Culture and Cultural Entities

Culture and Cultural Entities
Title Culture and Cultural Entities PDF eBook
Author Joseph Margolis
Publisher Springer Science & Business Media
Pages 189
Release 2013-11-11
Genre Science
ISBN 9401576947

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viii choice and these include efforts to provide logical frameworks within which wecan make senseof these notions. This series will attempt to bring together work from allof these approaches to the history and philosophy of science and technology in the belief that each has something to add to our understanding. The volumes of this series have emerged either from lectures given by an author while serving as an honorary visiting professor at The City Collegeof New York or from a conference sponsored by that institution. The City College Program in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology oversees and directs these lectures and conferences with the financial aid of the Association for Philosophy ofScience, Psychotherapy, and Ethics. MARTIN TAMNY RAPHAEL STERN TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITO RS' PR EFACE vii PR EFACE xi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii I. NATUR E, CULTUR E, AND PERSONS 2. THE CONCEPT OF CONSCIOUSNESS 20 3. ANIMAL AND HUMAN MINDS 42 4 . ACTION AND CAUSALITY 64 5. PUZZLES ABOUT TH E CAUSAL EXPLANATION OF HUMAN ACTIONS 83 6. COGNITIVISM AND THE PROBLEM OF EXPLAINING HUMAN INTELLIGENCE 101 7. WITTGENSTEIN AND NATURAL LANGUAGES : AN ALTERNATIV E TO RATIONALIST AND EMPIRICIST THEO RIE S 133 INDEX 163 PREFACE I have tried to make a fresh beginning on the theory of cultural phenomena, largely from the perspectives of Anglo-American analytic philosophy.

Culture and Cultural Entities - Toward a New Unity of Science

Culture and Cultural Entities - Toward a New Unity of Science
Title Culture and Cultural Entities - Toward a New Unity of Science PDF eBook
Author Joseph Margolis
Publisher Springer Science & Business Media
Pages 164
Release 2009-06-13
Genre Philosophy
ISBN 9048125545

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Culture and Cultural Entities provides an original philosophical analysis of the nature and explanation of cultural phenomena, with special attention to ontology and methodology. It addresses in depth such topics as: the relation between physical and biological nature and cultural phenomena; the analysis of intentionality; the nature and explanation of action; causality; causal explanation and the unity of science; theories of language; historicity; animal and human intelligence; psychological and social phenomena; technology and evolution. Its approach features a form of non-reductive materialism, examines a wide range of views, and is highly readable, making it suitable for professionals, advanced undergraduate and graduate students, and an informed general audience. A new chapter was added to give a sense of pertinent trends since the appearance of the first edition, particularly with respect to the history of philosophy, pragmatism, the unity of science, and evolution. The unity, scope, and simplicity of the theory are well-regarded.

Reuniting the Antipodes - Constructive and Nonstandard Views of the Continuum

Reuniting the Antipodes - Constructive and Nonstandard Views of the Continuum
Title Reuniting the Antipodes - Constructive and Nonstandard Views of the Continuum PDF eBook
Author Peter Schuster
Publisher Springer Science & Business Media
Pages 330
Release 2013-03-14
Genre Mathematics
ISBN 940159757X

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At first glance, Robinson's original form of nonstandard analysis appears nonconstructive in essence, because it makes a rather unrestricted use of classical logic and set theory and, in particular, of the axiom of choice. Recent developments, however, have given rise to the hope that the distance between constructive and nonstandard mathematics is actually much smaller than it appears. So the time was ripe for the first meeting dedicated simultaneously to both ways of doing mathematics – and to the current and future reunion of these seeming opposites. Consisting of peer-reviewed research and survey articles written on the occasion of such an event, this volume offers views of the continuum from various standpoints. Including historical and philosophical issues, the topics of the contributions range from the foundations, the practice, and the applications of constructive and nonstandard mathematics, to the interplay of these areas and the development of a unified theory.

Talking Wolves

Talking Wolves
Title Talking Wolves PDF eBook
Author A. Biletzki
Publisher Springer Science & Business Media
Pages 242
Release 2013-03-14
Genre Philosophy
ISBN 9401588872

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Talking Wolves advances an analysis of Hobbes which takes language seriously (as seriously as Hobbes took it). It presents a reading of Hobbes's view of society at large, and political society in particular, through a comprehensive discussion based on, and intimately linked to, his philosophy of language. This philosophy, in turn, is seen in a new light as being a pragmatic theory of language in use, language in action.

