The world faces a crisis of meaning. The old stories - whether the exclusive claims of rival religions or the grand schemes of perennial philosophy - seem bankrupt to many. The editorial stance of this book is that mysticism and science offer a way forward here, but only if they abandon the idol of a single logical synthesis and acknowledge the diversity of different ways of knowing. The contributors, from disciplines as diverse as music, psychology, mathematics and religion, build a vision that...
Wa(h)Re Archaologie: Die Medialisierung Archaologischen Wissens Im Spannungsfeld Von Wissenschaft Und Offentlichkeit
by Marco Kircher
The Context of Explanation (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, v. 149)
by Martin Bunzl
Martin Bunzl considers the prospects for a general and comprehensive account of explanation, given the variety of interests that prompt explanations in science. Bunzl argues that any successful account of explanation must deal with two very different contexts - one static and one dynamic. Traditionally, theories of explanation have been built for the former of these two contexts. That is to say, they are designed to show how it is that a "finished" body of scientific knowledge can be put to expl...
Samsara - An Exploration of the Hidden Forces that Shape and Bind Us
by Daniel McKenzie
In eastern spiritual traditions, samsara is often used to describe worldly existence, the cycle of birth and death or the transmigration of the soul from one incarnation to the next. But the concept of samsara is actually much broader and includes psychology, universal laws of nature, the illusory quality of existence, and even the question of free will. In Samsara - An Exploration of the Hidden Forces that Shape and Bind Us, the author takes a look at the various aspects of samsara that influen...
Interpretation of Classical Electromagnetism (Fundamental Theories of Physics, #78)
by G. Rosser
The aim of this book is to interpret all the laws of classical electromagnetism in a modern coherent way. In a typical undergraduate course using vector analysis, the students finally end up with Maxwell's equations, when they are often exhausted after a very long course, in which full discussions are properly given of the full range of applications of individual laws, each of which is important in its own right. As a result, many students do not appreciate how limited is the experimental eviden...
Kant’s Theory of Natural Science (Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, #159)
by Peter Plaass
Plaass's treatise stood at the beginning of a renewed wave of scholarship regarding Kant's Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (MF). Plaass argues that the MF represents an integral step in Kant's development between the two editions of the Critique of Pure Reason. The MF repeats the `Copernican turn', using the conditions of subjectivity to derive the metaphysical determinations of `matter' as the object of natural science with the new method called `metaphysical constructio...
The editor and literary agent John Brockman recently challenged the salon of scientists that he hosts on his website by asking: 'What is the most important invention of the past two thousand years?' Not content to be merely right, his contributors vied for originality, provocativeness and intellectual panache. This book provides a showcase for more than a hundred of their responses, which are as varied, and in some cases strange, as the participants themselves. Gutenberg's printing press wins th...
Post-Truth Imaginations (History and Philosophy of Technoscience)
This book engages with post-truth as a problem of societal order and for scholarly analysis. It claims that post-truth discourse is more deeply entangled with main Western imaginations of knowledge societies than commonly recognised. Scholarly responses to post-truth have not fully addressed these entanglements, treating them either as something to be morally condemned or as accusations against which scholars have to defend themselves (for having somehow contributed to it). Aiming for wider prob...
Schopenhauer’s Broken World-View (Science and Philosophy, #10)
by P.F. Lauxtermann
Schopenhauer's philosophy, at first sight so beautifully rounded, upon analysis reveals itself as the secret arena of two conflicting world-views. The present analysis considers the conflict by confronting Schopenhauer as a `disciple-of-sorts of Kant' with Schopenhauer as `Goethe's one-time collaborator on the theory of colour'. Here the two meet over profound issues which the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century has ineluctably put before us: what is the right level at which to appr...
In recent years philosophers of science have urged that many scientific theories are extremely useful and successful despite being internally inconsistent. Via an investigation of eight alleged 'inconsistent theories' in the history of science, Peter Vickers urges that this view is at best overly simplistic. Most of these cases can only be described as examples of 'inconsistent science' if we employ reconstructions of science which depart from the real (history of) science to an unacceptable deg...
Searching for meaning in what Nietzsche called "the rainbow colours" around the outer edges of knowledge and imagination, Edward O. Wilson bridges science and philosophy to create a twenty-first-century treatise on human existence. Once criticised for his over-reliance on genetics, Wilson unfurls his most expansive and advanced theories on human behaviour. Whether attempting to explicate "the Riddle of the Human Species", warning of "the Collapse of Biodiversity" or creating a plausible "Portrai...
Science and Beyond
In this collection of essays leading scientists debate the limits, future, and scope of science. Contributors include: John Maynard Smith, Brian Goodwin, Richard Dawkins, Patrick Bateson, Patrick Wall, Margaret Boden, Joan Safran, John Taylor, Richard Gregory, Janet Sayers, Tom Blundell, Hilary Rose, Alwyn Smith and James Watson.
Model-Based Reasoning
There are several key ingredients common to the various forms of model-based reasoning considered in this book. The term 'model' comprises both internal and external representations. The models are intended as interpretations of target physical systems, processes, phenomena, or situations and are retrieved or constructed on the basis of potentially satisfying salient constraints of the target domain. The book's contributors are researchers active in the area of creative reasoning in science and...
Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion
by PH Gerald N Callahan
This book reviews the horizons and frontiers of humanism as they interact with the science of life in the universe, now generally known as "astrobiology". As one of the most important conversations of our time, the existence of life itself raises deep questions that are meaningful to both astrobiology and humanism. The text discusses current disagreements in this intercultural dialogue, which are shown to be solely due to the widespread delusion that the horizons and frontiers of science can be...
Beyond his pivotal place in the history of scientific thought, Charles Darwin's writings and his theory of evolution by natural selection have also had a profound impact on art and culture and continue to do so to this day. The Literary and Cultural Reception of Charles Darwin in Europe is a comprehensive survey of this enduring cultural impact throughout the continent. With chapters written by leading international scholars that explore how literary writers and popular culture responded to D...