Epistemology Books - Page 7

The Poverty of Historicism (Routledge Classics)

Karl Popper

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The fallacy of Utopian Engineering 5 out of 5 stars.
24 of 27 people found this review helpful.

Sir Popper is considered one of the most important thinkers in the area of philosophy of science. "The Poverty of Historicism" despite its complexity, carries a fundamental simple message: prediction over the course of history (its social and economic implications) is nothing more than a fantasy, an illusion. And this assertion is based on the principle that the events/persons responsible for changes are themselves affected by these same changes. It is Heisenberg's principle of uncertainty applied to social sciences!
Historicism is the theory that history develops itself according to pre-determined, inexorable laws with a fixed objective or end. Fascism and communism were laid upon these presuppositions, and the course fo history has proven the fallacy (therefore poverty) of such assumptions. The attempt to have a holistic approach by eliminating individual differences through "brain washing" is incompatible with critical thought, and although it will bring about a concentration of power it will also cause an erosion of knowledge. The Poverty of Historicism becomes a poverty of imagination, of the ability of critical judgement and analysis. Historicism, according to Karl Popper preposterously assumes the postion of having discovered the problem of "change," but revolutions are not unique to our modern era and the metaphysical speculation of what constitutes "change" has been addressed since the time of Heraclitus.
The goal of applying scientific methods with the same accuracy and predictability as those in theoretical physics is bound to end in failure when it concerns the course of history. The influence of the prediction upon the predicted events is here being termed as the "Oedipus effect." Physics can arrive at universally valid uniformities, whereas sociology must be contented with the intuitive understanding of unique events, and of the role they play in particular situations, occuring within particular struggles of interests, tendencies and destinies. If sociological laws determine the degree of anything, they will do so only in very vague terms, and will permit, at the best, a very rough scaling.
Karl Popper who was a fierce advocate of democrary and social critiscim, dedicated this book to all of those who have been victims to the fascist and communist belief in the inexorable laws of historical destiny.

Editorial Review:

Hailed on publication in 1957 as "probably the only book published this year that will outlive the century," this is a brilliant of the idea that there are fixed laws in history and that human beings are able to predict them.

Against Method

Paul Feyerabend

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Modern philosophy of science has paid great attention to the understanding of scientific 'practice', in contrast to concentration on scientific 'method'. Paul Feyerabend's acclaimed work, which has contributed greatly to this new emphasis, shows the deficiencies of some widespread ideas about the nature of knowledge. He argues that the only feasible explanations of scientific successes are historical explanations, and that anarchism must now replace rationalism in the theory of knowledge. The third edition of this classic text contains a new preface and additional reflections at various points in which the author takes account both of recent debates on science and on the impact of scientific products and practices on the human community. While disavowing populism or relativism, Feyerabend continues to insist that the voice of the inexpert must be heard. Thus many environmental perils were first identified by non-experts against prevailing assumptions in the scientific community. Feyerabend's challenging reassessment of scientific claims and understandings are as pungent and timely as ever.

Truth: A Guide

Simon Blackburn

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Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The author of the highly popular book Think, which Time magazine hailed as "the one book every smart person should read to understand, and even enjoy, the key questions of philosophy," Simon Blackburn is that rara avis--an eminent thinker who is able to explain philosophy to the general reader. Now Blackburn offers a tour de force exploration of what he calls "the most exciting and engaging issue in the whole of philosophy"--the age-old war over truth.
The front lines of this war are well defined. On one side are those who believe in plain, unvarnished facts, rock-solid truths that can be found through reason and objectivity--that science leads to truth, for instance. Their opponents mock this idea. They see the dark forces of language, culture, power, gender, class, ideology and desire--all subverting our perceptions of the world, and clouding our judgement with false notions of absolute truth. Beginning with an early skirmish in the war--when Socrates confronted the sophists in ancient Athens--Blackburn offers a penetrating look at the longstanding battle these two groups have waged, examining the philosophical battles fought by Plato, Protagoras, William James, David Hume, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and many others, with a particularly fascinating look at Nietzsche. Among the questions Blackburn considers are: is science mere opinion, can historians understand another historical period, and indeed can one culture ever truly understand another.
Blackburn concludes that both sides have merit, and that neither has exclusive ownership of truth. What is important is that, whichever side we embrace, we should know where we stand and what is to be said for our opponents.

