Epistemology Books - Page 15

Michael Polanyi: The Art of Knowing (Library Modern Thinkers Series)

Mark T. Mitchell

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Probably the best available summary of Polanyi's writings. 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 9 people found this review helpful.

Until now, Drusilla Scott's "Everyman Revived" has for many been the most useful primer on Michael Polanyi's deep, rich and complex philosophical writings. Scott's book remains excellent, but Mark Mitchell's exploration of Polanyi's epistemology is more accessible and better organized.

Mitchell's book is useful to anyone interested in Polanyi. It serves as a very capable introduction to the ideas; anyone reading Polanyi for the first time will benefit greatly from having Mitchell's book close at hand. Likewise, scholars who have been wrestling with the nuances of tacit knowing will appreciate Mitchell's organization and his thorough coverage of the development of ideas in Polanyi's works.

Mitchell offers exceptionally clear explanations of very complicated ideas, linking themes from among Polanyi's many works with helpful citations. He also draws connections among Polanyi and other writers who considered similar challenges, some of whom preceded and influenced Polanyi, and some who drew and expanded on Polanyi's ideas.

I've already given this book as a gift three times, and surely will again. For anyone interested in the importance of tradition and liberty to the advancement of knowledge, this book is a delight.

Editorial Review:

The polymath Michael Polanyi first made his mark as a physical chemist, but his interests gradually shifted to economics, politics, and philosophy, in which field he would ultimately propose a revolutionary theory of knowledge that grew out of his firsthand experience with both the scientific method and political totalitarianism. In this sixth entry in ISI Books’ Library of Modern Thinkers’ series, Mark T. Mitchell reveals how Polanyi came to recognize that the roots of the modern political and spiritual crisis lay in an errant conception of knowledge that served to foreclose any possibility of making meaningful statements about truth, goodness, or beauty. Polanyi’s theory of knowledge as ineluctably personal but also grounded in reality is not merely of historical interest, writes Mitchell, for it proposes an attractive alternative for anyone who would reject both the hubris of modern rationalism and the ultimately nihilistic implications of academic postmodernism.

Relative Truth

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Editorial Review:

The truth of an utterance depends on various factors. Usually these factors are assumed to be: the meaning of the sentence uttered, the context in which the utterance was made, and the way things are in the world. Recently, however, a number of cases have been discussed where there seems to be reason to think that the truth of an utterance is not yet fully determined by these three factors, and that truth must therefore depend on a further factor. The most prominent examples include utterances about values, utterances attributing knowledge, utterances that state that something is probable or epistemically possible, and utterances about the contingent future. In these cases, some have argued, the standard picture needs to be modified to admit extra truth-determining factors, and there is further controversy about the exact role of any such extra factors.
With contributions from some of the key figures in the contemporary debate on relativism this book is about a topic that is the focus of much traditional and current interest: whether truth is relative to standards of taste, values, or subjective informational states. It is an issue in the philosophy of language, but one with important connections to other areas of philosophy, such as meta-ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology.

Persons and Things

Barbara Johnson

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Editorial Review:

Moving effortlessly between symbolist poetry and Barbie dolls, artificial intelligence and Kleist, Kant, and Winnicott, Barbara Johnson not only clarifies psychological and social dynamics; she also re-dramatizes the work of important tropes—without ever losing sight of the ethical imperative with which she begins: the need to treat persons as persons.

In Persons and Things, Johnson turns deconstruction around to make a fundamental contribution to the new aesthetics. She begins with the most elementary thing we know: deconstruction calls attention to gaps and reveals that their claims upon us are fraudulent. Johnson revolutionizes the method by showing that the inanimate thing exposed as a delusion is central to fantasy life, that fantasy life, however deluded, should be taken seriously, and that although a work of art “is formed around something missing,” this “void is its vanishing point, not its essence.” She shows deftly and delicately that the void inside Keats’s urn, Heidegger’s jug, or Wallace Stevens’s jar forms the center around which we tend to organize our worlds.

