Knowledge, Reality, and Value
Knowledge, Reality, and Value

Author: Michael Huemer

Publisher:

Published: 2021-04

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13:

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The world's best introduction to philosophy, Knowledge, Reality, and Value explains basic philosophical problems in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, such as: How can we know about the world outside our minds? Is there a God? Do we have free will? Are there objective values? What distinguishes morally right from morally wrong actions? The text succinctly explains the most important theories and arguments about these things, and it does so a lot less boringly than most books written by professors."My work is all a series of footnotes to Mike Huemer." -Plato"This book is way better than my lecture notes." -Aristotle"When I have a little money, I buy Mike Huemer's books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes." -ErasmusContentsPreface Part I: Preliminaries 1. What Is Philosophy? 2. Logic 3. Critical Thinking, 1: Intellectual Virtue 4. Critical Thinking, 2: Fallacies 5. Absolute Truth Part II: Epistemology 6. Skepticism About the External World 7. Global Skepticism vs. Foundationalism 8. Defining "Knowledge" Part III: Metaphysics 9. Arguments for Theism 10. Arguments for Atheism 11. Free Will 12. Personal Identity Part IV: Ethics 13. Metaethics 14. Ethical Theory, 1: Utilitarianism 15. Ethical Theory, 2: Deontology 16. Applied Ethics, 1: The Duty of Charity 17. Applied Ethics, 2: Animal Ethics 18. Concluding Thoughts Appendix: A Guide to Writing GlossaryMichael Huemer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, where he has taught since the dawn of time. He is the author of a nearly infinite number of articles in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and political philosophy, in addition to seven other amazing and brilliant books that you should immediately buy.

Shifting Ground
Shifting Ground

Author: Naomi Scheman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2011-10-01

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 0199745633

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This volume of essays by Naomi Scheman brings together her views on epistemic and socio-political issues, views that draw on a critical reading of Wittgenstein as well as on liberatory movements and theories, all in the service of a fundamental reorientation of epistemology. For some theorists, epistemology is an essentially foundationalist and hence discredited enterprise; for others-particularly analytic epistemologists--it remains rigorously segregated from political concerns. Scheman makes a compelling case for the necessity of thinking epistemologically in fundamentally altered ways. Arguing that it is an illusion of privilege to think that we can do without usable articulations of concepts such as truth, reality, and objectivity, she maintains (as in the title of one of her essays) that epistemology needs to be "resuscitated" as an explicitly political endeavor, with trustworthiness at its heart. While each essay contributes to a specific conversation, taken together they argue for addressing theoretical questions as they arise concretely. Truth, reality, objectivity, and other concepts that problematically rest on shifting ground are more than philosophical toys, and the ground-shifting these essays enact is a move away from abstruse theorizing-analytic and post-structuralist alike. Following Wittgenstein's injunctions to just look, to attend to the "rough ground" of everyday practices, Scheman argues for finding philosophical insight in such acts of attention and in the difficulties that beset them. These essays are an attempt to grasp something in particular, to get a handle on a set of problems, and collectively they represent a fresh model of passionate philosophical engagement.

Reality? Knowledge? Philosophy!
Reality? Knowledge? Philosophy!

Author: Stephen Hetherington

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 192

ISBN-13: 1474469124

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This textbook introduction offers a new way of approaching metaphysics and epistemology - via links to ethical and social questions. It asks questions such as: Fundamentally, what are we? And what, if anything, do we know?

Time, Space and Knowledge
Time, Space and Knowledge

Author: Tarthang Tulku

Publisher: Dharma Publications

Published: 1977

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13:

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Hailed for its lucid presentation, TSK blends reasoning and experiential inquiry to offer a unique path of transformation. A deeply exhilarating book, TSK gives readers a language to ask the questions that conventional training teaches us to ignore. Thirty-five exercises reunite philosophy with direct experience.

The Social Construction of Reality
The Social Construction of Reality

Author: Peter L. Berger

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2011-04-26

Total Pages: 313

ISBN-13: 1453215468

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A watershed event in the field of sociology, this text introduced “a major breakthrough in the sociology of knowledge and sociological theory generally” (George Simpson, American Sociological Review). In this seminal book, Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann examine how knowledge forms and how it is preserved and altered within a society. Unlike earlier theorists and philosophers, Berger and Luckmann go beyond intellectual history and focus on commonsense, everyday knowledge—the proverbs, morals, values, and beliefs shared among ordinary people. When first published in 1966, this systematic, theoretical treatise introduced the term social construction,effectively creating a new thought and transforming Western philosophy.

Reality, Universal Ontology and Knowledge Systems: Toward the Intelligent World
Reality, Universal Ontology and Knowledge Systems: Toward the Intelligent World

Author: Abdoullaev, Azamat

Publisher: IGI Global

Published: 2008-04-30

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 1599049678

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"This book provides cutting-edge research on reality, its nature and fundamental structure, represented both by human minds and intelligent machines.--striving to describe a world model and ontology; organized human knowledge; powerful reasoning systems; and secure communication interoperability between human beings and computing reasoning systems promising the profound revolution in human values and ways of life"--Provided by publisher.

Making Sense of Reality
Making Sense of Reality

Author: Tia DeNora

Publisher: SAGE

Published: 2014-09-22

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1473905516

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What is reality and how do we make sense of it in everyday life? Why do some realities seem more real than others, and what of seemingly contradictory and multiple realities? This book considers reality as we represent, perceive and experience it. It suggests that the realities we take as ‘real’ are the result of real-time, situated practices that draw on and draw together many things - technologies and objects, people, gestures, meanings and media. Examining these practices illuminates reality (or rather our sense of it) as always ‘virtually real’, that is simplified and artfully produced. This examination also shows us how the sense of reality that we make is nonetheless real in its consequences. Making Sense of Reality offers students and educators a guide to analysing social life. It develops a performance-based perspective (‘doing things with’) that highlights the ever-revised dimension of realities and links this perspective to a focus on object-relations and an ecological model of culture-in-action.

Bilingual
Bilingual

Author: François Grosjean

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2010-08-15

Total Pages: 299

ISBN-13: 0674056450

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Whether in family life, social interactions, or business negotiations, half the people in the world speak more than one language every day. Yet many myths persist about bilingualism and bilinguals. In a lively and entertaining book, an international authority on bilingualism explores the many facets of life with two or more languages.