Epistemology Books - Page 16

Damasio's Error and Descartes' Truth: An Inquiry into Consciousness, Metaphysics, and Epistemology

Andrew Gluck

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Editorial Review:

The question of the relationship between mind and body as posed by Descartes, Spinoza, and others remains a fundamental debate for philosophers. In Damasio’s Error and Descartes’ Truth, Andrew Gluck constructs a pluralistic response to the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio. Gluck critiques the neutral monistic assertions found in Descartes’ Error and Looking for Spinoza from a philosophical perspective, advocating an adaptive theory—physical monism in the natural sciences, dualism in the social sciences, and neutral monism in aesthetics. Gluck’s work is a significant and refreshing take on a historical debate.

Behind The Mirror: A Search for a Natural History of Human Knowledge

Konrad Lorenz

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Essential! Order this book so it gets back in print soon! 5 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.

Konrad Lorenz hasn't recieved the praise his mind deserves. All political leanings aside--he had a nobel prize awarded and revoked--he is a brilliant thinker with essential theories on zoology and the meaning of life. This book outlines some of his early work with animal behavior. His work with ducks and geese and imprinting is phenomenal. It's amazing how thorough this man studied so many different creatures. And what's more is he never interfered with their habitats, he only observed what they would do without human tampering. In some ways he was an early conservationist and environmentalist.

To understand the implications of animal behavior for our own lives and what it means to the way we think, act and are, you must read this book. Lorenz should be up there right under Darwin in importance.

Unfortunately, this book is hard to find. I have a very old copy that I am lucky to find. Here I see it says that it's out of print. Please order this book. You will not be let down. And meanwhile you will help create demand for a book that should be on the shelves of all the bookstores both cyber and corporeal.

Studies in the Way of Words

Paul Grice

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Editorial Review:

This volume, Grice's first hook, includes the long-delayed publication of his enormously influential 1967 William James Lectures. But there is much, much more in this work. Paul Grice himself has carefully arranged and framed the sequence of essays to emphasize not a certain set of ideas but a habit of mind, a style of philosophizing.

Grice has, to be sure, provided philosophy with crucial ideas. His account of speaker-meaning is the standard that others use to define their own minor divergences or future elaborations. His discussion of conversational implicatures has given philosophers an important tool for the investigation of all sorts of problems; it has also laid the foundation for a great deal of work by other philosophers and linguists about presupposition. His metaphysical defense of absolute values is starting to be considered the beginning of a new phase in philosophy. This is a vital book for all who are interested in Anglo-American philosophy.

Critique of Judgement (Oxford World's Classics)

Immanuel Kant

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Editorial Review:

In the Critique of Judgement, Kant offers a penetrating analysis of our experience of the beautiful and the sublime. He discusses the objectivity of taste, aesthetic disinterestedness, the relation of art and nature, the role of imagination, genius and originality, the limits of representation, and the connection between morality and the aesthetic. He also investigates the validity of our judgements concerning the degree in which nature has a purpose, with respect to the highest interests of reason and enlightenment.
The work profoundly influenced the artists, writers, and philosophers of the classical and romantic period, including Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. In addition, it has remained a landmark work in fields such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, the Frankfurt School, analytical aesthetics, and contemporary critical theory. Today it remains an essential work of philosophy, and required reading for all with an interest in aesthetics.

Healing Children's Grief: Surviving a Parent's Death from Cancer

Grace Christ

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A Seminal Work in Child & Adolescent Bereavement 5 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.

Dr. Christ's new book is an invaluable resource for mental health professionals working with bereaved children and adolescents. I am developing a program of bereavement support groups for school-age children at a large urban mental health clinic. There is no book in my personal library that I have turned to more than Dr. Christ's HEALING CHILDREN'S GRIEF. It offers a rare and insightful window into the minds of bereaved children from age 3 to 17. This broad age range is divided into three-year age clusters (e.g. 3 to 5, 6 to 8, 9 to 11, etc.), and the subtle yet clinically critical differences in each age group's grief experience and symtoms are clearly described. The narratives that Dr. Christ shares from her work with these children are at once touching, compelling, and profoundly informative. Simply put, this book will equip you with age-specific interventions for bereaved children and adolescents, and is a must-read for professionals preparing to undertake this important work.

