Описание: Provides a critique of genetic determinism and reductionism within science while exploring a range of issues including the nature of science, biology, evolution, the environment, public health, and dialectics. This work brings together the essays of two prominent scientists who work to empower the public`s understanding of science and nature.
Описание: Alfred Sohn-Rethel located the origin of philosophical abstraction in the "false conciousness" brought about by the new money economy of Greek Antiquity. In the Enlightenment the conceptual barrier Kant put between phenomenal reality and the "thing-in-itself" expressed, in Sohn-Rethel's view, the reified consciousness stemming from commodity-exchange and the division of mental and manual labor. Because Sohn-Rethel saw the entire history of philosophy as branded by a timeless universal logic, he dismissed Hegel's concept of "totality" as "idealist" and Hegel's critique of Kantian dualism as irrelevant to Marx's critique of political economy. David Black, in the title essay of The Philosophical Roots of Anti-Capitalism, suggests, contra Sohn-Rethel, that Marx's exposition of the fetishism of commodities is historically-specific to capitalist production, and therefore cannot explain the origins of philosophy, which Black shows to have involved various historical developments in Greek society and culture as well as monetization. Just as Hegel's critique of Kantian formalism informs Marx's critique of capital, Hegel's writings on how the proper organization of labor might abolish the barrier Aristotle put between production and the "Realm of Freedom" prefigure Marx's efforts to formulate of an alternative to capitalism. Part Two, Critique of the Situationist Dialectic: Art, Class Consciousness and Reification, begins with Surrealism, whose "disappearance" as a revolutionary artistic and social force Guy Debord and the Situationists sought to make up for by superseding the poetry of Art with the poetry of Life. As well highlighting Debord's achievements in both theory and practice, Black points to his philosophical shortcomings and relates these to Debord's later "pessimistic" assessment of the possibility of revolutionary class consciousness within globalizing capitalism. The four essays in Part Three cover the Aristotelian anarchism, the ambivalent legacy of Lukбcs' theory of reification, Raya Dunayevskaya's Hegelian-Marxist concept of "absolute negativity" as "revolution in permanance", and Gillian Rose's philosophical challenge to both postmodernism and "traditional" Marxism.
Central to any interpretation of Wittgenstein's later philosophy is an understanding of his philosophical method and the nature of the turn which characterises the evolution from his early to his later work. In the essays in Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism, Marie McGinn argues that the methodological shift has at its heart a highly distinctive form of naturalism.
This form of naturalism has nothing to do with the kind of scientific naturalism that is associated with accounting for all phenomena in terms of the conceptual resources of the natural sciences. It is closer to the Aristotelian naturalism defended by John McDowell, although, in Wittgenstein's case, the principal influence is Goethe, whose conception of how to understand the phenomena of nature is self-consciously opposed to the reductive approach of scientific naturalism. Goethe places the emphasis on achieving a clarified view of complex, natural phenomena in their natural setting, with a view to describing patterns and connections that are in plain view. The novelty of Wittgenstein's later work is that it applies these methods to the task of conceptual clarification, which aims at dissolving philosophical problems and paradoxes.
The essays in Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism cover the following topics: scepticism about the external world; scepticism about other minds; knowledge and belief; meaning and rule-following; psychological states and the distinctive first-person use of psychological concepts; the relation between the early and the later philosophy; and the nature of Wittgenstein's naturalism.
Almost a decade ago, Alvin Plantinga articulated his bold and controversial evolutionary argument against naturalism. This intriguing line of argument raises issues of importance to epistemologists and to philosophers of mind, of religion, and of science. In this, the first book to address the ongoing debate, Plantinga presents his influential thesis and responds to critiques by distinguished philosophers from a variety of subfields. Plantinga's argument is aimed at metaphysical naturalism or roughly the view that no supernatural beings exist. Naturalism is typically conjoined with evolution as an explanation of the existence and diversity of life. Plantinga's claim is that one who holds to the truth of both naturalism and evolution is irrational in doing so. More specifically, because the probability that unguided evolution would have produced reliable cognitive faculties is either low or inscrutable, one who holds both naturalism and evolution acquires a "defeater" for every belief he/she holds, including the beliefs associated with naturalism and evolution. Following Plantinga's brief summary of his thesis are eleven original pieces by his critics. The book concludes with a new essay by Plantinga in which he defends and extends his view that metaphysical naturalism is self-defeating.
Описание: Using 60 different words that speak of the city, from bees to sewers, Manchester: something rich and strange offers a new way of thinking about this iconic post-industrial city. Twenty-three writers from diverse backgrounds offer their take on the everyday things that inform how we experience Manchester, recognising that we`re all active in the making and unmaking of the city`s spaces. -- .
How do we understand the world? While some look to the heavens for intelligent design, others argue that it is determined by information encoded in DNA. Science serves as an important activity for uncovering the processes and operations of nature, but it is also immersed in a social context where ideology influences the questions we ask and how we approach the material world. Biology Under the Influence: Dialectical Essays on the Coevolution of Nature and Society breaks from the confirms of determinism, offering a dialectical analysis for comprehending a dynamic social and natural world. In Biology Under the Influence, Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins provide a devastating critique of genetic determinism and reductionism within science while exploring a broad range of issues including the nature of science, biology, evolution, the environment, pubic health, and dialectics, They dismantle the ideology that attempts to naturalize social inequalities, unveil the alienation of science and nature, and illustrate how a dialectical position serves as a basis for grappling with historical developments and a world characterized by change. Biology Under the Influence brings together the illuminating essays of two prominent scientists who work to demystify and empower the public's understanding of science and nature.
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