Escape from Evil

Becker

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

A book to haunt your bookshelf 5 out of 5 stars.
15 of 15 people found this review helpful.

"Man is an animal...moving about on a planet shining in the sun. Whatever else he is, is built on this." So begins the opening pages of Becker's "Escape". "Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed--a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle...in which digestive tracks fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along..." Becker's "Denial of Death" dealt with the way man controls his basic anxiety by keeping it unconscious, "Escape from Evil", once again, tracks man from his organismic beginning to his emphatic end--detailing man's various ways he USES culture, ritual, power, inequality, money, etc as modes to achieving an expansiveness of meaning in the limited form of his physical body. Becker: "Man is an organism who KNOWS that he wants food and who KNOWS what will happen if he doesn't get it. This translates into a principle of prosperity...Once we have an animal who recognizes that he needs prosperity, we also have one who realizes that anything that works AGAINST continued prosperity is bad." Other insights: Becker's great insights into the primitive economy as religious because nature always gave freely to man, causing man to sacrifice food to remove his basic guilt...which may solve the dilema as to why native people were not content to just "exist" in paradise and be happy: Primitve life was a rich and playful dramatization of cosmic flirtation until Western man, who had long ago forgoten how to "play", came into the picture. Becker: "Society...is a dramatization of dependence and an exercise in mutal safety by the one animal in evolution who had to figure out a way of appeasing himself...We can conclude that primitives were more honest about these things---about guilt and debt---because they were more realistic about man's desperate situation vis-a-vis nature. Becker's insights unfold in front of you like a nasty animal you shine light on in your basement in the darkness. Read "Escape from Evil" along with "Denial of Death" and be prepared to either deny it all...or sit upright in the silent confines of your home and wonder what to do next...

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

Richard Rorty

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature hit the philosophical world like a bombshell. Richard Rorty, a Princeton professor who had contributed to the analytic tradition in philosophy, was now attempting to shrug off all the central problems with which it had long been preoccupied. After publication, the Press was barely able to keep up with demand, and the book has since gone on to become one of its all-time best-sellers in philosophy.

Rorty argued that, beginning in the seventeenth century, philosophers developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of representation. They compared the mind to a mirror that reflects reality. In their view, knowledge is concerned with the accuracy of these reflections, and the strategy employed to obtain this knowledge--that of inspecting, repairing, and polishing the mirror--belongs to philosophy. Rorty's book was a powerful critique of this imagery and the tradition of thought that it spawned. He argued that the questions about truth posed by Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and modern epistemologists and philosophers of language simply couldn't be answered and were, in any case, irrelevant to serious social and cultural inquiry. This stance provoked a barrage of criticism, but whatever the strengths of Rorty's specific claims, the book had a therapeutic effect on philosophy. It reenergized pragmatism as an intellectual force, steered philosophy back to its roots in the humanities, and helped to make alternatives to analytic philosophy a serious choice for young graduate students. Twenty-five years later, the book remains a must-read for anyone seriously concerned about the nature of philosophical inquiry and what philosophers can and cannot do to help us understand and improve the world.

An Intimate History of Humanity

Theodore Zeldin

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Extraordinary... 5 out of 5 stars.
9 of 9 people found this review helpful.

What a wonderful and intelligent book to read agian and again. Theodore Zeldin discusses in 25 chapters the past, the present and the future.
He has a different subject for each chapter analyzing the issue in his simple and challenging form, and he pushes the reader to get smarter...

Some of the chapters are: How men and woman have slowley learned to have interesting conversations, how some people have acquired an immunity to loneliness, how respect has become more desirable than power, how humams become hospitable to each other, and why people have not been able to find the time to lead several lives. These are just some of the titles in the book, and as you can see the subjects are just enchanting in every way, and it drives the reader to get involved in every way, and make his own beliefs and thoughts.

one of the best books for sure...

