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Author: Jonathan Barnes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2005-11-10
Total Pages: 384
ISBN-13: 9780521022187
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStudies the impact that the advances in philosophy and science had on each other in Greece between 300 B.C. and A.D. 200.
Author: James E. Gunn
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 9780810849020
DOWNLOAD EBOOKScience fiction is a field of literature that has great interest and great controversy among its writers and critics. This book examines the roots, history, development, current status, and future directions of the field through articles contributed by well-respected science fiction writers, teachers, and critics. This book can be used as a textbook for courses in theory as well as courses in science fiction literature and science fiction writing.
Author: Chad Arment
Publisher:
Published: 2004
Total Pages: 404
ISBN-13: 9781930585157
DOWNLOAD EBOOKCryptozoology has a scientific foundation and methodology, detailed here for those seeking a more rigorous understanding of the subject.
Author: Moon Books Schooner Moon Books
Publisher: Lulu.com
Published: 2008-02-01
Total Pages: 168
ISBN-13: 0615190456
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book was inspired by, and is loosely based on, "The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry" (1972) by the late Dr. J Allen Hynek. Dr. Hynek's book is generally considered to be the most influential book ever written about UFOs, but much has happened since 1972. This new book not only brings us up-to-date, but extrapolates on current science whenever possible. Perspectives are offered in three basic categories: natural causes, domestic technology, and alien technology. But perhaps more importantly a new way of looking at the phenomena is proposed that has been largely overlooked by other authors, and which finds itself at home in any of these three possibilities. The reader will not find discussion of conspiracy theories, accounts of abductions, or metaphysical and supernatural hypotheses. However, one will find speculations about possible alien visitations, what alien technology might be capable of, or what the distant future might hold.
Author: Peter Achinstein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001-09-20
Total Pages: 300
ISBN-13: 0198032919
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhat is required for something to be evidence for a hypothesis? In this fascinating, elegantly written work, distinguished philosopher of science Peter Achinstein explores this question, rejecting typical philosophical and statistical theories of evidence. He claims these theories are much too weak to give scientists what they want--a good reason to believe--and, in some cases, they furnish concepts that mistakenly make all evidential claims a priori. Achinstein introduces four concepts of evidence, defines three of them by reference to "potential" evidence, and characterizes the latter using a novel epistemic interpretation of probability. The resulting theory is then applied to philosophical and historical issues. Solutions are provided to the "grue," "ravens," "lottery," and "old-evidence" paradoxes, and to a series of questions. These include whether explanations or predictions furnish more evidential weight, whether individual hypotheses or entire theoretical systems can receive evidential support, what counts as a scientific discovery, and what sort of evidence is required for it. The historical questions include whether Jean Perrin had non-circular evidence for the existence of molecules, what type of evidence J. J. Thomson offered for the existence of the electron, and whether, as is usually supposed, he really discovered the electron. Achinstein proposes answers in terms of the concepts of evidence introduced. As the premier book in the fabulous new series Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Science, this volume is essential for philosophers of science and historians of science, as well as for statisticians, scientists with philosophical interests, and anyone curious about scientific reasoning.
Author: Alberto Vanzo
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-03-11
Total Pages: 296
ISBN-13: 0429663625
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExperimental philosophy was an exciting and extraordinarily successful development in the study of nature in the seventeenth century. Yet experimental philosophy was not without its critics and was far from the only natural philosophical method on the scene. In particular, experimental philosophy was contrasted with and set against speculative philosophy and, in some quarters, was accused of tending to irreligion. This volume brings together ten scholars of early modern philosophy, history and science in order to shed new light on the complex relations between experiment, speculation and religion in early modern Europe. The first six chapters of the book focus on the respective roles of experimental and speculative philosophy in individual seventeenth-century philosophers. They include Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, Margaret Cavendish, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Isaac Newton. The next two chapters deal with the relation between experimental philosophy and religion with a special focus on hypotheses and natural religion. The penultimate chapter takes a broader European perspective and examines the paucity of concerns with religion among Italian natural philosophers of the period. Finally, the concluding chapter draws all these individuals and themes together to provide a critical appraisal of recent scholarship on experimental philosophy. This book is the first collection of essays on the subject of early modern experimental philosophy. It will appeal to scholars and students of early modern philosophy, science and religion.
Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2018-10-25
Total Pages: 225
ISBN-13: 1527520293
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPhilosophy is the project of seeking for answers to “the big questions” regarding the condition of man, the nature of Reality, and man’s place within its scheme of things. The philosopher tries, as best one can, to address this range of complex and difficult issues. Against this background, this book considers some major areas of philosophical concern: namely, humans and their interpersonal relations, reality and our knowledge thereof, and philosophizing itself. It presents various case studies that typify the philosopher’s approach to the issues.
Author: Sun-ha Hong
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2020-07-28
Total Pages: 282
ISBN-13: 1479802107
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAn inquiry into what we can know in an age of surveillance and algorithms Knitting together contemporary technologies of datafication to reveal a broader, underlying shift in what counts as knowledge, Technologies of Speculation reframes today’s major moral and political controversies around algorithms and artificial intelligence. How many times we toss and turn in our sleep, our voluminous social media activity and location data, our average resting heart rate and body temperature: new technologies of state and self-surveillance promise to re-enlighten the black boxes of our bodies and minds. But Sun-ha Hong suggests that the burden to know and to digest this information at alarming rates is stripping away the liberal subject that ‘knows for themselves’, and risks undermining the pursuit of a rational public. What we choose to track, and what kind of data is extracted from us, shapes a society in which my own experience and sensation is increasingly overruled by data-driven systems. From the rapidly growing Quantified Self community to large-scale dragnet data collection in the name of counter-terrorism and drone warfare, Hong argues that data’s promise of objective truth results in new cultures of speculation. In his analysis of the Snowden affair, Hong demonstrates an entirely new way of thinking through what we could know, and the political and philosophical stakes of the belief that data equates to knowledge. When we simply cannot process all the data at our fingertips, he argues, we look past the inconvenient and the complicated to favor the comprehensible. In the process, racial stereotypes and other longstanding prejudices re-enter our newest technologies by the back door. Hong reveals the moral and philosophical equations embedded into the algorithmic eye that now follows us all.
Author: Glyn Daly
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
Published: 2019-03-15
Total Pages: 320
ISBN-13: 0810139375
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSpeculation: Politics, Ideology, Event develops Hegel’s radical perspective of speculative thought as a way of reclaiming and revitalizing the sense of the future and its possibilities. Engaging with such figures as Alain Badiou, Quentin Meillassoux, Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Žižek, and Fredric Jameson, Glyn Daly articulates the distinctness of speculative philosophy and draws its implications for new debates in areas of science, politics, capitalism, ideology, ethics, and the event. In a confrontation with today’s fatalistic milieu, principal emphasis is given to Hegel’s idea of infinity as the intrinsic dimension of negativity within all finitude. Against the modern era’s paradigmatic tendency to externalize social problems in the form of antagonism and Otherness, Daly argues for a renewal of utopian thought based on Hegelian reconciliation and the affirmation of excess as the essence of all being. On these grounds, he advances a new kind of political imagination that in speculative terms centers on uncompromising notions of truth and reason.
Author: Charles Henry Dow
Publisher:
Published: 1920
Total Pages: 108
ISBN-13:
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