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Certain Philosophical Questions

Author : J. E. McGuire

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 536 pages

File Size : 39,61 MB

Release : 2003-02-13

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 9780521530668

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Book Description

Isaac Newton wrote the manuscript Questiones quaedam philosophicae at the very beginning of his scientific career. This small notebook thus affords rare insight into the beginnings of Newton's thought and the foundations of his subsequent intellectual development. The Questiones contains a series of entries in Newton's hand that range over many topics in science, philosophy, psychology, theology, and the foundations of mathematics. These notes, written in English, provide a very detailed picture of Newton's early interests, and record his critical appraisal of contemporary issues in natural philosophy. Written predominantly in 1664-5, they give a significant perspective on Newton's thought just prior to his annus mirabilis, 1666. This volume provides a complete transcription of the Questiones, together with an 'expansion' into modern English, and a full editorial commentary on the content and significance of the notebook in the development of Newton's thought. It will be essential reading for all those interested in Newton and the intellectual foundations of science.



The Nature of Philosophical Problems

Author : John Kekes

Publisher : OUP Oxford

Page : 256 pages

File Size : 10,84 MB

Release : 2014-05-08

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 0191040908

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Book Description

We must all make choices about how we want to live. We evaluate our possibilities by relying on historical, moral, personal, political, religious, and scientific modes of evaluations, but the values and reasons that follow from them conflict. Philosophical problems are forced on us when we try to cope with such conflicts. There are reasons for and against all proposed ways of coping with the conflicts, but none of them has been generally accepted by reasonable thinkers. The constructive aim of The Nature of Philosophical Problems is to propose a way of understanding the nature of such philosophical problems, explain why they occur, why they are perennial, and propose a pluralist approach as the most reasonable way of coping with them. This approach is practical, context-dependent, and particular. It follows from it that the recurrence of philosophical problems is not a defect, but a welcome consequence of the richness of our modes of understanding that enlarges the range of possibilities by which we might choose to live. The critical aim of the book is to give reasons against both the absolutist attempt to find an overriding value or principle for resolving philosophical problems and of the relativist claim that reasons unavoidably come to an end and how we want to live is ultimately a matter of personal preference, not of reasons.



Philosophical Progress

Author : Daniel Stoljar

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 201 pages

File Size : 10,85 MB

Release : 2017

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 0198802099

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Book Description

Daniel Stoljar presents a persuasive rejection of the widespread view that philosophy makes no progress. He defends a reasonable optimism about philosophical progress, showing that we have correctly answered philosophical questions in the past and may expect to do so in the future. He offers a credible vision of how philosophy works.



Mass Terms: Some Philosophical Problems

Author : Francis Jeffrey Pelletier

Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media

Page : 308 pages

File Size : 33,95 MB

Release : 2007-11-08

Category : Language Arts & Disciplines

ISBN : 1402041101

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Book Description

I. MASS TERMS, COUNT TERMS, AND SORTAL TERMS Central examples of mass terms are easy to come by. 'Water', 'smoke', 'gold', etc. , differ in their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties from count terms such as 'man', 'star', 'wastebasket', etc. Syntactically, it seems, mass terms do, but singular count terms do not, admit the quantifier phrases 'much', 'an amount of', 'a little', etc. The typical indefinite article for them is 'some' (unstressed)!, and this article cannot be used with singular count terms. Count terms, but not mass terms, use the quantifiers 'each', 'every', 'some', 'few', 'many'; and they use 'a(n)' as the indefinite article. They can, unlike the mass terms, take numerals as prefixes. Mass terms seem not to have a plural. Semantically, philo sophers have characterized count terms as denoting (classes of?) indi vidual objects, whereas what mass terms denote are cumulative and dissective. (That is, a mass term is supposed to be true of any sum of things (stuff) it is true of, and true of any part of anything of which it is true). Pragmatically, it seems that speakers use count terms when they wish to refer to individual objects, or when they wish to reidentify a particular already introduced into discoursc. Given a "space appropriate" to a count term C, it makes sense to ask how many C's there are in that space.



Philosophical Problems in Sense Perception: Testing the Limits of Aristotelianism

Author : David Bennett

Publisher : Springer Nature

Page : 262 pages

File Size : 41,55 MB

Release : 2020-12-15

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 3030569462

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Book Description

This volume focuses on philosophical problems concerning sense perception in the history of philosophy. It consists of thirteen essays that analyse the philosophical tradition originating in Aristotle’s writings. Each essay tackles a particular problem that tests the limits of Aristotle’s theory of perception and develops it in new directions. The problems discussed range from simultaneous perception to causality in perception, from the representational nature of sense-objects to the role of conscious attention, and from the physical/mental divide to perception as quasi-rational judgement. The volume gives an equal footing to Greek, Arabic, and Latin philosophical traditions. It makes a substantial contribution not just to the study of the Aristotelian analysis of sense perception, but to its reception in the commentary tradition and beyond. Thus, the papers address developments in Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Avicenna, John of Jandun, Nicole Oresme, and Sayf al-Din al-Amidi, among others. The result of this is a coherent collection that attacks a well-defined topic from a wide range of perspectives and across philosophical traditions.



