Search results

At the same time that the pace of science and technology has greatly accelerated in recent decades, our legal and ethical oversight mechanisms have become bogged down and slower. This book addresses the growing gap between the pace of science and technology and the lagging responsiveness of legal and ethical oversight society relies on to govern emerging technologies. Whether it be biotechnology, genetic testing, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, computer privacy, autonomous robotics, or any of...

Wittgenstein scholarship has continued to grow at a pace few could have anticipated - a testament both to the fertility of his thought and to the thriving state of contemporary philosophy. In response to this ever-growing interest in the field, we are delighted to announce the publication of a second series of critical assessments on Wittgenstein, emphasising both the breadth and depth of contemporary Wittgenstein research. As well as papers on the nature and method of Wittgenstein's philosophy...

First published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Including books published between 1928 and 1957, this 10 volume set presents the thinking of leading philosophers on ancient philosophy towards the first half of the twentieth century. Eight of the books focus on Plato, with some volumes, such as Philosophy of Plato providing a general overview of his philosophy, and others, such as Plato's Theory of Art, Plato's Theory of Ethics and Plato's Theory of Education providing a more in-depth look at particular aspects of his philosophy. Other titles...

This work draws together the strands of doctrine into the epistemological theory that Hume called a mental geography, which translates in modern terms into a faculty theory of knowledge. This theory forms the foundation of Hume's other best-known doctrines and, the author argues, is essential to their proper understanding.

An accessible explanation of Kurt Goedel's groundbreaking work in mathematical logic In 1931 Kurt Goedel published his fundamental paper, "On Formally Undecidable Propositions of Principia Mathematica and Related Systems." This revolutionary paper challenged certain basic assumptions underlying much research in mathematics and logic. Goedel received public recognition of his work in 1951 when he was awarded the first Albert Einstein Award for achievement in the natural sciences-perhaps the highe...

Building on a range of disciplines - from biology and anthropology to philosophy and linguistics - this book draws on the expertise of leading names in the study of organic, mental and cultural codes brought together by the emerging discipline of biosemiotics. The volume represents the first multi-authored attempt to deal with the range of codes relevant to life, and to reveal the ubiquitous role of coding mechanisms in both organic and mental evolution.

This book brings together international experts from a wide variety of disciplines, in order to understand the impact that digital technologies have had on our well-being as well as our understanding of what it means to live a life that is good for us. The multidisciplinary perspective that this collection offers demonstrates the breadth and importance of these discussions, and represents a pivotal and state-of-the-art contribution to the ongoing discussion concerning digital well-being. Further...

Like most discussions within the tradition of rights-talk, this study is motivated by the desire to promote the idea that rights are moral assets that people should acquire in the course of their membership within social and political frameworks. However, while most participants in rights-talk concentrate on the safety and protection constraints required for a successful exercising of rights, the present study inquires into the circumstances under which people's rights lose their validity. The a...

This volume is a contribution to the ongoing debate on the distinction between a 'context of justification' and a 'context of discovery'. It is meant for researchers and advanced students in philosophy of science, and for natural and social scientists interested in foundational topics. Spanning a wide range of disciplines, it combines the viewpoint of philosophers and scientists and casts a new interdisciplinary perspective on the problem of observation and experimentation.

Gadamer's aesthetics demonstrates that the experience of art is grounded in the objectivities of language, history and tradition. By treating words and images as transmittable placeholders for meanings and concepts, hermeneutics gives a persuasive account of how artworks communicate. Davey demonstrates how hermeneutics transforms aesthetic reflection into a poignant attentive practice that is open to the unexpected. This new "poetics" is relevant not only to the understanding of art but also to...

This book is designed to offer a comprehensive high-level introduction to transhumanism, an international political and cultural movement that aims to produce a "paradigm shift" in our ethical and political understanding of human evolution. Transhumanist thinkers want the human species to take the course of evolution into its own hands, using advanced technologies currently under development - such as robotics, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, cognitive neurosciences, and nanotechnology -...

The essays in this collection are written by students, colleagues, and friends of Nuel Belnap to honor him on his sixtieth birthday. Our original plan was to include pieces from fonner students only, but we have deviated from this ever so slightly for a variety of personal and practical reasons. Belnap's research accomplishments are numerous and well known: He has founded (together with Alan Ross Anderson) a whole branch of logic known as "relevance logic." He has made contributions of fundament...

Lean Logic is David Fleming's masterpiece, the product of more than thirty years' work and a testament to the creative brilliance of one of Britain's most important intellectuals. A dictionary unlike any other, it leads readers through Fleming's stimulating exploration of fields as diverse as culture, history, science, art, logic, ethics, myth, economics, and anthropology, being made up of four hundred and four engaging essay-entries covering topics such as Boredom, Community, Debt, Growth, Har...

This book provides a formal ontology of senses and the belief-relation that grounds the distinction between de dicto, de re, and de se beliefs as well as the opacity of belief reports. According to this ontology, the relata of the belief-relation are an agent and a special sort of object-dependent sense (a "thought-content"), the latter being an "abstract" property encoding various syntactic and semantic constraints on sentences of a language of thought.

Creative Space summarizes and integrates the various up-to-date approaches of computational intelligence to knowledge and technology creation including the specific novel feature of utilizing the creative abilities of the human mind, such as tacit knowledge, emotions and instincts, and intuition. It analyzes several important approaches of this new paradigm such as the Shinayakana Systems Approach, the organizational knowledge creation theory, in particular SECI Spiral, and the Rational Theory o...

This volume tracks Ramsey's philosophical development over the course of his short life, arguing that there runs throughout Ramsey's work a methodological commitment to philosophising in what he called 'the realistic spirit', a commitment which is only given that name by him in 1929, the final year of his life. This commitment is characterised by the rejection of various (though not all) forms of realism, not as false, but as nonsensical. A large part of the book is concerned with characterising...

This open access book examines more than two centuries of societal development using novel historical and statistical approaches. It applies the well-being monitor developed by Statistics Netherlands that has been endorsed by a significant part of the international, statistical community. It features The Netherlands as a case study, which is an especially interesting example; although it was one of the world's richest countries around 1850, extreme poverty and inequality were significant probl...

As chairman and chief executive officer of Atlantic Richfield, the oil giant he had created, Robert Orville Anderson may have seemed an unlikely environmental leader in the 1960s. However, Anderson did not wait for the rest of his industry to recognize that its enlightened self interest lay in responding to the clamor of environmental activists. In this book, journalist Jack Raymond chronicles Anderson's activities on behalf of the environment in his capacity as oil man, and as chairman of the A...