problem of criticism since its appearance. This book contains articles on the history of philosophical criticism and ways that it has been understood in European thought. Individual chapters contain both historical-philosophical and problem-oriented analyses, indicating the relationships between philosophical criticism and rationalism, logic, scepticism, atheism, dialectic procedure, and philosophical counseling, among others. Philosophical reflection on critical thinking allows for an acknowledgment of its significance in the fields of epistemology, philosophy of politics, aesthetics, methodology, philosophy of language, and cultural theory. The book should interest not only humanities scholars, but also scholars in other fields, as the development of an anti-dogmatic critical approach is a lasting and indispensible challenge for all disciplines.