Editorial Review:

Using qualitative analytic methods, this book identifies five developmentally derived age groups that clarify important differences in children's grief and mourning processes, in their understanding of events, their interactions with families, and their varying needs for help and support. The author gives numerous examples of the ways parents and extended family interacted with the children, and also the ways that professionals, friends, and many others help families deal with this tragedy.

Mind and World

John McDowell

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Editorial Review:

Modern Philosophy finds it difficult to give a satisfactory picture of the place of minds in the world. In Mind and World, based on the 1991 John Locke Lectures, one of the most distinguished philosophers writing today offers his diagnosis of this difficulty and points to a cure. In doing so, he delivers the most complete and ambitious statement to date of his own views, a statement that no one concerned with the future of philosophy can afford to ignore.

John McDowell amply illustrates a major problem of modern philosophy--the insidious persistence of dualism--in his discussion of empirical thought. Much as we would like to conceive empirical thought as rationally grounded in experience, pitfalls await anyone who tries to articulate this position, and McDowell exposes these traps by exploiting the work of contemporary philosophers from Wilfrid Sellars to Donald Davidson. These difficulties, he contends, reflect an understandable--but surmountable--failure to see how we might integrate what Sellars calls the logical space of reasons" into the natural world. What underlies this impasse is a conception of nature that has certain attractions for the modern age, a conception that McDowell proposes to put aside, thus circumventing these philosophical difficulties. By returning to a pre-modern conception of nature but retaining the intellectual advance of modernity that has mistakenly been viewed as dislodging it, he makes room for a fully satisfying conception of experience as a rational openness to independent reality. This approach also overcomes other obstacles that impede a generally satisfying understanding of how we are placed in the world.

The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought

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Editorial Review:

The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought offers the most comprehensive collection of essays in multidisciplinary metaphor scholarship that has ever been published. These essays explore the significance of metaphor in language, thought, culture, and artistic expression. There are five main themes of the book: the roots of metaphor, metaphor understanding, metaphor in language and culture, metaphor in reasoning and feeling, and metaphor in nonverbal expression. Contributors come from a variety of academic disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, literature, education, music, and law.

Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology

Michael Williams

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Epistemological optimism critically defended. 5 out of 5 stars.
36 of 36 people found this review helpful.

The subtitle, "a critical introduction to epistemology," is precisely descriptive of this volume. I'd say it is somewhat beyond an introduction -- and it is nothing if not critical (but of course any serious consideration of epistemology must be). The discourse throughout tackles the problem of skepticism, both classical (Agrippan) and modern (Cartesian). As Williams states in the introduction, "Once we become aware that even our most cherished views can be challenged, there is no going back to a pre-critical, traditionalist outlook. This is why concern with knowledge is no longer optional. . . Scepticism is the skeleton in Western rationalism's closet: an argumentatively sophisticated attack on rationalism itself. It represents the extreme case of a tradition of critical inquiry reflexively applied. From the very beginnings of Western philosophy, there has been a counter-tradition arguing that the limits of reason are much more confining than epistemological optimists like to think. . . If scepticism cannot be refuted, the rational outlook undermines itself."
Once familiar with the arguments of philosophical skepticism, it seems they are but modestly more "sophisticated" than those of mere practical, I might say "methodological", skepticism. All skepticism, practical or philosophical, is rather highly intuitive; one needn't be a stark, raving genius to understand Descartes' description of the problem of external ('objective') knowledge. As it turns out, skepticism is built on the same foundational assumptions as is the most pervasive model of epistemological theory -- Foundationalism. At first blush, the "foundational" theory of knowledge might seem like the appropriate model with which to defend knowledge from philosophical skepticism. But Foundationalism fails on two levels; it neither overcomes skepticism nor can allow for epistemological risk-taking (which can have obvious merit). It can be argued that the difficulty of foundationalism may be that it is atomistic -- might a holistic theory fare better? A holistic line of attack is the so-called Coherence theory, but this approach, while conceived as being less vulnerable than Foundationalism, appeals to the same rational underpinnings as Foundationalism and, yes, Philosophical Skepticism. The problems, in all cases, are analyzed in the first 12 chapters.
After a diagnostic treatment of the foundational assumptions of Philosophical Skepticism, the epistemology (theory of knowledge) for which Williams finally argues is the so-called Contextual theory. While Contextualism rejects the assumptions of Foundationalism and its quarreling cousins, it allows, within a "default and challenge" framework, for: immediate knowledge, a methodology of fallibilism (i.e., falsification), and epistemological risk-taking. A deflationist approach to knowledge, contextualism is neither atomistic nor strictly holistic. It is critical to notice that Contextualism is not mere epistemological Relativism, as Williams says, "the relativist, like the sceptic, is a disappointed foundationalist."

