Dimensions of Practical Necessity
Dimensions of Practical Necessity

Author: Katharina Bauer

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-04-20

Total Pages: 255

ISBN-13: 3319523988

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection of essays provides the first systematic investigation of practical necessity and offers novel perspectives on this intriguing phenomenon. While debates on necessity often take place in the realm of metaphysics, there is a form of necessity that is pertinent to practical philosophy. “Here I stand. I can do no other,” a phrase habitually attributed to Martin Luther, is often interpreted as revealing underlying normative reasons that exhibit a special kind of necessitating force, experienced as an inescapable constraint by the agent. However, one of the features that make this phenomenon so fascinating is that this constraint is often deciphered as stemming from a form of necessitation that articulates the agent’s autonomy or practical identity. Luther’s saying serves as a leitmotif for an exploration of different claims and challenges related to practical necessity. As the complex philosophical investigations are based on familiar, everyday experiences the book is accessible to any academic readership.

Value and Context
Value and Context

Author: Alan Thomas

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2010-04-08

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0191615188

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Alan Thomas presents an original study of the status of value and its relation to the contexts in which evaluative claims are justified. He articulates and defends the view that human beings do possess moral and political knowledge, but that it is historically and culturally contextual knowledge in ways that, say, mathematical or chemical knowledge is not. His exposition of a 'cognitivist contextualism' in ethics and politics builds upon contemporary work in epistemology, moral philosophy, and political theory to fashion an argument that is relevant to current debates about culture, modernity, and relativism.

The Creative Process
The Creative Process

Author: Brewster Ghiselin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1985-11-22

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 9780520054530

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Interest is the creative process isn't new. Both Plato and Aristotle discussed its intricacies, and so have many others over the past two thousand years. This unusal collection provides a lively sampling of what 38 writers, artists, and scientists have had to say about creativity. While not always comforting, their remarks offer new ways of understanding the creative struggle. Discipline and hard work are clearly integral to the process, but as editor Brewster Ghiselin notes, so too is listening to the voice of eccentricity within ourselves and in the world."--Page 4 of cover

Technological Development and Science in the Industrial Age
Technological Development and Science in the Industrial Age

Author: P. Kroes

Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media

Published: 2013-03-09

Total Pages: 282

ISBN-13: 9401580103

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Historians and philosophers of technology are searching for new approaches to the study of the interaction between science and technology. New conceptual frameworks are necessary since the idea that technology is simply applied science is nothing short of a myth. The papers contained in this volume deal primarily with cognitive and social aspects of the science-technology issue. One of the most salient features of these papers is that they show a major methodological shift in studying the interaction between science and technology. Discussions of the science-technology issue have long been dominated by the demarcartion problem and related semantic issues about the notions `science' and `technology', and the `technology is applied science' thesis. Instead of general `global' interpretation schemes and models of the interaction between science and technology, detailed empirical case studies of cognitive and institutional connections between `science' and `technology' constitute the hard core of this book. The book will be of interest to philosophers of science, historians and philosophers of technology and science and sociologists of science.

The Practical Imagination
The Practical Imagination

Author: David F. Lindenfeld

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2008-04-15

Total Pages: 395

ISBN-13: 0226482448

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Drawing on the work of Foucault and Bourdieu, David Lindenfeld illuminates the practical imagination as it was exhibited in the transformation of the political and social sciences during the changing conditions of nineteenth-century Germany. Using a wealth of information from state and university archives, private correspondence, and a survey of lecture offerings in German universities, Lindenfeld examines the original group of learned disciplines which originated in eighteenth-century Germany as a curriculum to train state officials in the administration and reform of society and which included economics, statistics, politics, public administration, finance, and state law, as well as agriculture, forestry, and mining. He explores the ways in which some systems of knowledge became extinct, and how new ones came into existence, while other migrated to different subject areas. Lindenfeld argues that these sciences of state developed a technique of deliberation on practical issues such as tax policy and welfare, that serves as a model for contemporary administrations.