Bücher der Reihe SpringerBriefs in Philosophy

This book showcases the history and theory of pragmatism and its alignment to the sensibilities of contemporary analytic philosophy.

This book examines how epistemology was reinvented by¿Ibn S¿n¿, an influential philosopher-scientist of the classical Islamic world who was known to the West by the Latinised name Avicenna. It explains his theory of knowledge in which intentionality acts as an interaction between the mind and the world. This, in turn, led Ibn S¿n¿ to distinguish an operation of intentionality specific to the generation of numbers.The author argues that Ibn S¿n¿¿s transformation of philosophy is one of the major stages in the de-hellinisation movement of the Greek heritage that was set off by the advent of the Arabic-Islamic civilisation. Readers first learn about Ibn S¿n¿¿s unprecedented investigation into the concept of the number and his criticism of such Greek thought as Platös realism, Pythagoreans¿ empiricism, and Aristotle¿s conception of existence. Next, coverage sets out the basics of Ibn S¿n¿¿s theory of knowledge needed for the construction of numbers. It describes how intentionality turns out to be key in showing the ontological dependence of numbers as well as even more critical to their construction. In describing the various mental operations that make mathematical objects intentional entities, Ibn S¿n¿ developed powerful arguments and subtle analyses to show us the extent our mental life depends on intentionality. This monograph thoroughly explores the epistemic dimension of this concept, which, the author believes, can also explain the actual genesis and evolution of mathematics by the human mind.

The book provides the different forms of materialism, particularly distinguished into claims about the material nature of the world and about the material nature of the mind, and then focus on materialist approaches to body and embodiment, selfhood, ethics, laws of nature, reductionism and determinism, and overall, its relationship to science.

This book begins with a discussion of the human life cycle and then uses that discussion and other ideas to paint a general picture of what human lives are like. While the first part looks at human development and change, the second part of the book explores what all human lives are like. Philosophical ideas and methods are central to this book, although it is difficult to subcategorize it into any familiar subdiscipline of philosophy. It draws on modern concepts from psychology and social science in order to portray an image of human life and lives and to enable readers to easily understand the notion of human development in a very specific and directed way. Although cognitive development and the development of motor skills are two examples of forms of human development, this book homes in on a particular, and arguably more synoptic, way of seeing our development, which is in relation to and occurs within the human life cycle. This book isan enlightening read for a broad range of philosophy scholars, articulating and defending a view that is neither as pessimistic nor as optimistic about human life as previous views have been.

This work explains how different theories of causation confront causal overdetermination. Chapters clarify the problem of overdetermination and explore its fundamental aspects. It is argued that a theory of causation can account for our intuitions in overdetermination cases only by accepting that the adequacy of our claims about causation depends on the context in which they are evaluated.The author proposes arguments for causal contextualism and provides insight which is valuable for resolution of the problem. These chapters enable readers to quickly absorb different perspectives on overdetermination and important theories of causation, therefore it is a work that will have a broad appeal.    

This book presents an overview of postmodernism and its social indicators, and of the postmodern condition in consciousness as an indicator of its modification and development. The book also discusses various forms of multiculturalism, including multiculturalism as multiple modernities and plural modernities, and non-Western contemporaneity.

This book offers a new way to justify privacy based on a theory derived from Buddhist insights. It also argues that the new way of conceptualizing privacy, as presented in this book, would go a long way in helping unravel the difficult concept of group privacy.

The diversity of kinds of models one finds in science - ranging from toy models and scale models to theoretical and mathematical models - has attracted attention not only from scientists, but also from philosophers, sociologists, and historians of science.