Explanation

Explanation
Title Explanation PDF eBook
Author Giora Hon
Publisher Springer Science & Business Media
Pages 348
Release 2013-04-17
Genre Science
ISBN 9401597316

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For some years we have been conducting at the University of Haifa an interdisciplinary seminar on explanation in philosophy and psychology. We habitually begin the seminar with some philosophical reflections on explanation - an analysis of the concept and its metaphysical underpinnings. We discuss the various models and proceed to examine explanation in the setting of psychology. Thus, from the outset, we have focused not only on the concept itself but also on its application. The objective that we have set for the seminar, attended by students from both departments, Philosophy and Psychology, has been a critical understanding of the concept of explanation, its use and limitations. We were keen on deepening our understanding of the concept and on exploring its applications in fields of knowledge other than psychology. This was the motivation for convening an international conference on explanation and its application. The conference took place in the spring of 1998 under the auspices of the University of Haifa. The present book is the fruit of this meeting. The reader should note that the second part of the Introduction presents a detailed analytical account of the book. We hope that this overview will facilitate efficient use of the book by directing the reader's attention to those issues that might be of interest to him or her.

Logic, Meaning and Computation

Logic, Meaning and Computation
Title Logic, Meaning and Computation PDF eBook
Author C. Anthony Anderson
Publisher Springer Science & Business Media
Pages 632
Release 2012-12-06
Genre Philosophy
ISBN 9401005265

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This volume began as a remembrance of Alonzo Church while he was still with us and is now finally complete. It contains papers by many well-known scholars, most of whom have been directly influenced by Church's own work. Often the emphasis is on foundational issues in logic, mathematics, computation, and philosophy - as was the case with Church's contributions, now universally recognized as having been of profound fundamental significance in those areas. The volume will be of interest to logicians, computer scientists, philosophers, and linguists. The contributions concern classical first-order logic, higher-order logic, non-classical theories of implication, set theories with universal sets, the logical and semantical paradoxes, the lambda-calculus, especially as it is used in computation, philosophical issues about meaning and ontology in the abstract sciences and in natural language, and much else. The material will be accessible to specialists in these areas and to advanced graduate students in the respective fields.

I Am You

I Am You
Title I Am You PDF eBook
Author Daniel Kolak
Publisher Springer Science & Business Media
Pages 679
Release 2007-11-03
Genre Philosophy
ISBN 1402030142

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Borders enclose and separate us. We assign to them tremendous significance. Along them we draw supposedly uncrossable boundaries within which we believe our individual identities begin and end, erecting the metaphysical dividing walls that enclose each one of us into numerically identical, numerically distinct, entities: persons. Do the borders between us - physical, psychological, neurological, causal, spatial, temporal, etc. - merit the metaphysical significance ordinarily accorded them? The central thesis of I Am You is that our borders do not signify boundaries between persons. We are all the same person. Variations on this heretical theme have been voiced periodically throughout the ages (the Upanishads, Averroës, Giordano Bruno, Josiah Royce, Schrödinger, Fred Hoyle, Freeman Dyson). In presenting his arguments, the author relies on detailed analyses of recent formal work on personal identity, especially that of Derek Parfit, Sydney Shoemaker, Robert Nozick, David Wiggins, Daniel C. Dennett and Thomas Nagel, while incorporating the views of Descartes, Leibniz, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, Kant, Husserl and Brouwer. His development of the implied moral theory is inspired by, and draws on, Rawls, Sidgwick, Kant and again Parfit. The traditional, commonsense view that we are each a separate person numerically identical to ourselves over time, i.e., that personal identity is closed under known individuating and identifying borders - what the author calls Closed Individualism - is shown to be incoherent. The demonstration that personal identity is not closed but open points collectively in one of two new directions: either there are no continuously existing, self-identical persons over time in the sense ordinarily understood - the sort of view developed by philosophers as diverse as Buddha, Hume and most recently Derek Parfit, what the author calls Empty Individualism - or else you are everyone, i.e., personal identity is not closed under known individuating and identifying borders, what the author calls Open Individualism. In making his case, the author: - offers a new explanation both of consciousness and of self-consciousness - constructs a new theory of Self - explains psychopathologies (e.g. multiple personality disorder, schizophrenia) - shows Open Individualism to be the best competing explanation of who we are - provides the metaphysical foundations for global ethics. The book is intended for philosophers and the philosophically inclined - physicists, mathematicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, linguists, computer scientists, economists, and communication theorists. It is accessible to graduate students and advanced undergraduates.