The new aesthetics should restore fluidities between persons and things. In pursuing it, Johnson calls upon Ovid, Keats, Poe, Plath, and others who have inhabited this in-between space. The entire process operates via a subtlety that only a critic of Johnson’s caliber could reveal to us.

Why Truth Matters

Jeremy Stangroom, Ophelia Benson

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Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Truth has always been a central preoccupation of philosophy in all its forms and traditions. However, in the late twentieth century truth became suddenly rather unfashionable. The precedence given to assorted political and ideological agendas, along with the rise of relativism, postmodernism and pseudoscience in academia, led to a decline both of truth as a serious subject, and an intellectual tradition that began with the Enlightenment. "Why Truth Matters" is a timely, incisive and entertaining look at how and why modern thought and culture lost sight of the importance of truth. It is also an eloquent and inspiring argument for restoring truth to its rightful place. Ophelia Benson and Jeremy Stangroom, editors of the successful ButterfliesandWheels.Com website - itself established to 'fight fashionable nonsense' - identify and debunk such nonsense, and the spurious claims made for it, in all its forms. Their account ranges over religious fundamentalism, Holocaust denial, the challenges of postmodernism and deconstruction, the wilful misinterpretation of evolutionary biology, identity politics and wishful thinking. "Why Truth Matters" is both a rallying cry for the Enlightenment vision and an essential read for anyone who has ever been bored, frustrated, bewildered or plain enraged by the worst excesses of the fashionable intelligentsia.

Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Philosophical Essays of Donald Davidson)

Donald Davidson

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Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Classic Articles 4 out of 5 stars.
14 of 18 people found this review helpful.

Oxford is in the process of re-issuing these Davidson anthologies. The anthologies on truth and action do not have much new material. This anthology has some excellent previously published articles on self-knowledge/epistemology and rationality, which has become necessary reading on these respective topics.

Also, look out for new stuff in Vol. 4 and 5 in this series.

I also recommend Stroud's work on Davidson, which can be found in both of his recent collections (Oxford UP).

Editorial Review:

This is the long-awaited third volume of philosophical writings by Davidson, whose influence on philosophy since the 1960s has been deep and broad. His first two collections, published by Oxford in the early 1980s, are recognized as contemporary classics. His ideas have continued to flow; now, in this new work, he presents a selection of his best work on knowledge, mind, and language from the last two decades. It is a rich and rewarding feast for anyone interested in philosophy, and essential reading for anyone working on these topics.

A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge

Ernest Sosa

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Virtue Epistemology 5 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

If you are looking into this book you should already have a working knowledge of the vocabulary and problems one uses and faces respectively while investigating what we know and how we know it. In this book Sosa takes a rare approach to the usual questions raised in epistemology: skeptical challenges to knowledge, the things we are most closely acquainted with, and what counts as knowledge over and above true belief. For an epistemologist, his strong stance that knowledge is a performance (possibly even a performance that necessarily requires more than one person, but that is a matter of interpretation) calls for consideration and response. Bear in mind before purchase that his arguments are brief but thorough, which means he uses many condensed phrases that require close atention.

Editorial Review:

A Virtue Epistemology presents a new approach to some of the oldest and most gripping problems of philosophy, those of knowledge and skepticism. Ernest Sosa argues for two levels of knowledge, the animal and the reflective, each viewed as a distinctive human accomplishment. By adopting a kind of virtue epistemology in line with the tradition found in Aristotle, Aquinas, Reid, and especially Descartes, he presents an account of knowledge which can be used to shed light on different varieties of skepticism, the nature and status of intuitions, and epistemic normativity.