Editorial Review:

An unusual and thought-provoking history of humankind traces the evolution of emotions and personal relationships through the ages and among diverse cultures, discussing such varied topics as the art of conversation, inter-gender friendships, lifestyles, and cookery.

The Construction of Social Reality

John R. Searle

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Total reviews: 13 Average rating: 3.0 of 5

Searle: Primus Inter Pares 5 out of 5 stars.
10 of 12 people found this review helpful.

John Searle is a philosopher's philosopher. He's also scrupulously honest to a fault. When reading him, one never has to stop and wonder whether he really believes what he's saying. The present work, "The Construction of Social Reality" (CSR)" is no exception. Lucid, cogent, packed with insights, CSR is vintage Searle--a thinker who just seems to get better and better with age. Nowadays one can no more ignore Searle than could a medieval thinker ignore Aristotle, or a modern thinker ignore Kant. When I begin writing on any philosophical subject, I always check to see whether Searle is close by.

CSR offers the most perspicuous account of "social facts" or "institutional facts" of any work I know of, except, perhaps, Chapter 5 of Searle's earlier work, "Intentionality." I would recommend that anyone interested in the subject read that chapter together with CSR. The focus of Chapter 5 is "the Background." Searle develops this notion at great length in CSR, especially in Chapter 6. (The great strength of CSR is the logical progression of topics from one chapter to the next.) The idea of the Background has been around at least since Husserl and Heidegger, and is a key element in Heidegger's analysis in "Being and Time." To be sure, Searle does not slavishly follow Heidegger; the two thinkers have very different takes on what intentionality is. (An especially lucid analysis of the difference between Searle and Heidegger can be found in Hubert Dreyfus' classic introduction to Heidegger, "Being-In-The-World.") But anyone who has had second thoughts about running headlong into the thicket of Heideggerian prose can hardly do better than start with Searle. After all, when we're doing philosophy, it's always a good idea to understand the problem we're trying to solve, and the questions we're trying to answer. And Heidegger doesn't make it easy to do this. Searle does.

Not that Searle is perfect. Like most philosophers, he doesn't always resist the urge to engage in speculative metaphysics. This he does early on in CSR. For example, he writes: "Since our investigation is ontological, i.e., about how social facts exist, we need to figure out how social reality fits into our overall ontology, i.e., how the existence of social facts relates to other things that exist. We will have to make some substantive presuppositions about how the world is in fact in order that we can even pose the questions we are trying to answer. We will be talking about how social reality fits into a larger ontology, but in order to do that, we will have to describe some of the features of that larger ontology." (CSR, 5-6.)

Yes, we do have to make presuppositions. But here is one point on which Searle and Heidegger differ; and I'm inclined to side with Heidegger. We don't really have to get clear on what our presuppositions are; and, in fact, it's doubtful that we ever do. When we think we do, we invariably get entangled in a speculative venture. The whole foundationalist notion that we must begin with "clear and distinct ideas" rings a bit archaic nowadays. Searle tries to achieve clarity by accepting as incontrovertible axioms which, for him, mark out the boundaries of any human cognitive enterprise. Listen to Searle: "The truth is, for us, most of our metaphysics is derived from physics (including the other natural sciences). Many features of the contemporary natural science conception of reality are still in dispute and still problematic . . . But two features of our conception of reality are not up for grabs. They are not, so to speak, optional for us as citizens of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. It is a condition of your being an educated person in our era that you are apprised of these two theories: the atomic theory of matter and the evolutionary theory of biology." (CSR, 6.)

It is true that an educated person must be "apprised" of these two theories. It doesn't follow however, that one give them the foundational significance which Searle claims for them. What matters is not our metaphysics, but our presuppositions. And, as Heidegger would insist, we can't get clear about them by appealing to science. In fact, science is not interested in our "conception of reality" or the ultimate origins of things. If our presuppositions get in the way of our ability to do science, we may have to change them in part. But this doesn't mean that we have to draw a picture of ultimate reality in its totality in order to proceed with science. Again, this is just not something that scientists care about. I submit that Searle's analysis of institutional facts can go forward whether he's a committed naturalist or a believer in divine revelation.