Never at Rest

Author : Richard S. Westfall

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 934 pages

File Size : 31,88 MB

Release : 1983-04-29

Category : Technology & Engineering

ISBN : 1107392799

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Book Description

This richly detailed 1981 biography captures both the personal life and the scientific career of Isaac Newton, presenting a fully rounded picture of Newton the man, the scientist, the philosopher, the theologian, and the public figure. Professor Westfall treats all aspects of Newton's career, but his account centres on a full description of Newton's achievements in science. Thus the core of the work describes the development of the calculus, the experimentation that altered the direction of the science of optics, and especially the investigations in celestial dynamics that led to the law of universal gravitation.



Philosophical Problems of Modern Physics

Author : Peter Mittelstaedt

Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media

Page : 220 pages

File Size : 44,40 MB

Release : 2012-12-06

Category : Science

ISBN : 9401096171

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Book Description

Professor Peter Mittelstaedt is a physicist whose primary concern is the foundations of current physical theories. This concern has made him, through his prolonged, incisive and detailed examinations of the structures and overall characteristics of these theories, into a philosopher of physic- of contemporary physics, to be precise, of relativistic theories of space and time, and of the logic of quantum mechanics, in particular. The present book, which expounds his main ideas in these matters, has seen four editions (in German), each including newer results - as indeed does the present translation: see the author's 1975 preface to the English translation. Perhaps this is the place to repeat the author's chief problem and mention his own approach, even though they are expounded in his Intro duction. How close is Mittelstaedt to Kant's understanding of science? We are at liberty to choose a framework for thought - a logic and a method ology - prior to experience (in the classic sense, to think a priori); yet we choose a framework so as to fit our empirical findings. How is this done? How may it be understood and justified? This is obviously the question of all philosophies that evolve from, and are in reaction to, Kant's system.



Philosophical Relevance of Language

Author : Kanti Lal Das

Publisher : Northern Book Centre

Page : 284 pages

File Size : 10,88 MB

Release : 2006

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 9788172111960

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Book Description

The book is an attempt to examine the philosophical relevance of language from the methodological point of view. Moreover, an effort has been made that language is relevant to philosophy, because it helps in developing a philosophy of language and a philosophy with a linguistic turn subsequently known as linguistic philosophy. The book highlights the following issues:?Are the problems in Philosophy linguistic??Is the positivists? thesis circular??Does language require revision??Are the metaphors like ?form of life? or ?game? enough to sustain the charge of revisionism??Is language related to reality??In what sense language is said to be mirror of human mind?



Handbook of Color Psychology

Author : Andrew J. Elliot

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 1737 pages

File Size : 48,35 MB

Release : 2015-12-17

Category : Psychology

ISBN : 1316395332

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Book Description

We perceive color everywhere and on everything that we encounter in daily life. Color science has progressed to the point where a great deal is known about the mechanics, evolution, and development of color vision, but less is known about the relation between color vision and psychology. However, color psychology is now a burgeoning, exciting area and this Handbook provides comprehensive coverage of emerging theory and research. Top scholars in the field provide rigorous overviews of work on color categorization, color symbolism and association, color preference, reciprocal relations between color perception and psychological functioning, and variations and deficiencies in color perception. The Handbook of Color Psychology seeks to facilitate cross-fertilization among researchers, both within and across disciplines and areas of research, and is an essential resource for anyone interested in color psychology in both theoretical and applied areas of study.



Philosophy of Science

Author : Alexander Christian

Publisher : Springer

Page : 281 pages

File Size : 50,53 MB

Release : 2018-03-26

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 3319725777

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Book Description

This broad and insightful book presents current scholarship in important subfields of philosophy of science and addresses an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary readership. It groups carefully selected contributions into the four fields of I) philosophy of physics, II) philosophy of life sciences, III) philosophy of social sciences and values in science, and IV) philosophy of mathematics and formal modeling. Readers will discover research papers by Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Keizo Matsubara, Kian Salimkhani, Andrea Reichenberger, Anne Sophie Meincke, Javier Suárez, Roger Deulofeu, Ludger Jansen, Peter Hucklenbroich, Martin Carrier, Elizaveta Kostrova, Lara Huber, Jens Harbecke, Antonio Piccolomini d’Aragona and Axel Gelfert. This collection fosters dialogue between philosophers of science working in different subfields, and brings readers the finest and latest work across the breadth of the field, illustrating that contemporary philosophy of science has successfully broadened its scope of reflection. It will interest and inspire a wide audience of philosophers as well as scholars of the natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. The volume shares selected contributions from the prestigious second triennial conference of the German Society for Philosophy of Science/ Gesellschaft für Wissenschaftsphilosophie (GWP.2016, March 8, 2016 – March 11, 2016).