Malebranche: The Search after Truth: With Elucidations of The Search after Truth (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

Nicolas Malebranche

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An important work in Early Modern Philosophy 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

Malebranche's importance as a philosopher has been rediscovered in the past 50 years. I say "rediscovered" because Malebranche was extremely influential in his time--garnering disciples both on the continent and in Great Britain. Locke, Liebniz, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, et al. owe much to his work. In the Search we find Malebranche's main arguments for the doctrine of vision in God and occasionalism. This latter theory held a prominent place in the 17th century as a solution to Descartes' famous mind-body problem. Of Malebranche's work, the Search is the most important, containing a nearly complete account of his philosophical and theological system. One note of caution, the Malebranche of the Search after Truth did have a tendancy to ramble (not unlike Locke). In reading it, one will have to wade through tedious sections on the psychology of those who take themselves to be witches or werewolves and the optical illusion of the moon's image on the horizon. However, Malebranche's opus is worth reading, especially for anyone interested in the development of philosophy during its most elegant time.

Editorial Review:

Malebranche is now recognized as a major figure in the history of philosophy, occupying a crucial place in the Rationalist tradition of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. The Search after Truth is his first, longest and most important work; this volume also presents the Elucidations that accompanied its third edition, the result of comments that Malebranche solicited on the original work and an important repository of his theories of ideas and causation. Together, the two texts constitute the complete expression of his mature thought, and are written in his subtle, argumentative and thoroughly readable style.

Forms of Talk (University of Pennsylvania Publications in Conduct & Communication)

Erving Goffman

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Good for DeAngelo students... 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 3 people found this review helpful.

"What makes [Goffman] compelling is not just the aptness of his observations or the rigors of his theoretical scheme but also his considerable gifts for rendering the everyday as bizarre and amusing."-New York Times

Forms of Talk extends Erving Goffman's interactional analyses of face-to-face communication to ordinary conversations and vebal exchanges. In this, his most sociolinguistic work, Goffman relates to certain forms of talk some of the issues that concerned him in his work on frame analysis. This book brings together five of Goffman's essays: "Replies and Responses," "Response Cries," "Footing," "The Lecture," and "Radio Talk."

Of lasting value in Goffman's work is his insistence that behavior-verbal or nonverbal-be examined along with the context of that behavior. In all of these classic essays, there is a "topic" at hand for discussion and analysis. In addition, as those familiar with Goffman's work have come to expect, there is the wider context in which the topic can be viewed and related to other topics-a characteristic move of Goffman's that has made his work so necessary for students of interaction in many disciplines.

The Essence of Truth: On Plato's Cave Allegory and Theaetetus (Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers)

Martin Heidegger

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Editorial Review:

One of Heidegger's most important works, this text gives a thorough explanation of what is arguably the most fundamental and abiding theme of his philosophy, namely the difference between truth as the "unhiddenness of beings" and truth as the "correctness of propositions". For Heidegger, it was by neglecting the former primordial concept of truth in favour of the latter derivative concept that Western philosophy, beginning with Plato himself, took off on its "metaphysical" course towards the bankruptcy of the present day. This book consists of a lecture course delivered by Heidegger at the University of Freiburg in 1931-32. The first part is a detailed analysis of Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" in "The Republic", while the second part gives an exegesis and interpretation of a central section of Plato's "Theaetetus". As always with Heidegger's writings on the Greeks, the point of his interpretative method is to bring to light the original meaning of philosophical concepts, especially to free up these concepts to their intrinsic power.

Quine in Dialogue

W. V. Quine

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Editorial Review:

Over the course of his life, W. V. Quine, one of the twentieth century’s great philosophers, engaged and inspired, interviewed and critiqued countless scholars, critics, and students. The qualities that distinguished him in any discussion are on clear display in this volume, which features him in dialogue with his predecessors and peers, his critics and students.

The volume begins with a number of interviews Quine gave about his perspectives on twentieth-century logic, science and philosophy, the ideas of others, and philosophy generally. Also included are his most important articles, reviews, and comments on other philosophers, from Rudolf Carnap to P. F. Strawson. The book, which contains many previously unpublished manuscripts, concludes with a selection of small pieces, written for a broader public, that give a glimpse of the philosopher’s wide interests, his sense of humor, and his warm relations to friends. The result is a wide-ranging, in-depth, and finely nuanced portrait of the humanity underlying this great twentieth-century thinker’s philosophy.