But then, again, none of this matters to a reader who wants to know about how social reality is put together. And for that, this is the definitive source. Searle long ago earned his status as primus inter pares in the philosophical community. Whether he's as much a thinker for everyone else is less certain. In an age when muddled thinking is deemed virtuous, and most people have learned all they know about philosophy from Oprah Winfrey, one must probably conclude that Searle will always be at home among his own. He'll never been invited to appear on a daytime talk show. To his credit, I'm confident he wouldn't accept the invitation. I wish I could give CSR ten stars instead of five.

Aidan McDowell

Editorial Review:

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle argues that there are two kinds of facts--some that are independent of human observers, and some that require human agreement.

Against An Infinite Horizon

Ronald Rolheiser

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A simple, profound book 5 out of 5 stars.
72 of 73 people found this review helpful.

Fr. Rolheiser has given us a wonderful gift in this compelling spiritual guide. I was especially inspired by his use of the stages of motherhood of the Virgin Mary and our own stages of faith. I loved his book "The Holy Longing" but I think I like this one even better. If you're on a spiritual journey, Catholic or otherwise, this is a real treasure.

Read it and think! 5 out of 5 stars.
69 of 70 people found this review helpful.

Christian books often become cliche, filled with the same old rhetoric and dogma that leaves us cold and searching; however, "Against an Infinite Horizon" is very fresh in its approach to seeing God in every moment.

I can't think of one aspect of living that Rolheiser omitted. He discusses social justice, marriage and sexuality (His assertion that sex is a sacrament still has me thinking!), death, the gender of God, and the simple act of being grateful.

I didn't always agree with his premises, but Rolheiser gives so many unique perspectives from which to view the ordinary in our lives that you will simply devour this book. He challenges the reader to reconsider our lives and how we view ourselves "against the infinite horizon" of God. There were times when, with my mouth open, I had to stop mid-paragraph and think about what he had said. Nothing revolutionary, just a fresh approach.

This is an excellent book for group discussions,or, like me, for personal growth. Read it and think!

Editorial Review:

The author of the highly regarded Shattered Lantern shares a vision of "the timeless in the everyday, providence in our common encounters, Gethsemane in our common pains, destiny in our common loves, the building of cathedrals in our common work, the finger of God in our common stories, and our common unfinished symphony as part of the great eternal symphony of God."

Against An Infinite Horizon

Ronald Rolheiser

List Price: $14.95 By: The Crossroad Publishing Company, Inc. Amazon Marketplace: 12 new & used starting at $4.62

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A simple, profound book 5 out of 5 stars.
72 of 73 people found this review helpful.

Fr. Rolheiser has given us a wonderful gift in this compelling spiritual guide. I was especially inspired by his use of the stages of motherhood of the Virgin Mary and our own stages of faith. I loved his book "The Holy Longing" but I think I like this one even better. If you're on a spiritual journey, Catholic or otherwise, this is a real treasure.

Read it and think! 5 out of 5 stars.
69 of 70 people found this review helpful.

Christian books often become cliche, filled with the same old rhetoric and dogma that leaves us cold and searching; however, "Against an Infinite Horizon" is very fresh in its approach to seeing God in every moment.

I can't think of one aspect of living that Rolheiser omitted. He discusses social justice, marriage and sexuality (His assertion that sex is a sacrament still has me thinking!), death, the gender of God, and the simple act of being grateful.

I didn't always agree with his premises, but Rolheiser gives so many unique perspectives from which to view the ordinary in our lives that you will simply devour this book. He challenges the reader to reconsider our lives and how we view ourselves "against the infinite horizon" of God. There were times when, with my mouth open, I had to stop mid-paragraph and think about what he had said. Nothing revolutionary, just a fresh approach.

This is an excellent book for group discussions,or, like me, for personal growth. Read it and think!

Editorial Review:

The author of the highly regarded Shattered Lantern shares a vision of "the timeless in the everyday, providence in our common encounters, Gethsemane in our common pains, destiny in our common loves, the building of cathedrals in our common work, the finger of God in our common stories, and our common unfinished symphony as part of the great eternal symphony of God."