Gale Researcher Guide for: Kant's Approach to Teleology and Purpose in Nature is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
Gale Researcher Guide for: Ren? Descartes: Overview is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.
This scholarly and accessible study presents “a provocative new reading” of the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century advances in scientific inquiry (Kirkus Reviews). In The Scientific Revolution, historian Steven Shapin challenges the very idea that any such a “revolution” ever took place. Rejecting the narrative that a new and unifying paradigm suddenly took hold, he demonstrates how the conduct of science emerged from a wide array of early modern philosophical agendas, political commitments, and religious beliefs. In this analysis, early modern science is shown not as a set of disembodied ideas, but as historically situated ways of knowing and doing. Shapin shows that every principle identified as the modernizing essence of science—whether it’s experimentalism, mathematical methodology, or a mechanical conception of nature—was in fact contested by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practitioners with equal claims to modernity. Shapin argues that this contested legacy is nevertheless rightly understood as the origin of modern science, its problems as well as its acknowledged achievements. This updated edition includes a new bibliographic essay featuring the latest scholarship. “An excellent book.” —Anthony Gottlieb, New York Times Book Review
In a globalized neo-colonial world an insidious and often debilitating crisis of knowledge not only continues to undermine the quality of research produced by scholars but to also perpetuate a neo-colonial and oppressive socio-cultural, political economic, and educational system. The lack of attention such issues receive in pedagogical institutions around the world undermines the value of education and its role as a force of social justice. In this context these knowledge issues become a central concern of critical pedagogy. As a mode of education that is dedicated to a rigorous form of knowledge work, teachers and students as knowledge producers, anti-oppressive educational and social practices, and diverse perspectives from multiple social locations, critical pedagogy views dominant knowledge policies as a direct assault on its goals. Knowledge and Critical Pedagogy: An Introduction takes scholars through a critical review of the issues facing researchers and educators in the last years of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Refusing to assume the reader’s familiarity with such issues but concurrently rebuffing the tendency to dumb down such complex issues, the book serves as an excellent introduction to one of the most important and complicated issues of our time.
In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.
The treatise De mundo offers a cosmology in the Peripatetic tradition which subordinates what happens in the cosmos to the might of an omnipotent god. Thus the work is paradigmatic for the philosophical and religious concepts of the early imperial age, which offer points of contact with nascent Christianity.
This is the most authoritative and engaging philosophical reference work in English. It gives clear and reliable guidance to all areas of philosophy and to the ideas of all notable philosophers from antiquity to the present day. The scope of the volume is not limited to English-languagephilosophy: it surveys the foremost philosophy from all parts of the world. A distinguished international assembly of more than two hundred contributors provide almost 2,000 alphabetically arranged entries which are not only instructive but also entertaining: they combine learning, lucidity, elegance, and wit. There are more than fifty extended entries of 3,000 words on themain areas of philosophy and the great philosophers: these include essays by Alasdair MacIntyre on the history of moral philosophy, Paul Feyerabend on the history of the philosophy of science, Jaegwon Kim on problems of the philosophy of mind, Richard Swinburne on problems of the philosophy ofreligion, David Charles on Aristotle, Peter Singer on Hegel, Anthony Kenny on Frege, and Anthony Quinton on philosophy itself. Short entries deal with key concepts (for instance, personal identity, time) doctrines (utilitarianism, holism), problems (the mind-body problem, the meaning of life), schools of thought (Marxist philosophy, the Vienna Circle), and practical issues (abortion, vegetarianism). Individual thinkerspast (Pythagoras, Confucius, Galileo, Goethe, Burke, Santayana, de Beauvoir, Radhakrishnan) and present (over 150 contemporary figures, such as Chomsky, Derrida, and Popper) are profiled, and eighty of them are depicted in black-and-white portraits. Interspersed throughout are short explanations ofparticular philosophical terms (qualia, supervenience, iff), puzzles (the Achilles paradox, the prisoner's dilemma), and curiosities (the philosopher's stone, slime). Every entry is accompanied by suggestions for further reading. A chronological chart of the history of philosophy is located at theend of the book, together with fourteen diagrams showing the structure of philosophy and the relations between its subjects and doctrines. This book will be an indispensable guide and a constant source of stimulation and enlightenment for anyone interested in abstract thought, the eternal questions, and the foundations of human understanding.
Standard accounts of nineteenth-century German philosophy often begin with Kant and assess philosophers after him in light of their responses to Kantian idealism. In Continental Idealism, Paul Redding argues that the story of German idealism begins with Leibniz. Redding begins by examining Leibniz's dispute with Newton over the nature of space, time and God, and stresses the way in which Leibniz incorporated Platonic and Aristotelian elements in his distinctive brand of idealism. Redding shows how Kant's interpretation of Leibniz's views of space and time consequently shaped his own 'transcendental' version of idealism. Far from ending here, however, Redding argues that post-Kantian idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel on the one hand and metaphysical sceptics such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche on the other continued to wrestle with a form of idealism ultimately derived from Leibniz. Continental Idealism offers not only a new picture of one of the most important philosophical movements in the history of philosophy, but also a valuable and clear introduction to the origins of Continental and European philosophy.
