Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Epistemology

What does it mean to know something? Can we have confidence in our knowledge? Epistemology, the study of knowledge, can often seem like a daunting subject. And yet few topics are more basic to human life. We are inquisitive creatures by nature, and the unending quest for truth leads us to raise difficult questions about the quest itself. What are the conditions, sources, and limits of our knowledge? Do our beliefs need to be rationally justified? Can we have certainty? In this primer on epistemology, James Dew and Mark Foreman guide readers through this discipline in philosophy.

IIIT Books-In-Brief Series is a valuable collection of the Institute’s key publications written in condensed form to give listeners a core under-standing of the main contents of the original. Our established, age-old notions of knowledge have ceased to be meaningful in postnormal times. What we define as true knowledge, and the ways in which we create it, have changed radically. The emergence of ‘Big Data’ and Artificial Intelligence, as well as ‘fake news’, ‘alternative facts’, ‘deep fake’, and ‘post-truth’ have changed the nature of knowledge production.

This book explores the laser’s journey from obscure theoretical roots to its central place in medicine, warfare, communications, and cosmology. Alongside its technical story runs a deeper inquiry: what does this sharpened light reveal about the nature of order, attention, and the human desire for focus amid chaos? What begins as a tool becomes a metaphor, and finally a mirror—reflecting the structure of thought itself.

In a world overflowing with information yet starved for understanding, Prisoners of the Mind invites listeners on a fearless exploration of the hidden structures that shape thought, distort perception, and quietly govern belief. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and cultural critique, this book dismantles the comforting illusions through which modern life is too often navigated—illusions of control, certainty, merit, and even selfhood.

Unreal Reality: The Paradox of Existence is a lucid and unflinching exploration of reality, illusion, and the ethical demands of being. Blending philosophy, science, and reflective clarity, this book journeys through the shifting ground beneath perception, memory, identity, and knowledge. It challenges the need for certainty, confronts the limits of understanding, and insists that meaning can—and must—be forged even when truth remains out of reach.

This book is a philosophical journey into the heart of uncertainty. From ancient myths of the abyss to modern science, from entropy to fractals, from Michel Serres’s poetics of noise to the digital floods of our age, Pursuing Chaos asks whether knowledge is possible without illusions—and whether truth can survive without rhetoric.

Artificial intelligence can answer almost anything. The tragedy is that people have nothing to ask. Surrounded by infinite knowledge, we shrink our curiosity to absurdities: “Do you have legs?” This book is about that paradox. Not about machines, but about us—about how to learn again, how to build methods of thinking, how to cultivate curiosity before it disappears.

Was geschieht, wenn wir Kant nicht mehr als marmornes Denkmal, sondern als lebendigen Menschen lesen? Diese Frage bildet den Kern dieses Buches. Immanuel Kants Philosophie war niemals dazu bestimmt, als unverrückbares Dogma verehrt zu werden. Sie war ein kritisches Projekt, ein Versuch, die Grenzen der Vernunft sichtbar zu machen und Werkzeuge für weiteres Denken zu schaffen.

This book introduces the Anthropic-Independent Reality Index, a conceptual framework designed to assess the degree to which ideas are shaped — or distorted — by evolved cognitive structures. Drawing on insights from evolutionary epistemology, cognitive neuroscience, and the philosophy of science, the index offers a non-utilitarian scale for measuring the ontological independence of a concept from the adaptive biases of the human mind.

This book explores the concept of abstraction as both a central method of philosophical inquiry and a process that inevitably encounters multiple forms of limitation. Through logical, epistemological, ontological, linguistic, existential, and mystical perspectives, it examines how abstraction can clarify, distort, transcend, or collapse into self-reference and emptiness. It argues that while abstraction is essential for conceptual thought, it also risks severing ties with lived experience, language, and meaning.

In We Might Be NPCs, Ray Brownlee takes you on a sharp, funny, and mind-bending tour through one of the strangest ideas in modern thought, the Simulation Hypothesis. Blending philosophy, physics, and a dash of pop culture, this book asks the unsettling question: What if reality isn’t… real?

This book introduces and develops the concept of Historic Antiteleology as a radical reorientation of historical thought beyond the metaphysics of progress, redemption, or narrative coherence. Drawing on the insights of Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, and poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Benjamin, the essay critiques the enduring influence of teleological models in historiography — models that frame history as a purposeful sequence culminating in moral, political, or technological fulfillment.

Philosophical Foundation argues for clarity over and against meaninglessness, which is implicit in various forms of skepticism and fideism. Throughout the book, critical analysis is applied to unexamined assumptions in the areas of metaphysics and ethics in order to address long-standing disputes.

Dans Les deux sources de la morale et de la religion, son dernier grand livre (1932), Bergson ne se contente pas d'établir la distinction entre le clos et l'ouvert comme critère absolu, en morale, mais aussi en religion (et même dans chaque religion) et en politique. Il en recherche le double fondement, dans la structure immuable de notre espèce, d'un côté dans les actes imprévisibles des grands hommes de bien ou des mystiques, de l'autre.

¿Puede la filosofía dar respuestas a los problemas de la actualidad? ¿Puede enseñarnos a pensar en la muerte al margen de nuestra angustia existencial? ¿Una perspectiva filosófica nos ayuda a ver al otro como tal? ¿Cómo pensar en el poder cuando, en realidad, el poder nos atraviesa? ¿Qué se revela cuando la filosofía cuestiona la linealidad del tiempo?

"100 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard" is a collection of thoughts from the French philosopher whose work influenced many other philosophers including; Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dominique Lecourt and Jacques Derrida. The quotes featured open a door into his monumental work with a selection of his most significant thoughts and ideas from witticisms to deeper reflections. "100 Quotes by Gaston Bachelard" will delight those interested in Western philosophy.

Understanding Different Perspectives is your ultimate guide toward looking at yourself and the world around you in new and interesting ways. Brace yourself for an exciting listen through history’s most renowned beliefs, practices, and philosophies.

Seeking Truth looks at both the philosophical and practical issues of truth to understand how we come to know what we know and why we disagree so much. More importantly, it lays out how we can disagree in ways that avoid division and polarization and instead move to build a consensus on the truth. Seeking Truth addresses things like how to think about what you believe, how to handle disagreement and errors positively, how do you know if you are open-minded, and how to make better decisions.

La filosofía de la terapia es una indagación critica acerca de las razones y creencias para que los terapeutas de todas modalidades hagan lo que hacen como lo hacen. Esta obra fue concebida como una invitación para que terapeutas y filósofos dialoguen acerca de la verdadera naturaleza y propósito para la terapia. De suma importancia filosófica también son las justificaciones utilizadas no solamente en la práctica de la terapia, pero también en la formación de nuevos profesionales.

What we believed were the laws of physics are really the archetypal laws of mind, and the consciousness that created our universe originated from the “monad”. In philosophy, the monad is the single source of all things—the embedded matrix of both our present existence and all possible future incarnations. For theologians, it is the logos—the word of God that created the world. In mathematics, the monad is the root of all the numbers that describe nature. In science, it is the Big Bang explosion of light and information from which our universe sprung forth.