This work breaks new ground by carefully distinguishing the concepts of belief, confirmation, and evidence and then integrating them into a better understanding of personal and scientific epistemologies. It outlines a probabilistic framework in which subjective features of personal knowledge and objective features of public knowledge have their true place. It also discusses the bearings of some statistical theorems on both formal and traditional epistemologies while showing how some of the existing paradoxes in both can be resolved with the help of this framework.This book has two central aims: First, to make precise a distinction between the concepts of confirmation and evidence and to argue that failure to recognize this distinction is the source of certain otherwise intractable epistemological problems. The second goal is to demonstrate to philosophers the fundamental importance of statistical and probabilistic methods, at stake in the uncertain conditions in which for the most part we lead our lives, not simply to inferential practice in science, where they are now standard, but to epistemic inference in other contexts as well. Although the argument is rigorous, it is also accessible. No technical knowledge beyond the rudiments of probability theory, arithmetic, and algebra is presupposed, otherwise unfamiliar terms are always defined and a number of concrete examples are given. At the same time, fresh analyses are offered with a discussion of statistical and epistemic reasoning by philosophers. This book will also be of interest to scientists and statisticians looking for a larger view of their own inferential techniques.The book concludes with a technical appendix which introduces an evidential approach to multi-model inference as an alternative to Bayesian model averaging.

This book unifies a large part of the vast body of Husserlian phenomenology using a relatively simple set of dynamical laws. By making key Husserlian ideas clear and by formally expressing them, it facilitates efforts to apply Husserlian phenomenology in various domains, in particular to cognitive science.

This book is a contribution both to Aristotle studies and to the philosophy of nature, and not only offers a thorough text based account of time as modally potentiality in Aristotle's account, but also clarifies the process of "actualizing time" as taking time and looks at the implications of conceiving a world without actual time.

This title links two of the most dominant research streams in philosophy of logic, namely game theory and proof theory. The fifth chapter develops the algorithm from CTT-demonstrations to dialogical strategies.

This book lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion and operates on the assumption that dialogue between the two disciplines can be fruitful.

Since unary algebras admit only type 1, this book focuses on these algebras to tackle the main problem. It discusses several aspects of unary algebras and proves that the Constraint Satisfaction Problem for relational structures is polynomially equivalent to SysTermSat over unary algebras.

This book describes a novel conception of reality, one that uniquely incorporates an idealistic view of existence with an account of objectivity.

This volume examines Popper's philosophy by analyzing the criticism of his most popular critics: Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend and Imre Lakatos. Starting from the assumption that Hume's criticism of induction is valid, the book explores the central criticism and objections that these three critics have raised.

This book on infinite regress arguments provides (i) an up-to-date overview of the literature on the topic, (ii) ready-to-use insights for all domains of philosophy, and (iii) two case studies to illustrate these insights in some detail. Infinite regress arguments play an important role in all domains of philosophy.

This book explains the first published consistency proof of PA. A notable aspect of the proof is the representation of ordinal numbers that was developed by Gentzen. The topic should interest researchers and students who work on proof theory, history of proof theory or Hilbert's program and who do not mind reading mathematical texts.

This book develops a philosophical analysis of economic reality and economic science from an Aristotelian point of view. It differs from other philosophy of economics books as it also deals with economic reality (not only the science) and approaches its subject from an Aristotelian perspective.

Explores the practical applicability of the philosophy of science to scientific research, but also considers its relevance to practice within the realms of technology, design, crafts, and even within the world of arts and the humanities.

This volume offers a new understanding of Titchener's influential system of psychology popularly known as introspectionism, structuralism and as classical introspective psychology.

Paradoxes provide a vehicle for exposing misinterpretations and misapplications of accepted principles. for instance, startling claims concerning human destiny and the nature of reality are directly related to fallacious reasoning in a betting paradox, and a problem analyzed in philosophy journals is resolved by means of a computer program.

This book provides an introductory overview to the social debate over enhancement technologies with an overview of the transhumanists' call to bypass human nature and conservationists' argument in defense of it.

The aim of the book is to argue for the restoration of theoretical and practical reason to economics. Institutions allow us to deliberate on and guide our decisions about capabilities, through the use of practical reason.

Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. The Essentials of Risk Theory will be a helpful starting point for all risk scholars who are interested in broadening and deepening their current perspectives.

This book carries out an epistemological analysis of the decision, including a critical analysis through the continuous reference to an interdisciplinary approach including a synthesis of philosophical approaches, biology and neuroscience.

A Summary of Scientific Method is a brief description of what makes science scientific. A Summary of Scientific Method provides a clear, intuitive, and accurate model of scientific method.

The ancient Chinese scholars are fond of applying the Yin and Yang diagram to correlate almost everything. This book continues that tradition and uses the model to study other non-dialectical theories and models.

This book is a contribution to the understanding of psychosomatic health problems.