Showing titles in Epistemology

A leading astronomer and gifted teacher takes readers on a wondrous tour of how science confronts the big questions—about the universe’s origins, destiny, and fundamental nature—and how it contends with the limits of our knowledge Humans have learned a lot about the world around us and the...

In a refreshing challenge to the common presumption that knowing involves amassing information, this book offers an eight-step approach that begins with love and pledge and ends with communion and shalom. Everyday adventures of knowing turn on a moment of insight that transforms and connects knower and known. No matter the field - science or art, business or theology, counseling or athletics - this little manual offers a how-to for knowing ventures.

More than at any other time in human history, we live in an age defined by movement and mobility; yet, we lack a unifying theory which takes this seriously as a starting point for philosophy. The history of philosophy has systematically explained movement as derived from something else that does not move: space, eternity, force, and time.

Does the real world, defined as a world of objects that exist independent of human interests, concerns, and cognitive activities, really exist? Jan Westerhoff argues that we have good reason to believe it does not. His discussion considers four main facets of the idea of the real world, ranging from the existence of a separate external and internal world (comprising various mental states congregated around a self), to the existence of an ontological foundation that grounds the existence of all the entities in the world.

As we stand on the cusp of a new political reality, the contours of personal freedom and autonomy are becoming increasingly well-defined. The future holds the possibility of an existence where the barriers to living life on one’s own terms are ever-diminishing, where the power of voluntarily connected individuals challenges and reshapes the statist quo. Even though the journey toward this new reality is fraught with trade-offs and challenges, it has the potential for unprecedented freedom and philosophical fulfillment.

In Band 3 der Reihe Physik leicht erklärt führt Orhan Schöwe in eines der tiefsten Konzepte moderner Physik: die Raumzeit. Dieses Hörbuch erklärt verständlich und ohne Formeln, wie Raum und Zeit untrennbar miteinander verwoben sind – und warum diese Erkenntnis unser Bild von Wirklichkeit grundlegend verändert.

A transformative and philosophical investigation into how we ask questions, full of practical advice on how we can harness the power of questions for ourselves We live in a world that wants answers. Answers provide solutions to our problems, teach us about the world, and help us navigate our...

"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."

Az ember hajlamos nagy titkokat sejteni ott, ahol egyszerűen csak nagyobb erők működnek, mint amiket uralni tud. Azonnal a nagy titkot keresi, amikor kiemelkedő tehetségekkel találkozik, és akkor is, amikor a tudomány eszközeivel igyekszik mélyebben megérteni a világot.

L'uomo è un essere intelligente. Nel dizionario di Oxford l'intelligenza viene definita come "la capacità di acquisire e applicare conoscenze e competenze complesse". Se prendiamo per buona questa definizione, possiamo essere certi che l'essere umano, per come lo conosciamo, verrà presto superato dagli algoritmi di intelligenza artificiale. Le nostre forme sociali camminano al di fuori dell'ordine dell'intelligenza possibile all'uomo.

This revolutionary treatise starts from one fundamental premise: that our phenomenal consciousness includes direct experience of value. For too long, ethical theorists have looked for value in external states of affairs or reduced value to a projection of the mind onto them. The result, unsurprisingly, is widespread antirealism about ethics. In this book, Sharon Hewitt Rawlette turns our metaethical gaze inward and dares us to consider that value, rather than being something “out there”, is a quality woven into the very fabric of our conscious experience, in a highly objective way.

Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is a core text of modern philosophy. Presenting an examination of the nature of human reason, its central argument is that the way in which man perceives his environment is a direct consequence of the mind’s ability to act on this environment and convert it into something meaningful. The work brings together two opposing schools of philosophy—rationalism and empiricism—and proposes a third way, which came to be known as transcendental idealism. The work proved to be hugely influential, not least on Marx, Heidegger and Nietzsche.

First published in 1710, George Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is a seminal contribution to Empiricist philosophy. Making the bold assertion that the physical world consists only of ideas and thus does not exist outside the mind, this work establishes Berkeley as the founder of the immaterialist school of thought. A major influence on such later philosophers as David Hume and Immanuel Kant, Berkeley's ideas have played a role in such diverse fields as mathematics and metaphysics and continue to spark debate today.

Wonder and awe lie at the heart of life's most profound questions. Wonderstruck shows how these emotions respond to our fundamental need to make sense of ourselves and everything around us, and how they enable us to engage with the world as if we are experiencing it for the first time.

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker - if you know how.

Epistemic vices are character traits, attitudes, or thinking styles that prevent us from gaining, keeping, or sharing knowledge. In this book, Quassim Cassam gives an account of the nature and importance of these vices, which include closed-mindedness, intellectual arrogance, wishful thinking, and prejudice. In providing the first extensive coverage of vice epistemology, an exciting new area of philosophical research, Vices of the Mind uses real examples drawn primarily from the world of politics to develop a compelling theory of epistemic vice.

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.

A luminous guide to how the radical new science of counterfactuals can reveal that the scope of the universe is greater, and more beautiful, than we ever imagined There is a vast class of things that science has so far almost entirely neglected. They are central to the understanding of physical...

This audiobook explores metaphor not as an ornament of language but as the fundamental mechanism of human cognition. It argues that every act of understanding—scientific, poetic, or everyday—is rooted in the transfer of structure from one experiential domain to another. Metaphor is presented as the mind’s first technology, a generative tool through which complexity is compressed into meaningful form. Far from being a deviation from literal speech, it is shown to be the very fabric of thought itself, underlying logic, mathematics, and the formation of conceptual categories.

Do any of us really care about truth when it comes to politics? Should we? In a world of big lies, denialism, and conspiracy theories, democracies are experiencing two interlocked crises: a loss of confidence in democracy itself and the growing sense among many that politics is only about power—not truth. In this book, Michael Patrick Lynch argues that truth not only can—but must—matter in politics. He shows why truth is an essential democratic value—a value we need to sustain our democratic way of life—and how it can be strengthened.