The author finally cautions that he has not offered the final word on these problems. But the treatment is obviously much more thorough than it appears in my brief review, and while I question a few of Williams assertions (very few actually), as an epistemological optimist (and a 'practical' rather than 'philosophical' skeptic), I suggest that he's pretty much gotten it right. The book is well worth your time if you are interested in the theory of knowledge (and if you have any interest in defending your beliefs/judgments, you should be).

Editorial Review:

What is epistemology or "the theory of knowledge?" What is it really about? Why does it matter? What makes theorizing about knowledge "philosophical?" Why do some philosophers argue that epistemology--perhaps even philosophy itself--is dead?
In this succinct, exciting, and original introduction to epistemology, Michael Williams explains and criticizes philosophical theories of the nature, limits, methods, possibility, and value of knowing. A coherent and progressive text, Problems of Knowledge covers both traditional and contemporary approaches to the subject, including foundationalism, the coherence theory, and "naturalistic" theories. As an alternative to these perspectives, Williams defends his own distinctive contextualist approach. Problems of Knowledge provides clear and engaging explanations of the theory of knowledge and why it matters, offering an excellent foundation for students in introductory epistemology courses.

The Elusive God: Reorienting Religious Epistemology

Paul K. Moser

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Editorial Review:

Three questions motivate this book's account of evidence for the existence of God. First, if God's existence is hidden, why suppose He exists at all? Second, if God exists, why is He hidden, particularly if God seeks to communicate with people? Third, what are the implications of divine hiddenness for philosophy, theology, and religion's supposed knowledge of God? This book answers these questions on the basis of a new account of evidence and knowledge of divine reality that challenges skepticism about God's existence. The central thesis is that we should expect evidence of divine reality to be purposively available to humans, that is, available only in a manner suitable to divine purposes in self-revelation. This lesson generates a seismic shift in our understanding of evidence and knowledge of divine reality. The result is a needed reorienting of religious epistemology to accommodate the character and purposes of an authoritative, perfectly loving God.

The Life of the Mind: On the Joys and Travails of Thinking

James V. Schall

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In praise of thought 5 out of 5 stars.
37 of 37 people found this review helpful.

Schall has become one of my favorite authors. He cuts through the trendy, the merely useful, and everything else we tend to think of as urgent and invites us to do what we were meant to do: seek truth. In the process, he reintroduces us to Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Boswell, Chesterton, and scores of other authors who can be our companions in this quest. It does no good to be busy unless one has chosen one's activity wisely. It does no good to hurry unless one has chosen the right way. Therefore, done rightly, thinking is the most "practical" of pursuits. I highly recommend this book, and of Schall's other works.

Editorial Review:

In "The Life of the Mind," Georgetown University's James V. Schall takes up the task of reminding us that, as human beings, we naturally take a special delight and pleasure in simply knowing. Because we have not only bodies but also minds, we are built to know what is. In this volume, Schall, author of "On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs "(ISI Books),"" among many other volumes of philosophical and political reflection, discusses the various ways of approaching the delight of thinking and the way that this delight begins in seeing and hearing and even in making and walking. We must be attentive to and cultivate the needs of the mind, argues Schall, for it is through our intellect that all that is not ourselves is finally returned to us, allowing us to live in the light of truth.