Showing titles in Epistemology

What, exactly, is post-truth? Is it wishful thinking, political spin, mass delusion, bold-faced lying? McIntyre analyzes recent examples - claims about inauguration crowd size, crime statistics, and the popular vote - and finds that post-truth is an assertion of ideological supremacy by which its practitioners try to compel someone to believe something regardless of the evidence. Yet post-truth didn't begin with the 2016 election; the denial of scientific facts about smoking, evolution, vaccines, and climate change offers a road map for more widespread fact denial.

Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought. Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.

Philosophy for busy people. Listen to this succinct account of the philosophy of Wittgenstein in just one hour. Ludwig Wittgenstein saw himself as ‘the last philosopher’. In his view, philosophy in the traditional sense was finished. A superb logician, Wittgenstein distrusted language and sought to solve the problems of philosophy by reducing them to the purest form of logic. Everything else - metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, finally even philosophy itself - was excluded.

For thousands of years, the faithful have honed proselytizing strategies and talked people into believing the truth of one holy book or another. Indeed, the faithful often view converting others as an obligation of their faith - and are trained from an early age to spread their unique brand of religion. The result is a world broken in large part by unquestioned faith. As an urgently needed counter to this tried-and-true tradition of religious evangelism, this audiobook offers the first-ever guide not for talking people into faith - but for talking them out of it.

Do we live inside a simulated reality or a pocket universe embedded in a larger structure about which we know virtually nothing? Is consciousness a purely physical matter, or might it require something extra, something nonphysical? According to the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel, it’s hard to say. In The Weirdness of the World, Schwitzgebel argues that the answers to these fundamental questions lie beyond our powers of comprehension. We can be certain only that the truth—whatever it is—is weird.

Why is the genome of a salamander 40 times larger than that of a human? Why does the avocado tree produce a million flowers and only a hundred fruits? Why, in short, is there so much waste in nature? In this lively and wide-ranging meditation on the curious accidents and unexpected detours on the path of life, Daniel Milo argues that we ask these questions because we’ve embraced a faulty conception of how evolution - and human society - really works.

In a letter of 1932, Karl Popper described Die beiden Grundprobleme der Erkenntnistheorie–The Two Fundamental Problems of the Theory of Knowledge–as ‘…a child of crises, above all of …the crisis of physics.' The two fundamental problems of knowledge that lie at the center of the book are the problem of induction, that although we are able to observe only a limited number of particular events, science nevertheless advances unrestricted universal statements; and the problem of demarcation, which asks for a separating line between empirical science and non-science.

For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by peace and freedom from fear, the absence of pain, and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil; death is the end of both body and soul and should therefore not be feared; the gods neither reward nor punish humans; the universe is infinite and eternal; and events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms.

A professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, Harry G. Frankfurt penned a surprise smash hit with his New York Times best seller On Bullshit, which insightfully and wittily captured the human capacity for, and tendency toward, BS. Now he examines the other side of the coin with this equally entertaining and provocative follow-up.

Although Bertrand Russell did most of his early work (along with his mentor and colleague Alfred North Whitehead) in mathematics, he had an enormously wide range of interests - from politics to sex education for the young. The following two essays - "Mysticism and Logic" and "Mathematics and the Metaphysicians" - provide listeners with a glimpse into Russell's thinking and, in turn, illuminates us about these deep subjects.

There is an epidemic of bad thinking in the world today. When Bad Thinking Happens to Good People provides an engaging tour through the basic principles of logic, argument, evidence, and probability that can make all of us more reasonable and responsible citizens.

The world's best introduction to epistemology, Understanding Knowledge discusses basic philosophical problems in epistemology.

The story goes like this: on a freezing winter night in 1941, a new piece of chamber music was performed to a crowd of prisoners of war on a three-stringed cello, clarinet, violin and pub piano with sticky keys. It was the premiere of Olivier Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du Temps. Listeners since then have been captivated by the ecstatic music and mythology of Messiaen’s masterpiece. Michael Symmons Roberts’ own lifelong fascination with the Quartet leads him on a quest to understand its enigmatic power.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is a towering figure of modern Western philosophy, someone whose thought continues to exert an influence across all areas of the discipline. His work is characterized by both breadth and unity: he writes powerfully about mind, epistemology, metaphysics, logic, mathematics, natural science, ethics, politics, aesthetics, education, and more. The Oxford Handbook of Kant provides an up-to-date account of recent scholarship on Kant's philosophy, taking in all areas of his writings.

Is it science? Is it religion? What exactly is the Design Revolution? This book answers the toughest questions about Intelligent Design. As the Intelligent Design movement has gained momentum over recent years, questions have naturally arisen to challenge its provocative claims. With clarity and concision, William Dembski responds to the most vexing questions and objections raised by experts and non-experts.

We used to know how to know. We got our answers from books or experts. We'd nail down the facts and move on. But in the Internet age, knowledge has moved onto networks. There's more knowledge than ever, of course, but it's different. Topics have no boundaries, and nobody agrees on anything.Yet this is the greatest time in history to be a knowledge seeker - if you know how.

Our beliefs constitute a large part of our knowledge of the world. We have beliefs about objects, about culture, about the past, and about the future. We have beliefs about other people, and we believe that they have beliefs as well. We use beliefs to predict, to explain, to create, to console, to entertain. Some of our beliefs we call theories, and we are extraordinarily creative at constructing them. Theories of quantum mechanics, evolution, and relativity are examples.

More than at any other time in human history, we live in an age defined by movement and mobility; yet, we lack a unifying theory which takes this seriously as a starting point for philosophy. The history of philosophy has systematically explained movement as derived from something else that does not move: space, eternity, force, and time.

Wonder and awe lie at the heart of life's most profound questions. Wonderstruck shows how these emotions respond to our fundamental need to make sense of ourselves and everything around us, and how they enable us to engage with the world as if we are experiencing it for the first time.

With his feet firmly on the ground, he challenged the speculative ideas of David Hume and George Berkeley who regarded ideas in the mind as a basis for the external world. Instead, the pugnacious but lively Reid took a much more ‘common sense’ view in basing his ideas of reality on sensus communis. Starting from a Ciceronian, stoical platform, he developed his views on more rational attitudes towards reality - ‘direct realism’.